Afraid of a Gun and Other Stories Page 9

  The woman left the cot without a word and went into the kitchen. The fugitive pushed the boy after her, and stood in the doorway while she cooked coffee, flapjacks, and bacon. Then they returned to the living-room. She put the food on the table and with the boy beside her resumed her seat on the cot.

  The man wolfed the meal without looking at it—his eyes busy upon door, window, woman, and boy, his revolver beside his plate. Blood still dripped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them.

  His hunger appeased, he rolled and lit a cigarette, his left hand fumbling stiffly through its part.

  For the first time the woman seemed to notice the blood. She came around to his side. "You're bleeding. Let me fix it."

  His eyes—heavy now with the weights of fatigue and satisfied hunger—studied her face suspiciously. Then he leaned back in his chair and loosened his clothes, exposing the week-old bullet-hole.

  She brought water and cloths, and bathed and bandaged the wound. Neither of them spoke again until she had returned to the cot.

  Then: "Had any visitors lately?"

  "Ain't seen nobody for six or seven weeks."

  "How far's the nearest phone?"

  "Nobel's—eight miles up the coulee."

  "Got any horses besides the one in the shed?"

  "No."

  He got up wearily and went to the bureau, pulling the drawers out and plunging his hands into them. In the top one he found a revolver, and pocketed it. In the trunk he found nothing. Behind the clothes on the wall he found a rifle. The cots concealed no weapons.

  He took two blankets from one of the cots, the rifle, and his slicker. He staggered as he walked to the door.

  "I'm going to sleep a while," he said thickly, "out in the shed where the horse is at. I'll be turning out every now and then for a look around, and I don't want to find nobody missing. Understand?"

  She nodded, and made a suggestion.

  "If any strangers show up, I guess you want to be woke up before they see you?"

  His sleep-dull eyes became alive again, and he came unsteadily back to thrust his face close to hers, trying to peer behind the faded surfaces of her eyes.

  "I killed a fellow in Jingo last week," he said after a while, talking slowly, deliberately, in a monotone that was both cautioning and menacing. "It was fair shooting. He got me in the shoulder before I downed him. But he belonged in Jingo and I don't. The best I could expect is the worst of it. I got a chance to get away before they took me to Great Falls, and I took it. And I ain't figuring on being took back there and hung. I ain't going to be here long, but while I am—"

  The woman nodded again.

  He scowled at her and left the shack.

  He tied the horse in one corner of the hut with shortened rope and spread his blankets between it and the door. Then, with the marshal's revolver in his hand, he lay down and slept.

  The afternoon was far gone when he woke, and the rain was still falling. He studied the bare yard carefully, and reconnoitred the house before re-entering it.

  The woman had swept and tidied the room; had put on a fresh dress, which much washing had toned down to a soft pink; had brushed and fluffed her hair. She looked up at his entrance from the sewing that occupied her, and her face, still young in spite of the harshness that work had laid upon it, was less sallow than before.

  "Where's the kid?" the man snapped.

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

  "Up on the hill. I sent him up to watch the coulee."

  His eyes narrowed and he left the building. Studying the hill through the rain, he discerned the outline of the boy, lying face-down under a stunted red cedar, looking toward the east. The man returned indoors.

  "How's the shoulder?" she asked.

  He raised an experimental arm.

  "Better. Pack me some grub. I'm moving on."

  "You're a fool," she said without spirit as she went into the kitchen. "You'd do better to stay here until your shoulder's fit to travel."

  "Too close to Jingo."

  "Ain't nobody going to fight all that mud to come after you. A horse couldn't get through, let alone a car. And you don't think they'd foot it after you even if they knew where to find you, do you? And this rain ain't going to do your shoulder no good."

  She bent to pick up a sack from the floor. Under the thin pink dress the line of back and hips and legs stood out sharply against the wall.

  As she straightened she met his gaze, her lids dropped, her face flushed, her lips parted a little.

  The man leaned against the jamb of the door and caressed the muddy stubble of his chin with a thick thumb.

  "Maybe you're right," he said.

  She put away the food she had been bundling, took a galvanized pail from the corner, and made three trips to the spring, filling an iron tub that she had set on the stove. He stood in the doorway watching.

  She stirred the fire, went into the living-room, and took a suit of underwear, a blue shirt, and a pair of socks from the bureau, a pair of gray trousers from one of the hooks, and a pair of carpet slippers from the pile of footwear. She put the clothing on a chair in the kitchen.

  Then she returned to the living-room, closing the connecting door.

  As the man undressed and bathed, he heard her humming softly. Twice he tiptoed to the connecting door and put an eye to the crack between it and the jamb. Each time he saw her sitting on the cot, bending over her sewing, her face still flushed.

  He had one leg in the trousers she had given him when the humming stopped suddenly.

  His right hand swept up the revolver from a convenient chair, and he moved to the door, the trousers trailing across the floor behind the ankle he had thrust through them. Flattening himself against the wall, he put an eye to the crack.

  In the front door of the shack stood a tall youth in a slicker that was glistening with water. In the youth's hands was a double-barrelled shotgun, the twin muzzles of which, like dull, malignant eyes, were focused on the centre of the connecting door.

