A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car.
Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons — one seventeen, one fifteen — there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed.
He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased.
We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing.
With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried.
Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely.
He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly, the little he had seen of him, looked something like Sherry, but perhaps he had been a little hasty in saying positively that it was Sherry. He wasn’t, now that he had had time to think it over, really sure that he had actually got a good look at the man’s face in the dim morning light. Finally, all that Weeks would swear to was that he had seen a man who had seemed to look a little bit like Sherry.
It was funny as hell.
The district attorney, having no nails left, nibbled his finger-bones.
The jury said, “Not guilty.”
Sherry was freed, forever in the clear so far as the Kavalov murder was concerned, no matter what might come to light later.
Marcus was released.
The district attorney wouldn’t say good-bye to me when I left for San Francisco.
IX
Four days after Sherry’s acquittal, Mrs. Ringgo was shown into my office.
She was in black. Her pretty, unintelligent, Oriental face was not placid. Worry was in it.
“Please, you won’t tell Dolph I have come here?” were the first words she spoke.
“Of course not, if you say not,” I promised and pulled a chair over for her.
She sat down and looked big-eyed at me, fidgeting with her gloves in her lap.
“He’s so reckless,” she said.
I nodded sympathetically, wondering what she was up to.
“And I’m so afraid,” she added, twisting her gloves. Her chin trembled. Her lips formed words jerkily: “They’ve come back to the bungalow.”
“Yeah?” I sat up straight. I knew who they were.
“They can’t,” she cried, “have come back for any reason except that they mean to murder Dolph as they did father. And he won’t listen to me. He’s so sure of himself. He laughs and calls me a foolish child, and tells me he can take care of himself. But he can’t. Not, at least, with a broken arm. And they’ll kill him as they killed father. I know it. I know it.”
“Sherry hates your husband as much as he hated your father?”
“Yes. That’s it. He does. Dolph was working for father, but Dolph’s part in the — the business that led up to Hugh’s trouble was more — more active than father’s. Will you — will you keep them from killing Dolph? Will you?”
“Surely.”
“And you mustn’t let Dolph know,” she insisted, “and if he does find out you’re watching them, you mustn’t tell him I got you to. He’d be angry with me. I asked him to send for you, but he—” She broke off, looking embarrassed: I supposed her husband had mentioned my lack of success in keeping Kavalov alive. “But he wouldn’t.”
“How long have they been back?”
“Since the day before yesterday.”
“Any demonstrations?”
“You mean things like happened before? I don’t know. Dolph would hide them from me.”
“I’ll be down tomorrow,” I promised. “If you’ll take my advice you’ll tell your husband that you’ve employed me, but I won’t tell him if you don’t.”
“And you won’t let them harm Dolph?”
I promised to do my best, took some money away from her, gave her a receipt, and bowed her out.
Shortly after dark that evening I reached Farewell.
X
The bungalow’s windows were lighted when I passed it on my way uphill. I was tempted to get out of my coupé and do some snooping, but was afraid that I couldn’t out-Indian Marcus on his own grounds, and so went on.
When I turned into the dirt road leading to the vacant house I had spotted on my first trip to Farewell, I switched off the coupé’s lights and crept along by the light of a very white moon overhead.
Close to the vacant house I got the coupé off the path and at least partly hidden by bushes.
Then I went up on the rickety porch, located the bungalow, and began to adjust my field glasses to it.
I had them partly adjusted when the bungalow’s front door opened, letting out a slice of yellow light and two people.
One of the people was a woman.
Another least turn of the set-screw and her face came clear in my eyes — Mrs. Ringgo.
She raised her coat collar around her face and hurried away down the cobbled walk. Sherry stood on the veranda looking after her.
When she reached the road she began running uphill, towards her house.
Sherry went indoors and shut the door.
I took the glasses away from my eyes and looked around for a place where I could sit. The only spot I could find where sitting wouldn’t interfere with my view of the bungalow was the porch-rail. I made myself as comfortable as possible there, with a shoulder against the corner post, and prepared for an evening of watchful waiting.
Two hours and a half later a man turned into the cobbled walk from the road. He walked swiftly to the bungalow, with a cautious sort of swiftness, and he looked from side to side as he walked.
I suppose he knocked on the door.
The door opened, throwing a yellow glow on his face, Dolph Ringgo’s face.
He went indoors. The door shut.
My watch-tower’s fault was that the bungalow could only be reached from it roundabout by the path and road. There was no way of cutting cross-country.
I put away the field glasses, left the porch, and set out for the bungalow. I wasn’t sure that I could find another good spot for the coupé, so I left it where it was and walked.
I was afraid to take a chance on the cobbled walk.
Twenty feet above it, I left the road and moved as silently as I could over sod and among trees, bushes and flowers. I knew the sort of folks I was playing with: I carried my gun in my hand.
All of the bungalow’s windows on my side showed lights, but all the windows were closed and their blinds drawn. I didn’t like the way the light that came through the blinds helped the moon illuminate the surrounding ground. That had been swell when I was up on the ridge getting cock-eyed squinting through glasses. It was sour now that I was trying to get close enough to do some profitable listening.
I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find — fifteen feet from the building — to think the situation over.
Crouching there, I heard something.
It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.
I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.