“And you let her go?”
“I was thinking it over,” Grood admitted. “You said we didn’t make war on women. I don’t know what I’d have done. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to do anything. Your friend, Ashe, did it for me.”
“Did what?” Bowman asked.
Grood shrugged his big shoulders. “I guess he was afraid she was going to talk, and be a witness against him,” he said. “She was running pretty fast, but Ashe had something that caught up with her.”
Bowman looked about him at the gathering twilight.
“Look here,” he said, “you’ve got to get in touch with the police and explain this situation. I’m afraid it’s going to mark the end of our incognito. The—”
“Forget it,” Big Jim Grood said. “I told you the cops would be tickled to death to have a solution handed to ’em on a silver platter, and wouldn’t care too much about how they got it. I’ve been talking with the boys in San Francisco on long distance. They don’t know who I am, but I spilled a mouthful to ’em. And I typed out a statement that I left on Harry Cutting’s coat. It’ll explain a lot of things; and the boys can match up the typewriter with the machine that wrote those two murder notes.”
“Then,” Bowman said slowly, “what’s holding us back?”
“Nothing on earth,” Jim Grood remarked, grinning, “unless you wanted to stick around to give me some more talk about cop methods not being any good.”
Jax Bowman grinned at the bulky ex-police captain who had worked his way up from pavement pounding.
“Tell me, Jim, how did you make Hornblower talk?”
Big Jim Grood said nothing, but doubled up his huge right hand and surveyed the battle-scarred fist with that look of fond pride which a golfer bestows upon his favorite driver after it has clicked out a three-hundred-yard drive.