“What is it?” Leslie Young asked from behind my shoulder. “What do you see over there?”
“It’s the old boy himself,” I told him. “He’s got a telescope mounted on a second-story balcony. I can’t imagine what he’s looking at to put that sort of an expression on his face.”
I studied the direction and tilt of Dwight’s telescope for a moment, trying to determine where his gaze was directed so that I could turn my glasses in that direction. It was down the canyon and a little to the left, and the tilt was slightly downward.
I swung my glasses off the motionless figure of Raymond Dwight with a feeling of revulsion, turned to the right in the approximate direction of his telescope and moved the focus screw back and forth, explaining to Young: “I’m trying to line up with him and see what the...”
That was as far as I got. At that instant my elongated vision picked up what I was looking for... and I wished I had left well enough alone, for I was looking at the upper porch of Young’s cabin... and at a woman whom I knew instinctively to be Young’s wife... clad in a scrap of a sun suit and lying on her back with the hot rays of sun shining upon her.
I could see her rouged lips, black hair that was bobbed and tousled, dark eyelashes lying against smooth cheeks. One arm lay outstretched, with fingertips touching the pages of an open book.
I jerked the glasses down feeling like a cheap Peeping-Tom, and I guess it must have shown on my face along with the blood I’d felt rushing up to it. I made a desperate effort at nonchalance, but Young’s hard face was thrust forward close to mine and there was no mistaking the demand in his eyes and voice when he said:
“What was it? Did you see what Dwight was looking at?”
I shook my head. I am convinced that it is a mistake for a writer to indulge in the habit of rewriting and readjusting ideas. It robs him of quick, concise decision, and I needed to act quickly now. After all, you can’t just come out and tell a perfect stranger that you’ve caught a man staring at his scantily clad wife. Or can you?
I couldn’t.
I lied the best I could but I guess it sounded pretty lame. “I couldn’t see anything,” I said. “I guess he’s just taking a look-see around about.” My fingers shook when I tried, too hastily, to fit the glasses back in the case.
Young’s hard brown fingers closed over mine with deliberate force. His words were, “I’ll take the glasses if you don’t mind,” but his tone implied so much more that I let him have them and moved back a step and mopped sweat from my face.
Time plodded by on heavy tragic heels as I stood there watching him focus the glasses on Dwight. I opened my lips a dozen times to say something... but what was there to say? I’d already said too much when I asked for the loan of the instrument. Even now, after witnessing the aftermath of that moment, I don’t know what I could have said to ward off what was coming.
All I could do was stand there and watch it happen. Watch the muscles in Leslie Young’s face work spasmodically, then harden into caustic bitterness as he focused the magic lenses on Dwight; and listen to his heavy breathing as he swung the glasses in a forty-degree arc and levelled them on the lounging figure of his wife.
I don’t know how long we stood there like that. It seemed a dozen eternities to me before Young lowered the glasses. For a moment he appeared to be listening, as though he heard something I couldn’t hear. He was outwardly composed, almost stolid, as he picked up the case in steady fingers and fitted the glasses inside. I had seen his eyes, and I didn’t look at him again. I made some inane remark which he let pass unnoticed.
He turned away and said, “Thanks for asking me over,” and walked out through the door to his horse.
I walked over to a window and watched him ride down from my borrowed cottage into the shadowy canyon bottom. The sun was veiled with fleecy white clouds, the blue of the Texas sky shining in between. Shadows moved furtively over valley and slopes. The soft breeze and the dead quiet of the canyon had a strange, narcotic effect on my mind.
2
I stuck around for half an hour but didn’t get any work done. Half a dozen times I was on the verge of calling Jerry Burke at police headquarters in El Paso and asking him to come out, but I didn’t actually have much to go on and I was afraid Jerry would laugh it off if he did come, and give me a good-natured razzing for letting my imagination run away with me.
Besides, there wasn’t anything even a man in Jerry’s official position could do. You can’t arrest a man for looking through a telescope from his own front balcony.
Moreover, I had a strong hunch Leslie Young wouldn’t relish intervention in his personal affairs. He had definitely given me the impression of a man able to take care of himself, and I knew he intended to take care of this business in his own way.
It wasn’t a nice spot for me any way I looked at it. I sat there at the window looking uneasily from Young’s cabin across to the Dwight estate, and tried desperately to excuse myself from all responsibility in the affair.
There was a feeling that something was going to happen. That forces had been set in motion which would inevitably result in tragedy. That if I hadn’t come to the damned cabin in the first place... hadn’t let those flashes of light arouse my curiosity... hadn’t asked Young to bring over his glasses...
I succeeded in working up a strong conviction that I hadn’t had a thing to do with it. That if I hadn’t thrown the switch, something else would have set off the spark just the same. That it was more a cumulative result than simple cause and effect.
At any rate, there was potential explosive in McKelligon’s Canyon. I couldn’t laugh it off, and I didn’t even try.
So, I decided to clear out. It was like lighting a fuse and running, but I was past minding that. There was a quiet bungalow waiting for me back in the city where I might be able to forget Young’s face as he stalked away.
Nip and Tuck came out of their corner hopefully and sat quietly with Scottish heads cocked while I put pajamas and shaving things back into my suitcase; then followed me out to the car.
I felt released when I was packed and ready to start. As though I were fleeing from something just in time.
That stopped me. No man, I suppose, likes to admit consciously that he is running away from danger. A sense of shame challenged me to stay... or perhaps it was curiosity.
At any rate, I changed my mind abruptly, turned away from the car and went down the road leading into the paved highway following along the floor of the canyon, whistling the pups to heel.
The dwarfed and water-starved trees threw heavy shade along the twisting road which followed the canyon upward. Picnic spots were cleared under groves of cottonwoods where streams trickled down from the peaks of Mt. Franklin.
About a quarter of a mile from my starting point on the highway, a wide concrete drive curved away to the right, climbing a steep slope to a stone archway over a gap in the high wall shutting the Dwight grounds away from the common herd.
I kept on up the highway, glancing over my shoulder now and then at the wall until it was finally left behind; vividly conscious of the owner of the estate, and working up quite a dislike for him.
I’ve never had any use for the type of man who gets a kick out of nudity per se. To my mind, it’s a species of childish eroticism peculiar to moronic intellects. Like getting excited about an obscene postcard, or laughing heartily at a vulgarly pointless joke.
My thoughts, however, were mostly of Leslie Young, and after I had walked for a long time, it occurred to me that there might be something I could do to prevent him from getting into serious trouble with Dwight.