'Sure. You bet your life. Fellow's got to be reasonable, see how I mean, Chief?'
Myron murmured, 'It would give me the greatest pleasure if both you gentlemen went straight to hell. Good-day!'
Three deputies--though not, of course, led by the friendly Mr. Everett Beasy--raided the Inn a week later, and found a pint of whisky behind the bar. They were just arresting Clark Cleaver, chief clerk (an assonance which Ora found very funny indeed) when Myron telephoned to T. J. Dingle.
That ended the process of law and justice.
Two weeks later, when Myron was driving back from the Centre by moonlight, some one shot at him from the bushes. The shot bored his windshield. In his office at the Inn, he immediately telephoned to Beasy.
'Hello. The sheriff? Good evening. This is Myron Weagle.'
'Well, well, I was terribly sorry to hear about that outrage!'
'What outrage?'
'Uh, uh--I mean the murder and suicide.'
'The murder two weeks ago, Sheriff?'
'Yes, sure. What the hell did you think I meant?'
'Better than that, Beasy. I know what you meant! Listen. You remember the older New York reporter that was here at the opening? Denmack? The tall thin fellow, a little bald?'
'I guess so. What about him?'
'Didn't he strike you as a pretty competent man--rather too good to just do an hotel opening--probably got the assignment just to give him a little vacation?'
'What of it?'
'Didn't Denmack strike you as a fellow that would be very enterprising, and yet very judicious and accurate, and not easily scared?'
'I don't know as he struck me at all! I didn't pay any attention to him in any way, shape, or manner! Darned fresh, that's how he struck me!'
'Exactly! Well, you'll be interested to know that I'm typing out a complete account of everything I know about the officers of the peace around here; names and everything, from the time of your first call on me, through the phony raid here, to this evening--original and two carbons. I'll finish it before I get to bed to-night, and to-morrow one copy will be in T. J. Dingle's hands, and another in Denmack's, but sealed, with instructions that he is to open it only in case anything happens to me. It might make a nice piece for the household page of his newspaper. So if I were you, I'd tell your man to stop shooting so recklessly--or else shoot to kill, next time!'
'Weagle, I do believe you've gone plumb crazy! I just haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about!'
'Well, I'm glad to hear that, old man. Certainly glad. And look now, as an expert, do you feel that Dutch Linderbeck, my dick here, is a competent loyal fellow?'
'He certainly is, Weagle. I don't understand one bit what you were kidding me about before, but when it comes to Dutch, he's O.K., a swell reliable guard.'
'Thanks a lot! I'll fire him first thing in the morning.'
It occurred to Myron that he had invited Beasy to shoot him that night, and the window-door of his office, opening into a grove, was perfect for convenient assassination. Yet he could not face being so melodramatic as to set out a guard or to borrow a revolver--provided, indeed, there was any revolver at the Inn, outside of Dutch Linderbeck's hip-pocket. He pulled down the curtain. His shadow fell on it, and he was uncomfortable as he sat typing not only his own experiences with the good Sheriff Beasy, but T. J. Dingle's information about Beasy's relationship to the Pinetop Dancing Pavilion.
He stopped, paralyzed. There was a distinct sound on the brick walk outside his window. He could not endure the inaction. He flung the window open, his back cold and shivering. He found the origin of the sound.
It was a porcupine, waddling away, terrified, looking back at him with the bleary, timid little eyes of a bear-cub, and skidding on the smooth brick as it tried to hurry.
In mid-August, two months after the opening, a time which should have been the best season, the Black Thread Inn was half empty. There had been other hotels aplenty in which there had been suicides, but the chance of one occurring on the opening night had tickled the imagination of that considerable part of the public which leads cautious lives and takes it out in gloating over the delights of suicides, torch-murders, sash-weight-murders, hangings, poison, and warfare. Myron knew that Sheriff Beasy and his intimates were scuttling about saying, 'I'd see my son or daughter dead before I'd let 'em so much as step foot in that den of iniquity!' And the tabloid newspaper had done much for Myron by its headline about 'Murder Tavern', run between an editorial on the necessity of church-going and a special article on Honour as one of the best-thought-of virtues.
There was a brisk scattering of sensation-lickers motoring for lunch, sometimes staying overnight. They vastly furthered the Inn's reputation as a sanctuary for illicit lovers. Some of them got more noisily drunk and burned more cigarette holes in the carpet than even a veteran hotel-man expects, and all of them hinted that they would just love to have a glimpse of the Murder Chamber. Occasionally the clerks satisfied them, by showing them any convenient room which happened to be empty; sometimes Myron indulged himself in the pleasure--his only one, just now--of refusing to do so, and thus losing for life their scabrous patronage.
Of the respectable couples who were neither rude nor greasy nor drunk, there was a proportion that had as much virtuous and smirking curiosity in peeping at the Inn as a haunt of vice as do respectable couples who go to slimy cafés in Paris or Berlin and are irritably disappointed when they see no degenerates to disgust them, but only other rabbit-nosed tourists like themselves.
Yet Myron was patient as he had never been in his zealous life. Daily he told himself to be patient--Effie May told him to be patient--Gritzmeier told him to be patient--Clark Cleaver begged him to be patient--Tom Weagle whined at him to be patient--and despite all this, he actually was patient. But he hated the loose-jawed gapers who believed that his clean place was a den of rottenness, and whose shambling curiosity polluted the Inn more than any swift and honest murder.
This too would pass away. People would forget. It was impossible that they should go on thinking of his Inn as merely a cheap bawdy house and not see the kindly rooms, the gay beach, the beautiful food that every day was lovingly prepared and at night had to be thrown away, untasted.
And people did forget. Other events claimed them. Labour Day, and the beginning of a new year in the office. The World's Series. New feature films. It was the year of Lindbergh and Clarence Chamberlin, and of Byrd and Maitland, and after their ocean flights, they were never out of the papers. Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim, Philip Payne, Mrs. Frances Grayson and half a dozen others winged out to sea and were never heard from again. Young Mr. Hickman, a prominent Sunday School scholar, kidnapped and murdered a child named Marion Parker, which entertained up-to-the-minute readers even more than an hotel-suicide. The Case of the Murder Tavern began to slide back into the indifference with which any democracy views any incident, noble or vile, that is more than four months old; and by October 1927, it was only history, as inconceivably ancient as the events of a whole year before--the positively medieval happenings of 1926, such as the coming over of Queen Marie and Ivar Kreuger to bear messages of Europe's love and its desire to do America good, or the re-opening of the Hall-Mills case, with its altogether elegant murder of a rector and his choir-singer.
The only son of Senator Colquhoun was one now with Hector.
Even in September, when the oaks and maples hung out the banners of a gallant and dying host, guests who did not snoop and giggle began to appear at the Inn, from nowhere in particular, and a few of them stayed a week, riding, tramping, playing golf, and shyly informing Myron that they had never known such food or such beds. For the first time, there was honest young laughter from the cabañas and diving-boards, and youth discovered as dizzily modern the croquet of its grandmothers. There were reservations scattered through October.