Now headlights were coming up behind him. The station wagon passed him and continued on for twenty or thirty yards. Then it turned, came back and drew up alongside Miller’s car. Conlon, gun in hand, got out. Harold Miller handed him the package of money.
“Keep him covered while I check it,” Reynolds said, as Conlon returned with the ransom to the car. In the glow from the dashboard lights he hurriedly thumbed the thick wads of currency.
Presently Reynolds put the bag in the seat beside him and said through the open window, “You’re a smart apple, Miller. It’s all here.”
Harold Miller hardly heard him for Conlon was saying, “I’ve seen you some place before, punk.”
Looking at him hard, Miller replied, “That’s right. We have met before.”
“Tie a kite to that social stuff,” came impatiently from Reynolds. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“But what about my wife?” Miller asked tautly.
“Don’t worry,” Reynolds replied through the window, “we’re not killers. We’re not risking a murder rap. We just drugged her and left her on the bed. When she wakes up she’ll come home. By then we’ll be a long, long way off.”
The station wagon drove away. After a moment Miller followed.
Harold and Edith Miller sat in the kitchen spreading marmalade on toast and drinking hot coffee.
“It’s lucky for me you didn’t destroy your plates and equipment when I asked you to,” Edith said.
“It was — yes.” Harold Miller ran his fingers through his thinning hair wearily. “But now I’ve destroyed everything. And of course Conlon has seen me before. When I was doing that stretch for counterfeiting he was in the next cell-block.
“But I didn’t do too good a job with the hundred grand. They’re sure to be picked up. And, as kidnapping calls for a far heavier penalty than passing counterfeit bills, they won’t be able to put up much of a defense.”
Edith smiled tiredly and kissed him.
The Frightened Lady
by Theodore Mathieson
Gambling in the Sierra gold towns could measure a man for his coffin. But Jim Troy raised the stakes a notch higher by rubbing elbows with Death on a horseshoe curve.
On a sunny afternoon in late spring, Jim Troy came out of the Nugget House, where he’d been engaged in several sporadic, unproductive games of poker with two solid Cornish miners, and stared bleakly down the narrow, town of Grass Valley.
“Why did I ever come here?” he asked the air, and a blue-coated Chinese, padding past him with slippered feet on the board walk, turned to give him a toothless grin — amused at the tall, lean-faced young white devil who talked to himself.
Troy’s searching gray eyes smiled in return, then he crossed the street and stepped under the shallow marquee of the Criterion to look at the red program-board covered with group photographs.
“You’re the reason, Clara,” he said ruefully, nodding his dark head at the pretty face of a blonde girl who looked out engagingly at him.
She was soft-featured, with full, sensual lips, and high cheek bones, which gave her dark eyes a piquant, exotic look. He’d met Clara Berg on the river boat Yosemite on the way to Sacramento, where the dramatic repertory company she worked for was scheduled to appear. He’d taken her out every night, meeting her with unusual punctuality at the stage doors of the Metropolitan after every performance, and then when the troupe came north for another week’s engagement in Grass Valley, he’d come with it.
But it was over now. A cold campfire. She knew it, and so did he. There was no bitterness, just a tacit agreement. So why did he stand here prolonging his ennui in this profitless town?
Troy shrugged away the memory of a vagrant hope, and glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. The narrow gauge train left in forty-five minutes, and there was no reason for him not to be on it. He could be back on a San Francisco-bound river boat deep in a real game of poker, by eight-thirty this evening. He set off at once for his hotel to pick up his suitcase.
As he mounted the stone steps to the lobby, a round-faced, short-legged little man in a bowler hat and wearing an expensive alpaca overcoat, perhaps in his early forties, pushed excitedly past him on the way out. Thinking he had seen the man before, Troy turned and was surprised to look into pale blue eyes which were filled with unmistakable hostility.
“You are Mister Troy,” the man stated flatly in a guttural accent, laying his gold-handled cane over his arm and drawing on a pair of brown, kid-skin gloves.
“Yes.”
“I will remember you!” the other promised, and without another word set off down the street. There was something ludicrous about the haughty strut of the little man, and Troy walked into the hotel smiling.
Inside the lobby, the desk clerk, a sallow-faced stripling said nasally: “Here is Mr. Troy now,” and leered with prurient eagerness from the gambler to a woman sitting at one end of the lobby. It was Clara.
Looking magnificently blonde in her egret-plumed hat and ermine-trimmed red velvet jacket, she rose to greet him, picked up a suitcase, and then motioned him behind a marble-faced column out of sight of the curious desk clerk.
“I waited for you,” she said breathlessly.
Troy was tempted to tell her straight out of his decision to leave alone on the afternoon train. But Clara looked at him with such naked pleading, that Troy, who could rarely refuse a sincere appeal for help from anybody, sighed and said: “I thought you were at rehearsal.”
“I’ve quit the troupe.”
“What?”
“I had to. I’ve got to get out of town right away, on the afternoon train. I want you to come with me, Jim — please.”
“What’s happened? Has that guy you knew in San Francisco been on your trail?”
“No, no it’s not that,” she said almost too quickly. “It’s a long story, Jim. I’ll tell you on the train.”
“I’ll get my suitcase...”
“Jim?” She put out a small, dimpled hand, and her voice was childishly ingenuous. “Maybe we were wrong to decide, without talking it over, that it was all through between us.”
“Well, isn’t it?” Troy could also be blunt.
She lowered her eyes, looking hurt. “I shan’t ask anything more of you than to go with me to Frisco. I really need you with me, Jim. I’m afraid.”
And when she turned her dark eyes up to him, Troy could see the flickerings of genuine panic in their depths.
“Don’t worry, Clara,” he said soothingly. “I’ll be with you.”
As the funnel-stacked narrow gauge locomotive puffed noisily out of the Grass Valley station, Troy, who sat in an end seat facing Clara, could look over her shoulder down the length of the coach at all the other passengers.
There were only eight or nine besides themselves, and midway down the car, staring aloofly out of the window, was the man in the bowler hat, who’d brushed past him at the hotel. Troy frowned, and then turned his attention to Clara.
“Now then, why are you running away? It must be pretty serious, if it made you decide to walk out on a repertory company. They’ll blackball you for sure.”
“I don’t care,” Clara whispered, and with trembling fingers she opened her purse and took out a slip of yellow paper with pale green lines and handed it to the gambler. Printed in block letters in ink was the name: sir Francis Levinson. That was all.
“I got that in the mail this morning. It was sent to the theatre.”
Troy glanced at the envelope she held out to him, and saw it was postmarked Grass Valley.