I stumbled over roots, bumped into trees, and found nothing. The flashlight would have helped the laugher more than me, so I kept it idle in my hand.
When I got tired of playing peekaboo with myself, I cut through the woods to the field on the other side, and went down to the fire.
The fire had been built in one end of the field, a dozen feet or less from the nearest tree. It had been built of dead twigs and broken branches that the rain had missed, and had nearly burnt itself out by the time I reached it.
Two small forked branches were stuck in the ground on opposite sides of the fire. Their forks held the ends of a length of green sapling. Spitted on the sapling, hanging over the fire, was an eighteen-inch-long carcass, headless, tailless, footless, skinless, and split down the front.
On the ground a few feet away lay an airedale puppy’s head, pelt, feet, tail, insides, and a lot of blood.
There were some dry sticks, broken in convenient lengths, beside the fire. I put them on as Ringgo came out of the woods to join me. He carried a stone the size of a grapefruit in his hand.
“Get a look at him?” he asked.
“No. He laughed and went.”
He held out the stone to me, saying:
“This is what was chucked at us.”
Drawn on the smooth gray stone, in red, were round blank eyes, a triangular nose, and a grinning, toothy mouth — a crude skull.
I scratched one of the red eyes with a fingernail, and said:
“Crayon.”
Ringgo was staring at the carcass sizzling over the fire and at the trimmings on the ground.
“What do you make of that?” I asked.
He swallowed and said:
“Mickey was a damned good little dog.”
“Yours?”
He nodded.
I went around with my flashlight on the ground. I found some footprints, such as they were.
“Anything?” Ringgo asked.
“Yeah.” I showed him one of the prints. “Made with rags tied around his shoes. They’re no good.”
We turned to the fire again.
“This is another show,” I said. “Whoever killed and cleaned the pup knew his stuff; knew it too well to think he could cook him decently like that. The outside will be burnt before the inside’s even warm, and the way he’s put on the spit he’d fall off if you tried to turn him.”
Ringgo’s scowl lightened a bit.
“That’s a little better,” he said, “Having him killed is rotten enough, but I’d hate to think of anybody eating Mickey, or even meaning to.”
“They didn’t,” I assured him. “They were putting on a show. This the sort of thing that’s been happening?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the sense of it?”
He glumly quoted Kavalov:
“Captain Cat-and-mouse.”
I gave him a cigarette, took one myself, and lighted them with a stick from the fire.
He raised his face to the sky, said, “Raining again; let’s go back to the house,” but remained by the fire, staring at the cooking carcass. The stink of scorched meat hung thick around us.
“You don’t take this very seriously yet, do you?” he asked presently, in a low, matter-of-fact voice.
“It’s a funny layout.”
“He’s cracked,” he said in the same low voice. “Try to see this. Honor meant something to him. That’s why we had to trick him instead of bribing him, back in Cairo. Less than ten years of dishonor can crack a man like that. He’d go off and hide and brood. It would be either shoot himself when the blow fell — or that. I was like you at first.” He kicked at the fire. “This is silly. But I can’t laugh at it now, except when I’m around Miriam and the commodore. When he first showed up I didn’t have the slightest idea that I couldn’t handle him. I had handled him all right in Cairo. When I discovered I couldn’t handle him I lost my head a little. I went down and picked a row with him. Well, that was no good either. It’s the silliness of this that makes it bad. In Cairo he was the kind of man who combs his hair before he shaves, so his mirror will show an orderly picture. Can you understand some of this?”
“I’ll have to talk to him first,” I said. “He’s staying in the village?”
“He has a cottage on the hill above. It’s the first one on the left after you turn into the main road.” Ringgo dropped his cigarette into the fire and looked thoughtfully at me, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know how you and the commodore are going to get along. You can’t make jokes with him. He doesn’t understand them, and he’ll distrust you on that account.”
“I’ll try to be careful,” I promised. “No good offering this Sherry money?”
“Hell, no,” he said softly. “He’s too cracked for that.”
We took down the dog’s carcass, kicked the fire apart, and trod it out in the mud before we returned to the house.
V
The country was fresh and bright under clear sunlight the next morning. A warm breeze was drying the ground and chasing raw-cotton clouds across the sky.
At ten o’clock I set out afoot for Captain Sherry’s. I didn’t have any trouble finding his house, a pinkish stuccoed bungalow with a terra cotta roof, reached from the road by a cobbled walk.
A white-clothed table with two places set stood on the tiled veranda that stretched across the front of the bungalow.
Before I could knock, the door was opened by a slim black man, not much more than a boy, in a white jacket. His features were thinner than most American negroes’, aquiline, pleasantly intelligent.
“You’re going to catch colds lying around in wet roads,” I said, “if you don’t get run over.”
His mouth-ends ran towards his ears in a grin that showed me a lot of strong yellow teeth.
“Yes, sir,” he said, buzzing his s’s, rolling the r, bowing. “The capitaine have waited breakfast that you be with him. You do sit down, sir. I will call him.”
“Not dog meat?”
His mouth-ends ran back and up again and he shook his head vigorously.
“No, sir.” He held up his black hands and counted the fingers. “There is orange and kippers and kidneys grilled and eggs and marmalade and toast and tea or coffee. There is not dog meat.”
“Fine,” I said, and sat down in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.
I had time to light a cigarette before Captain Sherry came out.
He was a gaunt tall man of forty. Sandy hair, parted in the middle, was brushed flat to his small head, above a sunburned face. His eyes were gray, with lower lids as straight as ruler-edges. His mouth was another hard straight line under a close-clipped sandy mustache. Grooves like gashes ran from his nostrils past his mouth-corners. Other grooves, just as deep, ran down his cheeks to the sharp ridge of his jaw. He wore a gaily striped flannel bathrobe over sand-colored pajamas.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, and gave me a semi-salute. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “Don’t get up. It will be some minutes before Marcus has breakfast ready. I slept late. I had a most abominable dream.” His voice was a deliberately languid drawl. “I dreamed that Theodore Kavalov’s throat had been cut from here to here.” He put bony fingers under his ears. “It was an atrociously gory business. He bled and screamed horribly, the swine.”
I grinned up at him, asking:
“And you didn’t like that?”
“Oh, getting his throat cut was all to the good, but he bled and screamed so filthily.” He raised his nose and sniffed. “That’s honeysuckle somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Smells like it. Was it throat-cutting that you had in mind when you threatened him?”
“When I threatened him,” he drawled. “My dear fellow, I did nothing of the sort. I was in Udja, a stinking Moroccan town close to the Algerian frontier, and one morning a voice spoke to me from an orange tree. It said: ‘Go to Farewell, in California, in the States, and there you will see Theodore Kavalov die.’ I thought that a capital idea. I thanked the voice, told Marcus to pack, and came here. As soon as I arrived I told Kavalov about it, thinking perhaps he would die then and I wouldn’t be hung up here waiting. He didn’t, though, and too late I regretted not having asked the voice for a definite date. I should hate having to waste months here.”