She was shaking like a leaf and I said, “You’ve had a terrible day, Doris. I’m sorry.”
“He died the way he wanted — wanted me to die,” she said. “You switched rifles last night, didn’t you?”
“Yes. It had to be that way or he would have killed you later on in Phoenix. But it’s all over now, Doris — it’s a nightmare that never happened and now you’re safe, and free, and your life is ahead of you.”
“Yes.” She straightened a little in the seat. “And where I was blind, now I can see.”
There was no reason to cause Doris further unpleasantness by telling anyone of Jack’s murder attempts so we let everyone thing we had heard a shot and then found his body.
The reaction of the law was best expressed by old Joe Reese, who said, “Anybody that would hunt with such a cheap rifle ought to have sense enough to know that the first shot would blow his head off.”
I knew that Doris was more upset and alone than she had ever been so I hitched her jeep behind my pickup and we rode together on the trip back to Phoenix. And I wanted this last chance to have her beside me before we had to go our separate ways.
More than ever, now, her money would be a barrier between us. After her experience with Jack how could I ever expect her to fully believe that I cared not in the slightest for her wealth?
The sun was down, the western sky glowing with gold, when we stopped in front of her house. The ride together was over and I could feel my own loneliness already setting in.
“Well, here we are,” I said. “It was nice of you to ride with me.”
“Are you going home now?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s time to resume our roles of Poor Boy and Rich Girl. But if anything should ever happen that you need me, let me know.”
She looked at me, a strange, tender smile on her face. “Bill, you fool — didn’t I tell you that I once wanted something that my money couldn’t buy for me?”
For a moment I had the wild impression that she meant she had wanted me instead of Jack. Then I jerked my mind back into sanity. “What did you have your heart set on?” I asked. “The Koh-i-noor diamond?”
She shook her head, that little smile still on her face.
“As for being a rich girl,” she said, “I was afraid to tell him but there was a reason why I didn’t want Jack to throw money away. That’s why I brought the magnifying glass along — why I was trying so desperately to find rich ore like Daddy found.
“The vein pinched out a month ago and the mine is closed — worked out. The last of my money went to get ready for that hunting trip. I’m flat broke. Bill.”
The sunset was suddenly about twenty times brighter than ever and I knew I had been right the first time about what money couldn’t buy for her.
I put my arms around her and I couldn’t feel the faintest sign of a barrier anymore.
Three for the Hounds
by Theodore Mathieson
Bert Hunking, hearing his Siberian huskies begin to howl, came out of his wheel-less trailer house to see Corinne running up the path from her red convertible. In her arms she held a large brown paper sack, and as she reached him, pressing herself against his body and kissing him, she held the bundle over his head like a forfeit in a children’s game.
“You got some stuff he wore lately?” Hunking asked, grabbing the sack, and peering into it like a kid eyeing some goodies.
“Those are his pajamas, and he wore them last night.”
“All night?” Hunking’s heavily handsome face had a leer on it.
She slapped him playfully on the cheek. “If I didn’t love you so much, Bert, I’d take that to heart. Show me what you’re going to do, show me!”
“Can’t wait to get rid of him, huh?”
This time she turned away angrily, her movement setting the dogs in the nearest kennel to howling again.
Quickly Hunking reached for her. It wasn’t every day that he snagged himself a girl who lived in a rich house on a hill, married to an old geezer twice her age.
“Now you know I didn’t mean that, Doodles,” he said. “Sure, I’ll show you what’s on the program-y.”
Arm in arm, he guided her over to a large kennel where four Siberian huskies growled with the ominous promise of a canine apocalypse.
“I imagine right now they might even go for me, if I gave them half a chance. But they’ll sure as hell go for him. For three days they’ve had nothing to eat...”
“That must account for the howling we hear on the hill. It sets old Francis just about crazy.”
“It won’t bother old Francis much longer.”
Hunking took a pair of flamingo colored pajamas out of the bag, and tying them into a firm knot on a forked stick, he thrust the stick through the kennel bars and jabbed at the dogs. They went crazy, shredding the garments in seconds.
“How are you going to do it?” she asked presently.
“Well, your old guy will come in through the gate there. He’ll break a trip thread which will lower the drop gate I’ve fixed on this kennel, and the dogs will have at him.”
“But won’t it look odd, their getting out of a kennel like that?”
“Nope.” Hunking looked smug. “See, even though they’re in the kennel, they’ve got a three-way free chain on their collars, all linked to a single heavier chain. The final link on that heavier chain has been sprung, so when the dogs are found after the — er — accident, it will look like they broke loose — not from the kennel — but from this metal post outside it.”
He pointed to the post at his feet, where a chain fragment of four or five links was attached.
“I’ll be up the hill in the woods,” he continued, “apparently hunting quail with my shot gun, and when I hear the ruckus, I simply come down and shoot the dogs. The police can’t hold me. I looked into it; I got my whole ten acres pasted with dog warning signs.”
“One thing’s missing,” Corinne said. “How are you going to get Francis to come down here in the first place?”
“That, Doodles, will be your job. And here is what you tell him...”
From the rooftop of his three-story mansion, “Old Francis” Stoddard III crouched in a flapping bathrobe, with a telescope screwed into his good eye.
Every day for the past week, after Corinne had left for town, he’d come up here to study the clearing where the private road to Hunking’s place curved past, and had seen her red convertible go by.
Reluctantly he had realized she was having an affair with the dog man.
Ever since the day, two months before, when Hunking had called at the mansion, at Stoddard’s request, to help doctor an ailing Doberman pinscher, Corinne had started being away a lot. But he’d only become aware of it recently.
At first, in spite of his imperious curiosity, he had found it troublesome to climb out on the roof with his telescope — his asthma always gave him trouble afterwards. But then, as he experimented with angles of vision, and found he was able, from a kind of widow’s walk, to see a segment of Hunking’s yard where he kept his dogs, it became a bitter kind of fun.
For the past few days he’d seen the dog man poking at a kennel with a stick to which was attached some kind of colored material, and wondered what he was up to. But it wasn’t until he’d missed a favorite blue shirt and then, the following day, saw a blue material being shoved at the brutes, that he began to have his suspicions. Only this morning, for instance, when he’d seen Corinne eyeing his flamingo pajamas, he’d waited until she’d “gone to town,” then checked and found his nightwear was gone, too.