Then he remembered the brown smudge on her shoes and nearly shuddered.
Fred growled, “Gimme that gun, sis!”
“You do, and somebody is liable to get killed!” Nace warned her.
“Get out!” she hissed.
“In my coat pocket is a telegram,” Nace told her. “It’s the one you sent to me in New York. It was forwarded here, and because I had registered at the hotel under a fake name, I didn’t get it until less than an hour ago.”
The red-head eyed him steadily, considering this. She looked like a flame-haired Madonna with the lights playing on her features.
Thunder bawled over the log house roof. Blond Spencer twisted and moaned on the floor.
The girl said jerkily, “I wonder — if — if I’ve had you all wrong?”
“I hope so.” Nace pointed at Spencer. “Who’s this?”
“Spencer — Jim Spencer. He is athletic director here at Camp Lakeside.”
Fred Franks came over and gingerly extracted the telegram from Nace’s coat pocket. He eyed it.
“Forwarded back here from New York City, all right,” he admitted.
Nace picked the suffering Spencer up, dumped him in a chair. Then he seated himself with a flourish, took out his pipe, gorged it with tobacco and applied a match.
“Let’s get to the bottom of this!” he said briskly. “Who’s Sol Rubinov?”
“He is — was the caretaker and man-of-all-work here at Camp Lakeside,” said the girl.
“It was in answer to a telegram signed by Sol Rubinov that I came here. As I told you, I didn’t get your wire until tonight.”
“Oh! Then Rubinov sent for you! That explains it!”
Nace looked at blond Spencer’s shoes. They were plain black.
“Get Rubinov,” Nace suggested. “He may want to be in on this.”
The red-head became pale, somewhat rigid. “I can’t. I don’t know where he is. I think — he has been murdered.”
Fred Franks gave his sister a dramatic stare.
“I know he was murdered, sis!” he rapped. “I saw something on my way to town tonight which makes me sure of it. There was an explosion, just like we heard here night before last, and afterward, at the scene of the blast, the mangled body of Constable Jan Hasser was found.”
The girl shuddered and sank into a chair made out of branches with the bark still attached.
“There was a terrific blast here at Camp Lakeside night before last,” she told Nace swiftly. “Fred and I hunted around several minutes before we found the exact spot. There we discovered—!” Her mouth closed so tightly little muscles bunched around it, and her face looked as if it had been whitewashed.
“We found pieces of flesh and blood scattered around,” finished Fred. “But we couldn’t tell whether it was human. There wasn’t no sign of a body.”
“This happened the night after Rubinov sent me the telegram,” Nace pointed out.
“Constable Hasser chanced to be passing and he laughed at our idea of calling in the state police,” the girl said, voice strained.
“He would!” A fog of pipe smoke was growing in the sultry air over Nace’s head.
Blond Spencer pushed himself out of his chair. He rolled his eyes at Nace, keeping both hands over his middle.
“I’m goin’ to the kitchen an’ wash my face!” he said hoarsely. “Maybe cold water will make me feel better.”
He staggered into the kitchen, leaving the door open. Nace, looking through the gaping door, could see a second door across the kitchen, evidently leading outdoors.
“There just the one kitchen door going outside?” he asked.
The red-head nodded.
Nace sat where he was. Spencer turned on a water faucet in the kitchen. The splashing, mingling as it did with the thunder outdoors, made it seem as though it had started to rain. Nace kept his ears cocked, just on the chance Spencer might try to get out of the kitchen by a window.
“What’s behind all this?” he questioned.
“To make you understand, I’ll have to tell you Sol Rubinov’s history,” Benna Franks said, plainly glad to get away from the explosion subject. “He was born in Russia. His father was a successful shopkeeper, but rather ignorant. He trusted no one. He would not put his money in the banks, but hoarded it always in metal coins. He had a large hoard of coins when he died.
“Sol Rubinov, his son, had the same mania for hoarding. When he came to America, he brought a small fortune in coins gathered by his father. He never made a large salary here, but he saved nearly all of it. And every dollar of it, he changed into gold or silver and added to his secret hoard.”
“He was sure inviting trouble,” grunted Nace. He could hear Spencer splashing in the kitchen.
“Two days ago — the same day he wired you — Rubinov came to me and told me where his hoard was hidden,” continued the girl. “He told me, that in the event of his death, I was to have his money.”
Nace shut his eyes tightly and thought of the shrill voice in the night-ridden woods, of the brown powder on the girl’s sport shoes. He thought also of what a jury would say when they heard Rubinov’s death meant the girl was to have the old Russian’s gold hoard. His forehead felt clammy.
“We looked for the hoarded money, Fred and I,” said the girl. “It was gone, except for one coin wedged in a crack.”
Spencer came weaving out of the kitchen, blond hair touseled, wiping his hands in a towel. The washing had made the strange little pits on his hands stand out more noticeably.
“The hoard was supposed to be in a box under the floor of Rubinov’s cabin,” Benna Franks continued. “This is the single coin we found.”
She arose, extracted a coin from a brown leather bag, passed it over.
At first glance, it looked like silver. But it bore an unusual face design. Nace bounced it on the table. He bit it. He eyed it closely.
“Bless us!” he ejaculated.
“What is it?” questioned the red-head.
“This one coin is worth a small fortune,” he explained. “In the old days, Russia made a little money out of platinum. That was in the days before platinum became so valuable. This is one of those coins. But it has a worth greatly beyond the platinum content as a collector’s piece.”
Nace clattered dottle out of his pipe in a hammered iron stand, reloaded it, asked, “Did Rubinov seem worried when he told you where his hoard was hidden?”
The red-head nodded. “He did.”
Nace blew smoke and followed the squirming gray cloud with his eyes. “How about two or three months ago — when the U.S. government began raising cain with gold hoarders? You know — when the banks all closed for a while.”
The girl gave a slight start. “Why — Rubinov was worried by that! I remember now. He came to me several times and wanted to know all about what it meant. If a man had been getting gold coins and keeping them, could the government take them away from him? That was his question.”
“And you told him?”
“I gave him to understand the government might confiscate his gold as a penalty. That, you recall, was the talk at the time.”
Nace frowned through his smoke fog. “Want to hear me do some guessing?”
They all three nodded.
“Here is what I think happened,” Nace said briskly. “Rubinov got scared and decided to turn his hoarded money into the bank. He wanted a guard while he did it, so he went to Constable Hasser and Deputy Constable Fatty Dell. But Hasser and Dell persuaded him not to turn it in, probably lying to him and telling him it was all right to keep the money.
“Hasser and Dell got someone else to help them — somebody who kills with that infernal explosive. They watched Rubinov and found out where the hoard was hidden. But Rubinov got wise and sent for me. Then they killed Rubinov and stole his hoard.