  The man in the kitchen swung his revolver up, his thumb drawing back the hammer with the mechanical precision of the man who is accustomed to single-action pistols.

  The lean-to's rear door slammed open. "Drop it!"

  The fugitive, wheeling with the sound of the door's opening, was facing this new enemy before the order was out.

  Two guns roared together.

  But the fugitive's feet, as he wheeled, had become entangled in the trailing trousers. The trousers had tripped him. He had gone to his knees at the very instant of the two guns' roaring.

  His bullet had gone out into space over the shoulder of the man in the doorway. That one's bullet had driven through the wall a scant inch over the falling fugitive's head.

  Floundering on his knees, the fugitive fired again.

  The man in the door swayed and spun half around.

  As he righted himself, the fugitive's forefinger tightened again around the trigger—

  From the connecting doorway a shotgun thundered.

  The fugitive came straight up on his feet, his face filled with surprise, stood bolt upright for a moment, and wilted to the floor.

  The youth with the shotgun crossed to the man who leaned against the door with a hand clapped to his side. "Did he get you, Dick?"

  "Just through the flesh, I reckon—don't amount to nothing. Reckon you killed him, Bob?"

  "I reckon I did. I hit him fair!"

  The woman was in the lean-to. "Where's Buddy?"

  "The kid's all right, Mrs. Odams," Bob assured her. "But he was all in from running through the mud, so Ma put him to bed."

  The man who lay still on the floor made a sound then, and they saw that his eyes were open.

  Mrs. Odams and Bob knelt beside him, but he stopped them when they tried to move him to examine the wreckage the shotgun had made of his back.

  "No use," he pro
tested, blood trickling thinly from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. "Let me alone."

  Then his eyes—their red savageness glazed—sought the woman's.

  "You—Dan—Odams's—woman?" he managed.

  There was something of defiance—a hint that she felt the need of justification—in her answer. "Yes."

  His face—thick-featured and deep—lined without the mud—told nothing of what was going on in his mind.

  "Dummy," he murmured to himself presently, his eyes flickering toward the hill on whose top he had seen what he had believed to be a reclining boy.

  She nodded.

  The man who had killed Dan Odams turned his head away and spat his mouth empty of blood. Then his eyes returned to hers.

  "Good girl," he said clearly—and died.

  -- End—

  DEATH ON PINE STREET

  A plump maid with bold green eyes and a loose, full-lipped mouth led me up two flights of steps and into an elaborately furnished boudoir, where a woman in black sat at a window. She was a thin woman of a little more than thirty, this murdered man's widow, and her face was white and haggard.

  "You are from the Continental Detective Agency?" she asked before I was two steps inside the room.

  "Yes."

  "I want you to find my husband's murderer." Her voice was shrill, and her dark eyes had wild lights in them. "The police have done nothing. Four days, and they have done nothing. They say it was a robber, but they haven't found him. They haven't found anything!"

  "But, Mrs. Gilmore," I began, not exactly tickled to death with this explosion, "you must —"

  "I know! I know!" she broke in. "But they have done nothing, I tell you—nothing. I don't believe they've made the slightest effort. I don't believe they want to find h— him!"

  "Him?" I asked, because she had started to say her. "You think it was a man?"

  She bit her lip and looked away from me, out of the window to where San Francisco Bay, the distance making toys of its boats, was blue under the early afternoon sun.

  "I don't know," she said hesitantly; "it might have—"

  Her face spun toward me—a twitching face—and it seemed impossible that anyone could talk so fast, hurl words out so rapidly one after the other.

  "I'll tell you. You can judge for yourself. Bernard wasn't faithful to me. There was a woman who calls herself Cara Kenbrook. She wasn't the first. But I learned about her last month. We quarrelled. Bernard promised to give her up. Maybe he didn't. But if he did, I wouldn't put it past her—a woman like that would do anything—anything. And down in my heart I really believe she did it!"

  "And you think the police don't want to arrest her?"

  "I didn't mean exactly that. I'm all unstrung, and likely to say anything. Bernard was mixed up in politics, you know; and if the police found, or thought, that politics had anything to do with his death, they might—I don't know just what I mean. I'm a nervous, broken woman, and full of crazy notions." She stretched a thin hand out to me. "Straighten this tangle out for me! Find the person who killed Bernard!"

  I nodded with empty assurance, still not any too pleased with my client.

  "Do you know this Kenbrook woman?" I asked.

  "I've seen her on the street, and that's enough to know what sort of person she is!"

  "Did you tell the police about her?"

  "No-o." She looked out of the window again, and then, as I waited, she added, defensively:

  "The police detectives who came to see me acted as if they thought I might have killed Bernard. I was afraid to tell them that I had cause for jealousy. Maybe I shouldn't have kept quiet about that woman, but I didn't think she had done it until afterward, when the police failed to find the murderer. Then I began to think she had done it; but I couldn't make myself go to the police and tell them that I had withheld information. I knew what they'd think. So I—You can twist it around so it'll look as if I hadn't known about the woman, can't you?"

