Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “I’m killed!” said Casey’s voice. “There’s nothing holding me, but I can’t move!”

  The other man didn’t answer, and I moved about trying to find him. When I stumbled on him he was breathing, and I lugged him and Casey to the sheriff’s side, so that the two of us could feel them over, but you couldn’t make sure in the dark.

  “How did it happen?” I asked the sheriff.

  “Hell. I caught sight of it too late. You remember we thought he’d changed a tire? All he’d done was fasten thick wire at an angle across the track, just high enough to ditch us; Smart, I’ll say! Suppose you climb up and unhitch the wire before someone else comes along and gets hurt.”

  I climbed up. The wire was of the same thick gage that had been used to fasten the door-handles in the Pullman, and was wound three times around a tree-trunk, led across the road, and then made fast to a rock. If we had hit it straight we might have jumped or broken it, but the angle was such that you couldn’t have hit it straight. Even going at slow speed it would have turned us outward over the side of the cliff, and it was nothing but the speed we were using that landed us among the trees instead of on the rocks this side of them. I let the wire down the cliff-side for a holdfast, and clambered down to hoist those three men one at a time to the road. The sheriff came easiest; his ankle was very badly sprained, but he could help with two hands and the other foot. The other two had to be carried, and it took, I dare say, half-an-hour. Casey said he was in no pain, but felt numb all over, and the other fellow was obviously suffering from concussion.

  “D’you suppose you’d be all right if I leave the three of you here?” I asked the sheriff.

  “Sure. Going back for help? There’ll be someone along in the early morning; we’ll get picked up all right. Still, if you’d rather—”

  “Will you be all right?” I asked him.

  “Sure. What’s eating you?”

  “Then I’ll go on. Give me directions how to reach that damned house. I’ll go get him, or have a durned good try.”

  “Feller, you were right just now,” the sheriff answered. “You and I would agree on most things. I guess I’ll swear you in as deputy. Hold up your right hand; so, we’ll call you sworn. Casey, you’re witness. Remember: If you get him the California side of the line you’ve no jurisdiction. In that case plug him and do the arguing about it afterwards. If you catch him this side, plug him, and there won’t be no argument. Have you got a good gun? Take mine.”

  “This one’s an old friend.”

  “Now remember. He may go slow now, figuring on having ditched us good. I guess he saw our lights as we went over. I hate to lose that good car. Listen: Five miles up the road on the right-hand side there’s a shack belonging to a man named Norcross. If his phone’s working, call up every police station within a radius of thirty miles, and get a crowd started on the way to meet you at your man’s house. Maybe old Norcross’ll lend you a rig; but he’s moody; you’ll be taking a chance if you borrow his rig without asking.”

  “I’ll take another chance or two,” I said.

  “Good boy. Now there’s this: Bhopal Gosh may have his plans all laid for crossing Lake Tahoe by boat.”

  “How big’s the lake?” I asked.

  “Thirty miles by sixteen, and more than a mile deep where they’ve found bottom — coldest water anywhere — drowns you quick, and never gives up its dead. If he’s got a boat, you try to get a car — take his maybe — and get around the lake to head him off. You’ll be able to see his boat all the way across in this moonlight. Stop wherever there’s a phone and keep the gangs wised up. Whatever you do don’t follow him alone across the water. He’ll spill you, and you won’t stand a chance. Besides, a bit of a wind across that lake’ll upset any but a stout craft, and the best are none too safe.”

  “How’ll I find his house?”

  “Can’t mistake it. Follow this road about nine miles as straight as she’ll take you. The side-tracks to the right all go to milliondollar huts where the Californians lead the simple life in Summertime. You keep straight on. His house is on the left, facing the lake. There’s a garage in line with it big enough to hold four cars, and the house is a brown shingle affair with a big roof pitched steep like a hillside. It stands by a clump of sugar-pines, and whether he’s got servants, or any one to help him put up a fight I can’t say. Get to a phone, like I told you, and then watch the place and wait for help to reach you. Good luck! It’s usually luckiest to shoot first; remember that!”

  “Ye owld amachoor daytective! I’ll bet ye the drinks ye’ll never get him!” murmured Casey by way of farewell.

  * * * * *

  I VERY nearly overtook my man at the end of about two miles, for he really did have tire trouble and a hard job changing shoes. I came on the discarded shoe with a loaded revolver near it that he had let fall in the dust when he took his coat off, and saw his tail-light disappearing around a turn not three hundred yards ahead of me. He was not going fast. Either his engine was badly overheated, or else he was sure of having killed us, and overconfident. But no matter how fast you walk, a car going at only fifteen or twenty miles an hour is going to leave you pretty nearly standing still, and I didn’t catch sight of his tail-light again. In ordinary circumstances I would have reveled in that walk, instead of cursing every bend in the road that only showed another bend as soon as you rounded it — and that again another bend beyond. Some six or seven thousand feet above sea-level, the air was perfect and the scenery as wild as any man could wish. I even saw a bear lolloping across the road in front of me, and hove a rock at him out of sheer envy, because he might enjoy the solitude, whereas I must hurry on.

