He shuddered.
“Lord!” he said. “I hate to think of it. Honestly, Bob, I was more than a year getting enough moisture in my muscles so that I could look good in a dinner coat. I was all stringy and shriveled like a mummy. No, Bob, I’m done with the desert. If you can make anything out of those claims, go ahead and do it. I’ve built up quite a fortune making investments, and right now I’m in the middle of a business deal that is going to more than double my fortune.”
“I’d like to have you go back with me,” I told him. “Perhaps when you got back to the desert you’d feel a little bit differently toward it. You used to get along pretty well in the desert.”
He shuddered and shook his head.
“I couldn’t stand it, Bob,” he said.
There were lurching steps outside the door. The knob rattled.
Pete Ringley frowned.
“No one disturbs me in here,” he said.
The words had just left his lips when the door opened and a young man entered the room.
He was big and tall. He hadn’t filled out yet, but he was enough like his father so I knew him at a glance. This was the “kid” that Pete had always talked about around the campfires; the kid that Pete had determined to send through college; the kid who was going to have the advantages of all the education that his father had missed.
I looked at him. He was drunk.
He wasn’t offensively drunk; it was just the type of drunk that comes from taking two or three drinks on top of a hangover. The eyes were moist and watery; the skin was a rich pinkish red, as though he had been putting hot and cold towels on his face after he shaved, trying to get his nerves steady. His hair was glossy and black, and it swept back in waves that were as glossy as the wing of a blackbird. The waves were too regular, too artificial. It looked as though some one had put them in with a hot iron.
Pete frowned.
“I’m busy, George,” he said.
George grinned easily.
“That’s what Evelyn said,” he told him. “But she said that she didn’t think it was anything important — nothing that you cared about particularly.”
Pete flushed.
“George,” he said, “shake hands with Bob Zane. Bob Zane was my old desert partner.”
George Ringley gave me a hand that was cool and just a little flabby.
“How’re yuh?”
I squeezed the hand a bit, just to see if there would be any resistance. It was like squeezing a dead trout.
George pulled his hand away and looked at it.
“Big he-man stuff — outdoor man — wide open spaces and all that, eh?” he asked.
Pete Ringley scowled at him, and there was a look of hopeless resignation on his face.
“What is it, George?” he asked.
“Got to see you, guv’nor, before I go out. Got to see you within the next hour. It’s important as hell.”
Pete stared steadily at him.
“I presume,” he said, “that you’re in some kind of a jam over money matters, and that you think it’s important as the devil I should come to your rescue. Is that it?”
George smiled at me.
“The guv’nor,” he said, “is a great student of character. He should have been a detective.”
He grinned at his father.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but you know how those things are, Dad. You were young once yourself.”
“I’ll see you sometime this afternoon,” Pete Ringley said.
“It’s got to be within an hour, guv’nor,” George told him; then, as he saw only ominous silence stamped upon his father’s face, he smiled affably at me. “Be seeing more of you, Zane,” he said.
When the door had closed I looked at Pete Ringley.
Pete’s face was apologetic.
“Don’t misjudge him, Bob,” he pleaded. “He’s an awfully good boy, an awfully good boy. But, you know, his mother died when he was five. I was out in the desert prospecting around, scraping up a little money here and there to send back to keep him in school. Then we struck it rich and I put him through college. He had the best that money could buy. Perhaps I indulged him a little too much. I was trying to make up to him for the years that he hadn’t had enough.”
“What college did he go to?” I asked.
“Harvard,” he said. “Why?”
I tapped the woodwork.
“Why didn’t you send him to your old college?” I asked.
“My college?” asked Pete. “Why, Bob, you know I never had any college.”
I tapped the woodwork again.
“The same college,” I said, “that took this cheap wood and made something distinctive out of it — the college of drifting sand.”
He looked at me for a moment before he got the idea, then he laughed nervously, and his eyes didn’t meet mine.
“He’s a good kid,” he said, and jabbed his finger against a push button.
“We’re going to have a highball, Bob,” he said. “I’ve got some genuine uncut whiskey.”
II
The Snatch
I had told Evelyn Ringley that I wouldn’t detain her husband long, and I kept my promise to her. Exactly fifty-seven minutes from the time Pete had met me on the porch, he was saying good-by to me. There were tears in his eyes and he was sorry to see me go, but he hadn’t urged me forcibly to stay. It was plain that his wife thought I wouldn’t mix in well with some of the guests who were coming in during the latter part of the afternoon to play bridge.
Poor Pete was in something of a daze. It seemed strange to him that his old partner would come on to see him and leave within less than an hour. Yet he realized as well as I did, perhaps better, that there was nothing else I could do.
I wouldn’t let him send the liveried chauffeur and the family sedan down to the depot. I insisted that he call a cab.
The cab started away with a lurch, and had gone about a hundred yards when a light gray roadster came tearing down the driveway from the big house.
George Ringley was at the wheel. The car gathered speed and swept past us at better than fifty miles an hour.
George saw me and slammed on the brakes. The big car swayed slightly. The tires screeched a protest. George gave the wheel a deft twist, sending the roadster up close to the cab.
“Didn’t know you were going so soon!” he shouted.
I nodded.
“Get out,” he said, “and I’ll take you wherever you want to go and get you there in half the time.”
I grinned and shook my head at him.
“No,” I said, “thanks all the same. I prefer the cab. I’m nervous about automobiles.”
His smile was humorous and patronizing. He looked on me as some wild outlander. He was still drunk — not dead drunk, but just pleasantly oiled. His face wore a grin of complacent self-satisfaction, and I gathered that the interview with his father, which had taken place a few moments before I left, had been entirely satisfactory to the young man.
“Okay,” he called. “Good luck.”
His foot pressed down on the throttle. The car shot ahead like a frightened jackrabbit and left the taxicab rattling and swaying, as though it had been standing still.
The cabdriver shook his head dubiously.
There was a traffic signal at the corner, where a through boulevard crossed the one we were on. George Ringley went through the red light just as it was changing. An officer blew vigorous blasts on his whistle. Ringley didn’t pay any attention to it at all.
A black Cadillac sedan came up from behind, traveling fast. I looked at it casually, wondering if every automobile in the city traveled at such a terrific rate of speed. There were four men in the sedan. As it swept past, I saw that the rear license plate was loose, dangling and flapping in the breeze which sucked up from behind the car.