  "Possibly. Now as I understand it, your husband was shot on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, at about three o'clock Tuesday morning. That right?"

  "Yes."

  "Where was he going?"

  "Coming home, I suppose; but I don't know where he had been. Nobody knows. The police haven't found out, if they have tried. He told me Monday evening that he had a business engagement. He was a building contractor, you know. He went out at about half-past eleven, saying he would probably be gone four or five hours."

  "Wasn't that an unusual hour to be keeping a business engagement?"

  "Not for Bernard. He often had men come to the house at midnight."

  "Can you make any guess at all where he was going that night?"

  She shook her head with emphasis.

  "No. I knew nothing at all about his business affairs, and even the men in his office don't seem to know where he went that night."

  That wasn't unlikely. Most of the B. F. Gilmore Construction Company's work had been on city and state contracts, and it isn't altogether unheard-of for secret conferences to go with that kind of work. Your politician-contractor doesn't always move in the open.

  "How about enemies?" I asked.

  "I don't know anybody that hated him enough to kill him."

  "Where does this Kenbrook woman live, do you know?"

  "Yes—in the Garford Apartments on Bush Street."

  "Nothing you've forgotten to tell me, is there?" I asked, stressing the me a little.

  "No, I've told you everything I know—every single thing."

  Walking over to California Street, I shook down my memory for what I had heard here and there of Bernard Gilmore. I could remember a few things—the opposition papers had been in the habit of exposing him every election year—but none of them got me anywhere. I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-million-dollar business and a pretty place in politics. 'A roughneck with a manicure,' somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy.

  Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable car. Then there had been some talk of a bootlegging syndicate of which he was supposed to be the head...

  I left the car at Kearny Street and walked over to the Hall of Justice. In the detectives' assembly-room I found O'Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail: a squat man of fifty who went in for wide-brimmed hats of the movie-sheriff sort, but whose little blue eyes and bullet-head weren't handicapped by the trick headgear.

  "I want some dope on the Gilmore killing," I told him.

  "So do I," he came back. "But if you'll come along I'll tell you what little I know while I'm eating. I ain't had lunch yet."

  Safe from eavesdroppers in the clatter of a Sutter Street lunchroom, the detective-sergeant leaned over his clam chowder and told me what he knew about the murder, which wasn't much.

  "One of the boys, Kelly, was walking his beat early Tuesday morning, coming down the Jones Street hill from California Street to Pine. It was about three o'clock—no fog or nothing —a clear night. Kelly's within maybe twenty feet of Pine Street when he hears a shot. He whisks around the corner, and there's a man dying on the north sidewalk of Pine Street, halfway between Jones and Leavenworth. Nobody else is in sight. Kelly runs up to the man and finds it's Gilmore. Gilmore dies before he can say a word. The doctors say he was knocked down and then shot; because there's a bruise on his forehead, and the bullet slanted upward in his chest. See what I mean? He was lying on his back when the bullet hit him, with his feet pointing toward the gun it came from. It was a thirty-eight."

  "Any money on him?"

  O'Gar fed himself two spoons of chowder and nodded.

  "Six hundred smacks, a coupla diamonds, and a watch. Nothing touched."

  "What was he doing on Pine Stree
t at that time in the morning?"

  "Damned if I know, brother. Chances are he was going home, but we can't find out where he'd been. Don't even know what direction he was walking in when he was knocked over. He was lying across the sidewalk with his feet to the curb; but that don't mean nothing—he could of turned around three or four times after he was hit."

  "All apartment buildings in that block, aren't there?"

  "Uh-huh. There's an alley or two running off from the south side; but Kelly says he could see the mouths of both alleys when the shot was fired—before he turned the corner—and nobody got away through them."

  "Reckon somebody who lives in that block did the shooting?" I asked.

  O'Gar tilted his bowl, scooped up the last drops of the chowder, put them in his mouth, and grunted.

  "Maybe. But we got nothing to show that Gilmore knew anybody in that block."

  "Many people gather around afterward?"

  "A few. There's always people on the street to come running if anything happens. But Kelly says there wasn't anybody that looked wrong—just the ordinary night crowd. The boys gave the neighbourhood a combing, but didn't turn up anything."

  "Any cars around?"

  "Kelly says there wasn't, that he didn't see any, and couldn't of missed seeing it if there'd been one."

  "What do you think?" I asked.

  He got to his feet, glaring at me.

  "I don't think," he said disagreeably; "I'm a police detective."

  I knew by that that somebody had been panning him for not finding the murderer.

  "I have a line on a woman," I told him. "Want to come along and talk to her with me?"

  "I want to," he growled, "but I can't. I got to be in court this afternoon."

  In the vestibule of the Garford Apartments, I pressed the button tagged Miss Cara Kenbrook several times before the door clicked open. Then I mounted a flight of stairs and walked down a hall to her door. It was opened presently by a tall girl of twenty-three or—four in a black and white crepe dress.

  "Miss Cara Kenbrook?"

  "Yes."

  I gave her a card—one of those that tell the truth about me.