“Who is this captain?”
“It’s not him,” the sallow servant said. “It’s that black devil.”
Ringgo said:
“Sherry’s his name, Hugh Sherry. He was a captain in the British army when we knew him before—quartermasters department in Cairo. That was in 1917, all of twelve years ago. The commodore”—he nodded his head at his father-in-law—“was speculating in military supplies. Sherry should have been a line officer. He had no head for desk work. He wasn’t timid enough. Somebody decided the commodore wouldn’t have made so much money if Sherry hadn’t been so careless. They knew Sherry hadn’t made any money for himself. They cashiered Sherry at the same time they asked the commodore please to go away.”
Kavalov looked up from his plate to explain:
“Business is like that in wartime. They wouldn’t let me go away if I had done anything they could keep me there for.”
“And now, twelve years after you had him kicked out of the army in disgrace,” I said, “he comes here, threatens to kill you, so you believe, and sets out to spread panic among your people. Is that it?”
“That is not it,” Kavalov whined. “That is not it at all. I did not have him kicked out of any armies. I am a man of business. I take my profits where I find them. If somebody lets me take a profit that angers his employers, what is their anger to me? Second, I do not believe he means to kill me. I know that.”
“I’m trying to get it straight in my mind.”
“There is nothing to get straight. A man is going to murder me. I ask you not to let him do it. Is not that simple enough?”
“Simple enough,” I agreed, and stopped trying to talk to him.
Kavalov and Ringgo were smoking cigars, Mrs. Ringgo and I cigarettes over crème de menthe when the red-faced blonde woman in gray wool came in.
She came in hurriedly. Her eyes were wide open and dark. She said:
“Anthony says there’s a fire in the upper field.”
Kavalov crunched his cigar between his teeth and looked pointedly at me.
I stood up, asking:
“How do I get there?”
“I’ll show you the way,” Ringgo said, leaving his chair.
“Dolph,” his wife protested, “your arm.”
He smiled gently at her and said:
“I’m not going to interfere. I’m only going along to see how an expert handles these things.”
IV
I ran up to my room for hat, coat, flashlight and gun.
The Ringgos were standing at the front door when I started downstairs again.
He had put on a dark raincoat, buttoned tight over his injured arm, its left sleeve hanging empty. His right arm was around his wife. Both of her bare arms were around his neck. She was bent far back, he far forward over her. Their mouths were together.
Retreating a little, I made more noise with my feet when I came into sight again. They were standing apart at the door, waiting for me. Ringgo was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. He opened the door.
Mrs. Ringgo addressed me:
“Please don’t let my foolish husband be too reckless.”
I said I wouldn’t, and asked him:
“Worth while taking any of the servants or farm hands along?”
He shook his head.
“Those that aren’t hiding would be as useless as those that are,” he said. “They’ve all had it taken out of them.”
He and I went out, leaving Mrs. Ringgo looking after us from the doorway. The rain had stopped for the time, but a black muddle overhead promised more presently.
Ringgo led me around the side of the house, along a narrow path that went downhill through shrubbery, past a group of small buildings in a shallow valley, and diagonally up another, lower, hill.
The path was soggy. At the top of the hill we left the path, going through a wire gate and across a stubbly field that was both gummy and slimy under our feet. We moved along swiftly. The gumminess of the ground, the sultriness of the night air, and our coats, made the going warm work.
When we had crossed this field we could see the fire, a spot of flickering orange beyond intervening trees. We climbed a low wire fence and wound through the trees.
A violent rustling broke out among the leaves overhead, starting at the left, ending with a solid thud against a tree trunk just to our right. Then something plopped on the soft ground under the tree.
Off to the left a voice laughed, a savage, hooting laugh.
The laughing voice couldn’t have been far away. I went after it.
The fire was too small and too far away to be of much use to me: blackness was nearly perfect among the trees.
I stumbled over roots, bumped into trees, and found nothing. The flashlight would have helped the laugher more than me, so I kept it idle in my hand.
When I got tired of playing peekaboo with myself, I cut through the woods to the field on the other side, and went down to the fire.
The fire had been built in one end of the field, a dozen feet or less from the nearest tree. It had been built of dead twigs and broken branches that the rain had missed, and had nearly burnt itself out by the time I reached it.
Two small forked branches were stuck in the ground on opposite sides of the fire. Their forks held the ends of a length of green sapling. Spitted on the sapling, hanging over the fire, was an eighteen-inch-long carcass, headless, tailless, footless, skinless, and split down the front.
On the ground a few feet away lay an airedale puppy’s head, pelt, feet, tail, insides, and a lot of blood.
There were some dry sticks, broken in convenient lengths, beside the fire. I put them on as Ringgo came out of the woods to join me. He carried a stone
