My watchtower’s fault was that the bungalow could only be reached from it roundabout by the path and road. There was no way of cutting cross-country.
I put away the field glasses, left the porch, and set out for the bungalow. I wasn’t sure that I could find another good spot for the coupe, so I left it where it was and walked.
I was afraid to take a chance on the cobbled walk.
Twenty feet above it, I left the road and moved as silently as I could over sod and among trees, bushes and flowers. I knew the sort of folks I was playing with: I carried my gun in my hand.
All of the bungalow’s windows on my side showed lights, but all the windows were closed and their blinds drawn. I didn’t like the way the light that came through the blinds helped the moon illuminate the surrounding ground. That had been swell when I was up on the ridge getting cockeyed squinting through glasses. It was sour now that I was trying to get close enough to do some profitable listening.
I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find—fifteen feet from the building—to think the situation over.
Crouching there, I heard something.
It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.
I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.
Mrs. Ringgo jumped, stopped dead still in the path, and then cried:
“Is Dolph in there? Is he? Is he?”
I was trying to tell her that he was by nodding, but she made so much noise with her Is he’s that I had to say “Yeah” out loud to make her hear.
I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.
You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate score-keeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.
Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.
Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.
Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amber rug some four feet away. His upper teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip, and he was coughing little stomach coughs as he wriggled.
At the other end of the room, Ringgo was upright on his knees, steadily working the trigger of a black revolver in his good hand. The pistol was empty. It went snap, snap, snap, snap foolishly, but he kept on working the trigger. His broken arm was still in the splints, but had fallen out of the sling and was hanging down. His face was puffy and florid with blood. His eyes were wide and dull. The white bone handle of a knife stuck out of his back, just over one hip, its blade all the way in. He was clicking the empty pistol at Marcus.
The black boy was on his feet, feet far apart under bent knees. His left hand was spread wide over his chest, and the black fingers were shiny with blood. In his right hand he held a white bone-handled knife—its blade a foot long—held it, knife-fighter fashion, as you’d hold a sword. He was moving toward Ringgo, not directly, but from side to side, obliquely, closing in with shuffling steps, crouching, his hand turning the knife restlessly, but holding the point always towards Ringgo. Marcus’s eyes were bulging and red-veined. His mouth was a wide grinning crescent. His tongue, far out, ran slowly around and around the outside of his lips. Saliva trickled down his chin.
He didn’t see us. He didn’t hear us. All of his world just then was the man on his knees, the man in whose back a knife—brother of the one in the black hand—was wedged.
Ringgo didn’t see us. I don’t suppose he even saw the black. He knelt there and persistently worked the trigger of his empty gun.
I jumped over Sherry and swung the barrel of my gun at the base of Marcus’s skull. It hit. Marcus dropped.
Ringgo stopped working the gun and looked surprised at me.
“That’s the idea; you’ve got to put bullets in them or they’re no good,” I told him, pulled the knife out of Marcus’s hand, and went back to pick up the Luger that Sherry had stopped trying to get.
Mrs. Ringgo ran past me to her husband.
Sherry was lying on his back now. His eyes were closed.
He looked dead, and he had enough bullet holes in him to make death a good guess.
Hoping he wasn’t dead, I knelt beside him—going around him so I could kneel facing Ringgo—and lifted his head up a little from the floor.
Sherry stirred then, but I couldn’t tell whether he stirred because he was still alive or because he had just died.
“Sherry,” I said sharply. “Sherry.”
He didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t even twitch.
I raised the fingers of the hand that was holding up his head, making his head move just a trifle.
“Did Ringgo kill Kavalov?” I asked the dead or dying man.
Even if I hadn’t known Ringgo was looking at me I could have felt his eyes on me.
“Did he, Sherry?” I barked into the still face.
The dead or dying man didn’t move.
I cautiously moved my fingers again so that his dead or dying head nodded, twice.
Then I made his head jerk back, and let it gently down on the floor again.
“Well,” I said, standing up and facing Ringgo, “I’ve got you at last.”
XI
I’ve
