A movement by the door of the bungalow brought him to sudden attention. He held the rifle more tightly and tried to estimate the strength of the wind. Two figures walked out of the house. The one with the shorts would be Harder’s host. The two walked over toward the waiting car and stood talking. Brown leveled the sights on the middle of the back of the man in the long trousers. He moved the sights a shade to the right to allow for the wind. He held his breath and slowly squeezed the trigger—
For a fraction of a second Harder didn’t realize what had happened. Clive had been standing in front of him, smiling and holding out his hand. Then he staggered backwards, with sort of an odd dance step. He had an expression of surprise and apology on his face. He folded slowly onto the grass and a red stain began to seep through the linen fabric of his shirt. There was a black hole in the middle of the stain. Harder dropped behind the car. He readied out and grabbed Clive’s ankles and pulled the unconscious man toward him, into the shelter of the body of the car. He remembered that just as Clive had fallen, he had heard a faint crack that seemed to come from back in the hills. The crack of a rifle.
He tore Clive’s shirt away from his chest and realized that a doctor was needed quickly. But he couldn’t move away from the car with any safety. He bunched his leg muscles and then, like a starting sprinter, ran for the house. He dodged from side to side as he ran. He found Appuhamy, told him what had happened, and then phoned the Kandy hospital with the dread in his mind that they would be too long in arriving. By the time he had hung up, Appuhamy was back with a massive Webley service pistol. Harder grabbed it in his sweating palm and ran out the back of the house. He cut down through the tea and then angled over to the shelter of the jungle. He worked his way through the tangle of brush, the vines clutching at his clothes, a cloud of insects around his sweating head. He worked his way upwards, trying to keep out of the sight of whoever might be on the high slopes ahead. He remembered his own qualms at taking the law into his own hands while he was in Galle. If he had then Brown would have been eliminated and Clive would be unhurt. He had a cold singlemindedness of purpose, to smash a slug from the heavy pistol into the beefy head of J. Haggard Brown.
After an hour of cautious climbing and scrambling through the brush he came to a clear spot on the side of a hill. He looked out through the leaves and saw the bungalow far below. He stopped and examined every foot of the side of the hill opposite. As he started to move again, the sun, getting low, struck a bright object in the brush not thirty feet away. He ducked silently behind a thick palm, and then stuck his head out until he could examine the spot from which the sudden glitter had come. He could see nothing.
Slowly and more cautiously he climbed higher. When he looked again he saw a shoe protruding from the brush. It was in the position of a man stretched out on his stomach. Then he saw the ankle. He drifted forward across the open space. When he could see the back of the man’s head and could recognize the reddish-brown hair of Brown, he leveled the pistol and shouted, “Drop your gun, Brown! Stand up!”
Mr. Lee, the nervous man named Bill and Kenneth Harder sat in the small office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. Harder had run through the story once, and Mr. Lee was asking questions.
“Ken, how on earth could you have managed to pick that Indian up off the island? How did you know you wouldn’t kill him?”
“When I was flying for Troop Carrier I snatched up a few gliders. Read a training manual on picking up personnel. Knew how it was done. Had to take a chance on not killing him, but I figured it wouldn’t be any great loss if I did. If I hadn’t dragged him out of there, Brown would have found some way to get him killed. He finally managed it anyway. Poor Haidari Rama was destined for a short life the minute they stuck him in that prison island. It was luck that when I phoned Hindustan about snatch-up equipment they told me that they only had one on hand for this Harver-Crescent outfit. I walked in, grabbed a sheet of their office stationery and made myself an official letter. With a full tank I had just enough gas for the running around I had to do.”
“But how did you stay clear of the British? They should have been pretty sore at you. You broke a few local laws, you know.”
“That was the easiest part of it. While Clive was getting his health back they had a lot of investigations. The thing was they were so embarrassed at having me uncover all that stuff right under their noses in Rangoon, that they didn’t realize I was the one who took the plane and snatched Haidari. I blamed it all on old J. Haggard and his imaginary associates. By luck, they didn’t get me and the Ratmalana Airport fellow together, and they didn’t take me up to Bangalore. They were happy to forget the whole thing.”
“That business with Brown at the last must have been rough.”
“That was the worst of it. I stood there with that Webley aimed at the back of his head and told him to stand up. He didn’t do it, but I saw him quiver a little and knew he was alive and listening. I walked closer to him until I was standing right near his feet and told him again. He still didn’t move, so for luck I plugged one into the ground right next to his shoulder. That did it. He gave this bubbling scream and turned around, sitting up and clawing at the fat brown thing on his throat. He didn’t even see me. His eyes stuck out and he gave one shuddering breath and stopped clawing at the thing. Then he began to stiffen up, and even as I stood there I could see his face swelling and growing dark. The fat brown snake let go of his throat and started to writhe away. I got it through the head. They told me later that it was a krite. You don’t see many of those in Ceylon. North India is usually the place for them.”
“I wonder why he didn’t get away from it?”
“I figure that when he fired the shot which hit Clive, the darn thing was disturbed and either dropped out of a tree right in front of his face, or crawled up close to him before he saw it. He had enough sense to hold still, and that snake must have been looking him in the eye from a distance of a few inches while I worked my way up the hill. He knew he was gone as soon as he moved. The shot that I fired actually killed him. It startled the snake.”