  I made what I took to be Norcross’s shack well within the hour, but there was nobody home. I made noise enough to wake anyone a mile away, and tried to break the door to get to the phone, but failed. However, there was a gray horse standing in the shed, and a spider-wheel rig that would just about hold together as long as the horse refrained from coughing. So I wrote a note on a leaf from my note-book, saying that the rig had been taken by a deputy sheriff and would be returned next morning, and drove away at a slow trot — the best that nag could offer. He had only three gaits anyhow; the second was a walk, and the third was to sit down on his rump between the shafts and think a while. So I let him trot, five miles an hour, or maybe six.

  And try how I would I could find no telephone. All the places except one that I tried were unoccupied. In that place there was a Chinaman, who grinned and said, “No can do.” He proved it, too, by letting me try the phone; it was as “dead” as Gulad the Abyssinian. So I drove, and it began to feel lonely under those huge trees, with nothing to disturb the silence except an occasional windmoan and the clop-clop-clop of that disreputable horse.

  As far as my experience goes it’s untrue that a fellow reviews his whole career in a moment of time when death looks him straight in the face. But this I have found true — that when you’re going forward to what you expect will be a crisis, all the circumstances that led up to it review themselves whether you will or not, until you are sick at heart from recognizing half-a-million mistakes you made and two or three opportunities you overlooked.

  After I left the Norcross shack I dare say I thought of thirty better ways to bring Bhopal Gosh to account.

  Nevertheless, strangely enough, and unexpectedly enough, I didn’t experience the slightest fear, until the old horse trotted around one last turn between sepulchral pines and cedars; and on my left hand, in a clearing, loomed the house that must be that of Bhopal Gosh, if the sheriff’s description of it was correct. Then fear struck me like a cold breath. There were no lights visible. There seemed to be nobody about. But I could hear an engine purring in the darkness by the front door, and the horse threw up his head and neighed.

  CHAPTER XIII. “Lake Tahoe don’t give up her dead.”

  IT occurred to me to go at once and put that car out of commission. I might possibly need it for pursuit, but setting off one possible
contingency against another it seemed wisest to dish the car. So I tied my borrowed Rosinante to a tree, walked up the drive, and tore out the wires leading through the dashboard to the switch. That was decidedly enough to delay Mr. Bhopal Gosh if he had not gone already.

  However, as it turned out I made a mistake. I could have caught him handily by leaving that car purring away peacefully with its lights full on. But the minute I tore out that handful of wires the circular glow of white light cast by the lamps on the front of the house vanished simultaneously.

  It didn’t occur to me until then that Bhopal Gosh would not have left the house in darkness, with all that illumination on the outer wall, unless there was something to be gained by it. It’s not easy to puzzle out the other fellow’s motives at a time when the least false move is likely to lose you the game. A crook thinks crookedly. If you’ve spent your waking moments for thirty or forty years endeavoring to think straight you’re out of harmony with a villain’s reasoning.

  All that I accomplished by extinguishing the light was to give Bhopal Gosh notice that someone was close on his trail. That glare on the house wall had been visible from the lake shore, a quarter of a mile away, and I now saw somebody come carrying a lantern from the lake toward the house. He was coming in a hurry — didn’t notice that the lights had gone out until he nearly reached the road, still well out of pistol range, perhaps two hundred yards from where I waited. Then he saw my gray horse, for the moon had dispersed the shadow in which I left him standing.

  I tried to figure out what I would do if the positions were reversed, but gave it up. I didn’t know why he was returning to the house. I remembered one of Terence Casey’s sayings that “crooks, me boy, always overlook something, for that’s the natur’ of a crook. Ye catch ’em because they blow their noses on a dead man’s handkerchief, or some such idiotic stunt as that.”

  That didn’t help much. Bhopal Gosh wasn’t blowing his nose. In fact, I couldn’t see him, I could only see the lantern. I watched the lantern steadily for several minutes, until it dawned on me that it was hanging from a twig and its owner had gone elsewhere. The odds were now that he was hunting me. As he knew the ground and I didn’t those odds were a hundred to one in his favor. I elected to stay where I was for the moment, between the car and the front door, listening for a footfall that would give me a hint of his whereabouts. I heard two sounds — first, the pop from the exhaust of a motor-boat engine down by the lake shore. But he hadn’t had time to reach the boat. I decided that the boat was moored, with its engine running, ready to get under way the moment its owner should come.

  The next sound came from the direction of my rig. I heard the shafts fall to the ground — a smart slap as somebody hit the horse — and then the click of hooves as the beast started off homeward at an easy trot. It was like a game of Freeze-out — funny, if I’d been in a mood to laugh. I had put out of action a car that he possibly didn’t want, and had demobilized myself as far as possible pursuit went; he had discovered that not more than two men were on his trail; for that rig would have broken down under the weight of more than two. And he had cut off my retreat.

