Bending as close to the ground as I could, I followed Jack up the path. The position stretched the slash in my back—a scalding pain from between my shoulders almost to my waist. I could feel blood trickling down over my hips—or thought I could.
The going was too dark for stealthiness. Things crackled under our feet, rustled against our shoulders. Our friends in the bush used their guns. Luckily, the sound of twigs breaking and leaves rustling in pitch blackness isn’t the best of targets. Bullets zipped here and there, but we didn’t stop any of them. Neither did we shoot back.
We halted where the end of the bush left the night a weaker gray.
“That’s it,” Jack said about a square shape ahead.
“On the jump,” I grunted and lit out for the dark cottage.
Jack’s long slim legs kept him easily at my side as we raced across the clearing.
A man-shape oozed from behind the blot of the building and his gun began to blink at us. The shots came so close together that they sounded like one long stuttering bang.
Pulling the youngster with me, I flopped, flat to the ground except where a ragged-edged empty tin-can held my face up.
From the other side of the building another gun coughed. From a tree-stem to the right, a third.
Jack and I began to burn powder back at them.
A bullet kicked my mouth full of dirt and pebbles. I spit mud and cautioned Jack:
“You’re shooting too high. Hold it low and pull easy.”
A hump showed in the house’s dark profile. I sent a bullet at it.
A man’s voice yelled: “Ow—ooh!” and then, lower but very bitter, “Oh, damn you—damn you!”
For a warm couple of seconds bullets spattered all around us. Then there was not a sound to spoil the night’s quietness.
When the silence had lasted five minutes, I got myself up on hands and knees and began to move forward, Jack following. The ground wasn’t made for that sort of work. Ten feet of it was enough. We stood up and walked the rest of the way to the building.
“Wait,” I whispered, and leaving Jack at one corner of the building, I circled it, seeing nobody, hearing nothing but the sounds I made.
We tried the front door. It was locked but rickety.
Bumping it open with my shoulder, I went indoors—flashlight and gun in my fists.
The shack was empty.
Nobody—no furnishings—no traces of either in the two bare rooms—nothing but bare wooden walls, bare floor, bare ceiling, with a stovepipe connected to nothing sticking through it.
Jack and I stood in the middle of the floor, looked at the emptiness, and cursed the dump from back door to front for being empty. We hadn’t quite finished when feet sounded outside, a white light beamed on the open doorway, and a cracked voice said:
“Hey! You can come out one at a time—kind of easy like!”
“Who says so?” I asked, snapping off the flashlight, moving over close to a side wall.
“A whole goldurned flock of deputy sheriffs,” the voice answered.
“Couldn’t you push one of ’em in and let us get a look at him?” I asked. “I’ve been choked and carved and shot at tonight until I haven’t got much faith left in anybody’s word.”
A lanky, knock-kneed man with a thin leathery face appeared in the doorway. He showed me a buzzer, I fished out my credentials, and the other deputies came in. There were three of them in all.
“We were driving down the road bound for a little job near the point when we heard the shooting,” the lanky one explained. “What’s up?”
I told him.
“This shack’s been empty a long while,” he said when I had finished. “Anybody could have camped in it easy enough. Think it was that Papadopoulos, huh? We’ll kind of look around for him and his friends—especial since there’s that nice reward money.”
We searched the woods and found nobody. The man I had knocked down and the man I had shot were both gone.
Jack and I rode back to Sausalito with the deputies. I hunted up a doctor there and had my back bandaged. He said the cut was long but shallow. Then we returned to San Francisco and separated in the direction of our homes.
And thus ended the day’s doings.
IV
Here is something that happened next morning. I didn’t see it. I heard about it a little before noon and read about it in the papers that afternoon. I didn’t know then that I had any personal interest in it, but later I did—so I’ll put it in here where it happened.
At ten o’clock that morning, into busy Market Street, staggered a man who was naked from the top of his battered head to the soles of his bloodstained feet. From his bare chest and sides and back, little ribbons of flesh hung down, dripping blood. His left arm was broken in two places. The left side of his bald head was smashed in. An hour later he died in the emergency hospital—without having said a word to anyone, with the same vacant, distant look in his eyes.
The police easily ran back the trail of blood drops. They ended with a red smear in an alley beside a small hotel just off Market Street. In the hotel, the police found the room from which the man had jumped, fallen, or been thrown. The bed was soggy with blood. On it were torn and twisted sheets that had been knotted and used rope-wise. There was also a towel that had been used as a gag.
The evidence read that the naked man had been gagged, trussed up and worked on with a knife. The doctors said the ribbons of flesh had been cut loose, not torn or clawed. After the knife-user had gone away, the naked man had worked free of his bonds, and, probably crazed by pain, had either jumped or fallen out of the window. The fall had crushed his skull and broken his arm, but he
