The nearest telephone? Was there one nearer than Sam Witherspoon’s? Offhand, he couldn’t think of one. He made a quick calculation and decided that he could get to the little crossroads inn where he was billeted, on ahead, in no more time than a return to the starting point of the chase would require.
So deciding, he made the inn at a trifling speed of sixty miles an hour, a mere jog for him, sparing the sketchily repaired tire in momentary expectation of a blowout.
Expecting it, he didn’t get the blowout. The tire took him home, and in precisely three-quarters of an hour after he had seen the last of the New York roadster his description of it was flashing to trooper barracks and billets and country and city police stations through not only his own, but all neighboring states.
While he was setting that machinery in motion, one of the three faces was vivid to Bradley — reminiscently vivid. The man with the flat nose was some one he had seen before; that had been his impression, and an instant impression, when he had overtaken and halted the roadster; an impression that had strengthened as he raced for the telephone. Now he was sure of it.
He desperately raked his memory. Where had he seen Flat Nose, and when?
A sudden hunch came. Upstairs, where he had methodically filed away every police bulletin received in that territory since he had been assigned there, he played it straight across the files.
There were hundreds of the bulletins, from detective bureaus all over the country and with every government department of criminal investigation represented as well — and it turned out, finally, that it was in one of the Federal broadsides he had previously seen the unforgettable face of the flat-nosed New Yorker. The particular bulletin which bore the likeness was more than a year old, but there was no mistaking that the man pictured and the man who had sat beside the driver in the roadster were one and the same.
Halfway through the files when he at last came to the photograph, Bradley snatched it out with a whoop of exultation. Thomas Scudder, alias Stevens, alias MacManus, once or still a fugitive under an indictment charging conspiracy to withdraw liquor illegally from a bonded warehouse — that was his man!
At the moment of discovery Bradley had eyes only for the one face, although the bulletin called for the apprehension of two fugitives and carried also a stiffly posed front-and-side camera study of Thomas Scudder’s companion in crime. He wasn’t interested in the second man just then, but when he presently gave a casual glance to the Rogues’ Gallery photograph to the left of the scowling Scudder, the glance froze into a petrified stare.
Another acquaintance! And more than an acquaintance, the bullet-headed and bull-necked party of the second part was now a neighbor!
“Dutch Gompert!” breathed Bradley. “What a break!”
Ten-point type under the Rogues’ Gallery picture spelled out confirmation. “Fritz (Dutch) Gompert” it was, according to the caption — and Bradley, who had intended to put a dressing on his head wound and turn in, swiftly changed his plans. He slipped out of his crimson stained tunic and into another just dry-cleaned; and then, back in the garage, he made quick work of shedding the bullet-broken tire and replacing it with a sound one.
As he felt now, he was good for all night, wide awake, ready to dash out again on the chase he had been forced to abandon as hopeless an hour ago. Rest was out of the question for him, at least until he had gone to Dutch Gompert’s place on Little Moose Lake and investigated the possibility that Dutch was entertaining company from New York.
It was a good bet that Dutch did have guests. If Gompert and Scudder had been team-mates in crookedness a year or two ago, why not now? In that case it would most likely have been for Little Moose Lake that the roadster was heading, and the fact that the trio in the car had left a presumably dead state policeman on a lonely road behind them would hardly have caused them to alter their objective. On the contrary, Dutch Gompert would harbor and advise them — click in with an alibi in case of need.
It was eighteen miles to Little Moose by the shortest route, and the black clouds were piling up again as the motorcycle, wide open, zoomed through the hills. The wind was up to almost half a gale; crashing through the brown woods, wrenching the crisp leaves from their dying grip on the branches, it swallowed the thunder of Bradley’s dash through the night. It covered the motorcycle’s roar so utterly that he had approached to within a quarter mile of Dutch Gompert’s place before he thought it better to leave the machine behind.
Where he dismounted the crest of the last sharp hill gave him what amounted to a bird’s eye view of Little Moose Lake and the bungalow nestling on its shore. Under the stormy sky the lake was a blob of ink, a blob that would have been invisible except for light from the bungalow that reflected on the sable waters.
Down in the lighted house there might be two enemies or there might be five. Dutch Gompert might be alone, as he usually was, with the Man Friday he called “Crow,” that scrawny bravo whose wasted body and dead eyes showed him far gone in drug addiction. Would he find just those two — or would Scudder and his machine gun crew be with them? At the showdown, would he face two or would he face five?
Bradley, boiling, nursed a hot hope that the answer would be five. Some day, sooner or later, he would either be throwing Dutch Gompert into a cell or running him out of the country. But he could wait to deal with Dutch. What he badly wanted tonight was just to come up with Thomas Scudder and his two fellow tourists.
Five to one wouldn’t really be bad odds, not when surprise went with the attack. If there were five men in the bungalow now, they wouldn’t be sitting around with guns on their knees. More likely they’d have glasses in their hands, and it would require no more than the kicking in of a window and a finger on the trigger of a formidable police positive to master them.
So Bradley, proceeding down hill afoot, carried with him full confidence of his ability to make a clean job of it single-handed whether the bungalow held two or held more. Had reinforcements been available, he could have wished them for only one reason — to guard his back while, after disarming them, he laced into Scudder and his big town pals with his fists.
The wind still was rising. No need, with all that racket, to pussyfoot. Even when he had reached the bungalow and was on the veranda, Bradley knew he could have brought his heels down hard without betraying his presence. There was not only noise from straining, brittle branches and scurrying leaves now; the wind, sweeping down the four-mile length of Little Moose, was crashing in a surf that drummed heavily along the shingle.
Listening at the door, Bradley could catch no sound within. The window nearer the door was curtained, and he went to another at the lakeside end of the long veranda. His view of the interior was unobstructed there. A huge log was flaming in a fireplace beyond a big table with a top of rough planks, but the chairs drawn to the hearth were empty. There weren’t five men in the bungalow, and there weren’t two. Lighted, warm, doubly inviting on so raw a night, the single big room with the curtained bunks built into its wall was deserted.
That was strange, but stranger still was the sight which met Bradley’s eyes as he turned from the window. Little Moose Lake, as he very well knew’, had a stretch of a shade more than four miles from head to foot, and was nowhere less than half a mile in width. And now, suddenly, an automobile was coming straight at him across the water, brilliant headlights boring close down across the lathered surface.