Buck trotted ahead, veering slowly till he was heading back toward the road.
At the edge of the road he waited until a car came along. Then, at the last moment, and before the driver could have time even to touch the brakes, he dashed forward, right under its wheels.
Back in himself in the hollow log one minute later (it had taken Buck just that long to die), the mind thing thought back over everything he had just done and decided that he had made no mistake this time.
Nor had he, except for one he could not possibly have foreseen. He should have let Buck wait for another car. The driver of the car that had killed Buck was Ralph S. Staunton, Ph.D., Sc.D., professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Doc Staunton did not look impressive. He was small, about five feet six, and weighed slightly under a hundred and twenty-five pounds. He was fifty, and his crew-cut hair was graying, but he had a wiry strength and an agile body and mind that made him seem younger. The first thing you’d have noticed about him was his eyes, because they were the youngest thing about him. When he was amused, which was often, they didn’t just twinkle; they seemed to sparkle like gray diamonds.
Right now, on vacation, he was dressed comfortably and somewhat sloppily, and he was in need of a shave. You’d never have guessed him to be one of the most brilliant men in the country.
CHAPTER SIX
Swearing under his breath, Doc Staunton braked the car to a stop. It hadn’t been his fault; there was no possible way he could have avoided running over that dog, but still it was an unpleasant thing to have happened. What had been wrong with the dog? Mad and running blindly? It had simply come from nowhere, out of the bushes along the side of the road. Even if it hadn’t stopped to look for cars, it couldn’t have failed to hear his—the only sound in a quiet countryside. The car was a station wagon, ancient and quite noisy, that he had bought two weeks before in Green Bay after having flown that far. He’d paid so little for it that if he sold it even for junk at the end of his Wisconsin vacation it would have cost him less to own it than to have rented a car for six weeks.
He turned off the ignition, got out of the car and walked back, hoping that the dog was dead. It couldn’t possibly survive; both the left front and the left rear wheels had gone squarely over its body. Since it would die anyway he hated the thought that it might have to live and suffer a while first. It was about twenty paces back of the car; it had taken him that far to stop. It didn’t seem to be moving, nor was it making any sound that he could hear, but when he was about halfway to it he saw that it was still alive; its side moved with convulsive breathing.
Doc swore again and went back to the car. He didn’t have either of his guns in it, but a tire iron would be better than nothing. He got one and hurried back to the dog, but it was dead by then; its eyes were open and glazed. Blood had run out of its mouth and there was no sign of breathing.
“Sorry, old boy,” Doc said softly. “Guess I’ll have to find out who owned you, and tell him.”
He bent down to lift the dog by its legs to move it off the edge of the road, but then he straightened up instead and stood thinking. The dog would have to be buried in any case, whether by him or by its owner, and it would be a much less pleasant job—because of ants and possibly buzzards—if he left it here while he did his errands in Bartlesville, which might take hours. He had no shovel in the station wagon but there was a tarpaulin which was old enough to be expendable. He got the tarpaulin and spread it out, folded once, on the road; then he lifted the dog onto it, rolled the tarpaulin around it a few times, and put it into the back of the station wagon.
In town a little later he made purchases at several different places, describing the dog—it had been a hound, male, liver and white—at each, and on the third try he found someone who said that it must be the dog that belonged to Gus Hoffman, and that Hoffman would be in town because he’d be attending the inquest on his son, who had committed suicide last night, that was being held at the local mortuary.
Doc Staunton had never attended an inquest and since he was mildly curious how one was run, he went to the mortuary and found it just starting. All the chairs were taken, but several other men were standing at the back of the room and Doc stood there too and listened.
Charlotte Garner was testifying, and Doc found himself increasingly fascinated. First by her calm and courageous frankness in telling the full truth about her relations with the boy Tommy Hoffman, and then by the story itself of how she had awakened to find Tommy’s clothes, but not Tommy. When she’d finished describing searching and calling for him and then running home to tell her parents, the coroner tried to dismiss her, but there was, she said, one thing that she wanted to add; his questions had led her to skip the part about the field mouse and she wanted to put it in the testimony because she thought possibly it had bitten Tommy when it had tried to run up his leg and he had knocked it off with his hand. And that maybe he had been infected by some form of hydrophobia…
The coroner let her finish, but before calling his next witness he talked to the jury a moment, explaining the symptoms of hydrophobia and its relatively long incubation period; a bite from the mouse could not possibly have affected Tommy so suddenly nor, for that matter, in such a way. Besides, he said, while it was possible that the mouse had had hydrophobia, which would account for at least most of its actions, it had not bitten Tommy; the skin on his hands had been unbroken. There had been scratches on his, legs, but these were caused by his running barelegged through bushes in the woods; none of the scratches could have been a bite.
Gus Hoffman testified next, then Jed Garner. Their stories were identical because they had been together all the time.
Doc Staunton listened carefully, especially when the dog Buck was mentioned—Buck following the boy last night, Buck leading them to the cave this morning. The sheriff testified last, about being called and going into the woods with Hoffman and Garner to bring out the body.
The coroner’s jury went into another room but came back almost immediately with a verdict of suicide while temporarily insane. People began to wander off.
Doc started to make his way toward the man whom he now knew to he Gus Hoffman, owner of the dog, but Hoffman disappeared into an inner office of the mortuary, no doubt to discuss arrangements for the funeral, and Garner and Garner’s daughter had gone with him.
Doc then cornered the big man who was the sheriff, introduced himself, and told about running over the dog.
“Maybe it’s just as well, Sheriff,” he said, “that I’m talking to you instead of Mr. Hoffman because—well, Mr. Hoffman had a nasty blow losing his son last night. Possibly it would be better if he doesn’t learn right away that his dog is dead too. It might be kinder to let him think the dog has just run away or got lost, and to realize gradually that it won’t be coming back. What do you think?”
The sheriff scratched his head. “Well—” He hesitated.
“May I make a suggestion?” Doc asked. “To give you a few minutes to think about that and also to let me ask a question or two about the suicide, which interests me, will you have a drink with me at the bar across the street?”
“Well—guess I’ll have time for one. Couple little things I gotta do here first, though. If you want to go ahead I’ll join you over there in ten minutes.”
At the bar, which he had investigated and found not wanting on his first day in Bartlesville, Doc ordered himself a beer and then got his pipe loaded and going. The cold beer tasted good, and he was just finishing it when the sheriff slid into the booth across from him. He said, “Beer looks good,” and turned toward the bar and called out, “Hey, Hank, bring us two beers. Big ones.”