Kilcourse lay just beneath the headlight’s glare, huddled on his face, with one knee drawn up under him.
I put the girl squarely in the line of light.
“Now stand there,” I said, “and behave. The first break you make, I’m going to shoot a leg out from under you,” and I meant it.
I found Kilcourse’s gun, pocketed it, and knelt beside him.
He was dead, with a bullet-hole above his collarbone.
“Is he—” her mouth trembled.
“Yes.”
She looked down at him, and shivered a little.
“Poor Fag,” she whispered.
I’ve gone on record as saying that this girl was beautiful, and, standing there in the dazzling white of the headlights, she was more than that. She was a thing to start crazy thoughts even in the head of an unimaginative middle-aged thief-catcher. She was—
Anyhow, I suppose that is why I scowled at her and said:
“Yes, poor Fag, and poor Hook, and poor Tai, and poor kind of a Los Angeles bank messenger, and poor Burke,” calling the roll, so far as I knew it, of men who had died loving her.
She didn’t flare up. Her big grey eyes lifted, and she looked at me with a gaze that I couldn’t fathom, and her lovely oval face under the mass of brown hair—which I knew was phony—was sad.
“I suppose you do think—” she began.
But I had had enough of this; I was uncomfortable along the spine.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll leave Kilcourse and the roadster here for the present.”
She said nothing, but went with me to Axford’s big machine, and sat in silence while I laced my shoes. I found a robe on the back seat and gave it to her.
“Better wrap this around your shoulders. The windshield is gone. It’ll be cool.”
She followed my suggestion without a word, but when I had edged our vehicle around the rear of the roadster, and had straightened out in the road again, going east, she laid a hand on my arm.
“Aren’t we going back to the White Shack?”
“No. Redwood City—the county jail.”
A mile perhaps, during which, without looking at her, I knew she was studying my rather lumpy profile. Then her hand was on my forearm again and she was leaning toward me so that her breath was warm against my cheek.
“Will you stop for a minute? There’s something—some things I want to tell you.”
I brought the car to a halt in a cleared space of hard soil off to one side of the road, and screwed myself a little around in the seat to face her more directly.
“Before you start,” I told her, “I want you to understand that we stay here for just so long as you talk about the Pangburn affair. When you get off on any other line—then we finish our trip to Redwood City.”
“Aren’t you even interested in the Los Angeles affair?”
“No. That’s closed. You and Hook Riordan and Tai Choon Tau and the Quarres were equally responsible for the messenger’s death, even if Hook did the actual killing. Hook and the Quarres passed out the night we had our party in Turk Street. Tai was hanged last month. Now I’ve got you. We had enough evidence to swing the Chinese, and we’ve even more against you. That is done—finished—completed. If you want to tell me anything about Pangburn’s death, I’ll listen. Otherwise—”
I reached for the self-starter.
A pressure of her fingers on my arm stopped me.
“I do want to tell you about it,” she said earnestly. “I want you to know the truth about it. You’ll take me to Redwood City, I know. Don’t think that I expect—that I have any foolish hopes. But I’d like you to know the truth about this thing. I don’t know why I should care especially what you think, but—”
Her voice dwindled off to nothing.
XVII
Then she began to talk very rapidly—as people talk when they fear interruptions before their stories are told—and she sat leaning slightly forward, so that her beautiful oval face was very close to mine.
“After I ran out of the Turk Street house that night—while you were struggling with Tai—my intention was to get away from San Francisco. I had a couple of thousand dollars, enough to carry me any place. Then I thought that going away would be what you people would expect me to do, and that the safest thing for me to do would be to stay right here. It isn’t hard for a woman to change her appearance. I had bobbed red hair, white skin, and wore gay clothes. I simply dyed my hair, bought these transformations to make it look long, put color on my face, and bought some dark clothes. Then I took an apartment on Ashbury Avenue under the name of Jeanne Delano, and I was an altogether different person.
“But, while I knew I was perfectly safe from recognition anywhere, I felt more comfortable staying indoors for a while, and, to pass the time, I read a good deal. That’s how I happened to run across Burke’s book. Do you read poetry?”
I shook my head. An automobile going toward Halfmoon Bay came into sight just then—the first one we’d seen since we left the White Shack. She waited until it had passed before she went on, still talking rapidly.
“Burke wasn’t a genius, of course, but there was something about some of his things that—something that got inside me. I wrote him a little note, telling him how much I had enjoyed these things, and sent it to his publishers. A few days later I had a note from Burke, and I learned that he lived in San Francisco. I hadn’t known that.
“We exchanged several notes, and then he asked if he could call, and we met. I don’t know whether I was in love with him or not, even at first. I did like him, and, between the ardor of his love for me and the flattery of having
