The purring gurgle died, leaving a more oppressive silence, the silence of wide emptiness.
Cold metal came under sliding palm. A finger found the button, fumbled too eagerly atop it, slid off. She clutched at the button with both hands. Light came. She whirled her back to the wall.
Across the room Guy straddled Doucas, holding his head up from the floor with thick hands that hid the Greek’s white collar. Doucas’s tongue was a bluish pendant from a bluish mouth. His eyes stood out, dull. The end of a red silk garter hung from one trouser-leg, across his shoe.
Guy turned his head toward Margaret, blinking in the light.
“Good girl,” he commended her. “This Greek was no baby to jump at in daylight.”
One side of Guy’s face was wet red under a red furrow. She sought escape in his wound from the implication of was.
“You’re hurt!”
He took his hands away from the Greek’s neck and rubbed one of them across the cheek. It came away dyed red. Doucas’s head hit the floor hollowly and did not quiver.
“Only nicked me,” Guy said. “I need it to show self-defence.”
The reiterated implication drove Margaret’s gaze to the man on the floor, and quickly away.
“He is-?”
“Deader than hell,” Guy assured her.
His voice was light, tinged faintly with satisfaction.
She stared at him in horror, her back pressed against the wall, sick with her own part in this death, sick with Guy’s callous brutality of voice and mien. Guy did not see these things. He was looking thoughtfully at the dead man.
“I told you I’d give him a bellyful if he wanted it,” he boasted. “I told him the same thing five years ago, in Malta.”
He stirred the dead Doucas gently with one foot. Margaret cringed against the wall, feeling as if she were going to vomit.
Guy’s foot nudged the dead man slowly, reflectively. Guy’s eyes were dull with distant things, things that might have happened five years ago in a place that to her was only a name on a map, vaguely associated with Crusades and kittens. Blood trickled down his cheek, hung momentarily in fattening drops, dripped down on the dead man’s coat.
The poking foot stopped its ghoulish play. Guy’s eyes grew wide and bright, his face lean with eagerness. He snapped fist into palm and jerked around to Margaret.
“By God! This fellow has got a pearl concession down in La Paz! If I can get down there ahead of the news of the killing, I can – Why, what’s the matter?”
He stared at her, puzzlement wiping animation from his face.
Margaret’s gaze faltered away from him. She looked at the overturned table, across the room, at the floor. She could not hold up her eyes for him to see what was in them. If understanding had come to him at once – but she could not stand there and look at him and wait for the thing in her eyes to burn into his consciousness.
She tried to keep that thing out of her voice.
“I’ll bandage your cheek before we phone the police,” she said.
THE MAN WHO KILLED DAN ODAMS
When the light that came through the barred square foot of the cell’s one high window had dwindled until he could no longer clearly make out the symbols and initials his predecessors had scratched and pencilled on the opposite wall, the man who had killed Dan Odams got up from the cot and went to the steel-slatted door.
“Hey, chief!” he called, his voice rumbling within the narrow walls.
A chair scraped across a floor in the front of the building, deliberate footsteps approached, and the marshal of Jingo came into the passage between his office and the cell.
“I got something I want to tell you,” the man in the cell said.
Then the marshal was near enough to see in the dim light the shiny muzzle of a short, heavy revolver threatening him from just in front of the prisoner’s right hip.
Without waiting for the time-honoured order the marshal raised his hands until their palms were level with his ears.
The man behind the bars spoke in a curt whisper.
“Turn around! Push your back against the door!”
When the marshal’s back pressed against the bars a hand came up under his left armpit, pulled aside his unbuttoned vest, and plucked his revolver from its holster. “Now unlock this here door!”
The prisoner’s own weapon had disappeared and the captured one had taken its place. The marshal turned around, lowered one hand, keys jingled in it, and the cell door swung open.
The prisoner backed across the cell, inviting the other in with a beckoning flip of the gun in his hand. “Flop on the bunk, face-down.”
In silence the marshal obeyed. The man who had killed Dan Odams bent over him. The long black revolver swept down in a swift arc that ended at the base of the prone official’s head.
His legs jerked once, and he lay still.
With unhurried deftness the prisoner’s fingers explored the other’s pockets, appropriating money, tobacco, and cigarette papers. He removed the holster from the marshal’s shoulder and adjusted it to his own. He locked the cell door behind him when he left.
The marshal’s office was unoccupied. Its desk gave up two sacks of tobacco, matches, an automatic pistol, and a double handful of cartridges. The wall yielded a hat that sat far down on the prisoner’s ears, and a too-tight, too-long, black rubber slicker.
Wearing them, he essayed the street.
The rain, after three days of uninterrupted sovereignty, had stopped for the time. But Jingo’s principal thoroughfare was deserted – Jingo ate between five and six in the evening.
His deep-set maroon eyes – their animality emphasised by the absence of lashes – scanned the four blocks of wooden-sidewalked street. A dozen automobiles were to be seen, but no horses.
At the first corner he left the street and half a block below turned into a muddy alley that paralleled it. Under a shed in the rear of a poolroom he found four horses, their saddles and bridles hanging near by. He selected a chunky, well-muscled roan – the race is not to the swift through the mud of Montana – saddled it, and led it to the end of the alley.
Then he climbed into the saddle and turned his back on the awakening lights of Jingo.
Presently he fumbled beneath the slicker and took from his hip pocket the weapon with which he had held up the marshaclass="underline" a dummy pistol of moulded soap, covered with tinfoil from cigarette packages. He tore off the wrapping, squeezed the soap into a shapeless handful, and threw it away.
The sky cleared after a while and the stars came out. He found that the road he was travelling led south. He rode all night, pushing the roan unrelentingly through the soft, viscid footing.
At daylight the horse could go no farther without rest. The man led it up a coulee – safely away from the road – and hobbled it beneath a clump of cottonwoods.
Then he climbed a hill and sprawled on the soggy ground, his lashless red eyes on the country through which he had come: rolling hills of black and green and gray, where wet soil, young grass, and dirty snow divided dominion – the triple rule trespassed here and there by the sepia ribbon of county road winding into and out of sight.
He saw no man while he lay there, but the landscape was too filled with the marks of man’s proximity to bring any feeling of security. Shoulder-high wire fencing edged the road, a footpath cut the side of a near-by hill, telephone poles held their short arms stiffly against the gray sky.
At noon he saddled the roan again and rode on along the coulee. Several miles up he came to a row of small poles bearing a line of telephone wire. He left the coulee bottom, found the ranch house to which the wire ran, circled it, and went on.
Late in the afternoon he was not so fortunate.