“So fortunate that this rope was here in the barn. Otherwise I might have had to shoot you. So fortunate.”
With the idiot speck of consciousness I had left, whirling in the midst of blackness, I felt soothed and delighted by the good fortune. How lucky we both were, and how pleasant it was to be going to sleep with a gentle voice droning in my ears.
The speck of consciousness flickered and went out, and I turned on great black wheels in an infinity of humming wheels.
CHAPTER XI
AFTER THE WHEELS HAD completed several 365-day journeys around the sun they stopped rotating, but the universe went on humming like an engine in neutral. I was lying on the rim of a wheel so big that it seemed flat to my back. The university coal-pile was on top of me and pinned me to the wheel so that I could not move my arms or head.
There was something in my right hand and I squeezed it and discovered that it was my left elbow. The coal-pile pressed down on my upturned face and there was something tight around my neck. I blew out and drew in a deep breath which whistled through my flattened nose. At least I was still breathing.
I stuck out my tongue and it came against a hard, rough surface that tasted familiar. Wood. Old wood. That was it, it was the lid of a coffin. I was buried alive in a tight coffin that pressed down on my face and folded arms. A wild claustrophobia seized me and I kicked out. My legs were free to kick but the lid of the coffin pressed down painfully on my stomach and groin.
I pressed put with my bent arms and the lid shifted slightly but the thing around my neck began to choke me. I felt like crying at the unfairness of being buried alive with something around my neck to choke me.
To choke me. I remembered Schneider and his promise to hang me. Was this how it felt to be hanged? Anger surged through me and I pushed frantically at the heavy lid of the coffin. It rose slightly and I saw light, but the rope was unbearably tight now and I moved my head sideways to ease the pressure.
I freed my right hand and got hold of the coffin-lid at the edge and pushed and it rose higher. But the rope had pulled my head over the edge of whatever I was lying on. I was going to give the lid a final desperate shove when I heard running feet somewhere below me.
A man’s voice, a voice I remembered from somewhere, shouted, “Branch, don’t move, and don’t let go of that beam.”
I tried to speak but there was no hole in my throat to speak through and the blood swelled in my head. As the black cloud bellied down at me again, the heavy lid lurched sideways but I held on with my right hand. Quick footsteps came up from somewhere and the weight was taken off my hand and arm. The pressure on my neck was released and the black cloud swooped up and away from me like an escaped balloon.
A hand raised my head where it dangled in space and I lay panting on a hard, narrow surface with somebody’s arm around my shoulders. As my vision cleared, I saw a face above me, a sullen Indian face that I remembered.
Wild ideas rushed through my mind like leering mimics of truth. He’s no F.B.I. man, he’s another spy. The president is a spy. And the old woman with the hard, bright face.
I struggled against the arm around me and tried to get up. The dark face said, “Take it easy, old boy. You’ll be all right in a minute. I’m Gordon, remember?”
I lay back and took it easy and my mind came back a piece at a time and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, with cracks in it. My neck was sore and my Adam’s apple felt as if Eve had taken a bite out of it. My arms were stiff, and my head and groin throbbed like a toothache. In five minutes I wasn’t all right, but I was fairly sane.
Gordon didn’t look particularly friendly, but he didn’t look like a spy either. Spies put ropes around your neck. I was still wearing a thick noose, with its end severed, around my neck like a necktie. Gordon had loosened it and I worked it over my head and took it off.
“A highly ingenious arrangement,” he was saying. “And so simple. Truly Attic in its simplicity.”
“What?” I said. “The Parthenon?” My voice scraped my throat like sandpaper and sounded like a crow cawing.
“Feeling better, Branch?”
“Yes, thanks. But my neck is somewhat chapped. Bring me my honey and almond cream. Also my bow of burning gold. I’m on a hunting trip.”
“You were, but you’re not,” Gordon said. “You’re going to be too busy explaining to play hare and hounds for a while. Can you get up now?”
“With excruciating ease,” I said and sat up. My head seemed to linger where it was and then got up by itself and jumped onto my shoulders with a jolt. In a minute it stopped vibrating and I could use it again for elementary purposes.
I was sitting astride a two-foot beam running along the top of a wooden wall twelve or fifteen feet above the floor of the old barn. The wall divided the wagon-floor, where Schneider had snared me, from the haymow, which still had some old grey-green hay in the corners. Gordon was sitting beside me on the beam supporting me with one arm, his feet on the top rung of a ladder which ran down to the wagon-floor.
The beam that had pinned my face and arms and that I had mistaken for the lid of a coffin lay on the beam in front of me. One end of it was between my legs, and I could see a rope knotted around its middle. The rope passed over a rafter above my head and hung above the floor of the barn a few feet out of my reach.
“Do you see it?” Gordon said. “Study it as an object-lesson in the inadvisability of going on extra-legal spy hunts. Delayed-action murder fixed to look like suicide.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I’m feeling dull this morning. It’s still morning, isn’t it?”
“It’s not seven yet. But you appear to be rather dull in the evening, too, if last night was typical. Dull is putting it mildly.”
“Go to hell,” I barked, but my throat regretted it. “A man was killed, and somebody had to do something.”
“Such as kill another man?”
“Nonsense. What happened to you after Galloway’s hothouse-liberal fiasco?”
“I tailed Dr. Schneider to his home. But the more interesting question is what happened to you? And what happened to Dr. Schneider?”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you. But not here. I’m grateful to you for saving my neck, but I don’t have to submit to cross-questioning on a two-foot beam forty feet in the air.”
“Fifteen feet is a better estimate.”
“So what? While we sit here chatting, the man who put me here is probably on his way out of the state. Did you ever hear of Peter Schneider?” The ironic rasp I forced into my voice made me cough.
“The police are after him,” Gordon said. “They’re after you, too.”
“I thought you were the police.”
“That’s right. Can you climb down by yourself or do I use the fireman’s lift on you? Or do you want to stay up here and hang yourself some more?”
I remembered what Peter Schneider had said before I passed out. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that when I came into this barn you were in the act of hanging yourself. The rope around your neck was slung over the rafter, pulled tight, and tied to this heavy loose beam. The beam was then placed on your face so that when you pushed it off it would fall and jerk the rope. The rope would then jerk you off the beam by the neck and either break it immediately or strangle you.”
“So I suppose you’re going to book me on a charge of attempted suicide.” Watching the fixed snarl on his face, I wouldn’t have put it past him.
“Don’t be childish, Branch. I told you we’re after Peter Schneider.”