  What puzzled me most was, why he didn’t make straight for the motor-boat. I heard his heavy footsteps over to my right behind a row of trees, and he was walking as if he weighed a ton, breaking twigs and crashing through the undergrowth like an elephant at feeding-time. I elected not to walk into that trap. Time was all in my favor.

  If I had been sure that he hadn’t another car waiting at the rear of the house I would have headed for the boat at once and put that out of commission; but it was possible he was calculating on my doing just that, and did have a car in reserve; so I waited, not so much reasoning really as acting from intuition and habit developed in hunting days. It was that refusal to come out in the open and be seen that forced his hand. He had to try to unmask my batteries somehow, and took a rather silly way of doing it.

  He began to scream like a beast in agony, pausing to wait for a reply and then screaming louder. As that had no result he yelled in English that he was caught by the leg in a bear-trap. If it was true I was glad to hear it; he might stay in the trap. I was certainly not going to be such a fool as to go and investigate; and what was more, he had done me the favor of demonstrating that he was all alone, for obviously any one within hail would have gone to his assistance; but nobody did go. He left off yelling after a few minutes, as a man at all prone to yelling would hardly do with his leg caught in the iron jaws of a bear-trap. Those things hurt.

  Continuing to puzzle away at the problem I decided that he had gone down to the motor-boat to get the engine started, and had then come back to the house for his treasure. Perhaps there had been some doubt in his mind whether he could start the engine, and he had preferred to make sure before committing himself to that means of escape. If those heavy gold plates were in the house yet it was hardly likely that both he and they would escape me before morning.

  But he had grown suspiciously quiet again, and I listened intently, wishing that contact with cities and railroads hadn’t dulled my hunting ear. I could hear the motor-boat popping away steadily, but not one sound from Bhopal Gosh. The lantern, swaying gently on its twig, still burned brightly where he had left it.

  His next move took me utterly by surprise. The porch light was switched on suddenly from inside the house, and I stood exposed between the door and the car at point-blank pistol range. I ducked around behind the car, astonished that I wasn’t fired at; and, from that position, peering under the top, I caught sight of his face looking through a window to the right of the front door. I pulled the wrong pistol from my pocket — his that I had picked up in the road beside the abandoned tire — took a snap shot at him, and missed. But he didn’t shoot back. It dawned on me that I had his only firearm! True to Terence Casey’s dictum, the arch-crook had overlooked one simple, necessary point!

  That settled it. I smashed in the window with the pistol-butt, and scrambled in, cutting my hand, but as luck would have it not badly enough to make it useless. The door at the end of that room slammed in my face, and I heard the key turn on the outside, but I took a heavy chair and swung it ax-fashion, breaking the door down in less than a minute. That let me through into the hall. He had switched the light off, and was doing something in a devil of a hurry, for I could hear his heavy breathing not far off. Then I caught the metallic hum of a safe opening, and the rattle of the handle of the inner, sheet-iron door as he fumbled with it in the dark. By the sound I judged he was at the end of the hall, so I fired the same pistol I had used before to try and catch sight of him by the flash — or hit him if I happened to be lucky. What I did see was the wall-button that controlled the electric current. I heard another door slam, and by the time I had switched the light on Bhopal Gosh was gone; but he had not removed the plunder, although he did get away with the key to the inner door of the safe.

  The safe stood under the main stairway, and was an inexpensive affair with a combination lock on the outer door, which he had left unfastened in his hurry. I dare say I could have forced that inner door without much trouble if given time, but it seemed wiser in the circumstances to leave the treasure in there and return when I had reckoned with the man. He wasn’t likely to be doing nothing while I fooled with the safe.

  So I went back for another chair and smashed the door on the right-hand side of the safe that he had disappeared through. It was a good, heavy office chair with an iron revolving screw in it and iron-braced legs, so the door went down in short order; but at that I wasn’t in time. There was a cellar below-stairs piled high with old, dry cord-wood, and as the door crashed outward a stinging cloud of white smoke met me with the crackling of blazing bark and splinters.

  I charged through, with the idea of catching him before he could take advantage of the smoke to give me the slip altogether. I was holding his pistol in my right hand, having shoved it in my hip pocket while I used the chair for a battering-ram, making two pistols in one pocket, and as I
rushed through I grabbed the first one that my fingers closed on. Bhopal Gosh was waiting for me just inside the door, and seized me by both arms from behind.

  It needed no expert in intuition to guess what his game was then. He meant to hurl me down into the blaze below, and return for the contents of the safe. And it was a new experience to discover myself almost helpless in the arms of a stronger man. All up and down the world I have only met three amateurs who could beat me with their fists or on the mat, and they had to work for their laurels. But this fellow twisted the revolver out of my right hand with the ease of a gorilla, and flung it down the cellar stairs into the galloping holocaust below us.

  “Yah-ah-ah!” he laughed.

  But it was an expensive little joke, for as he let go my right hand to hurl the weapon away I swung sharp round to face him and crashed my fist into his mouth, cutting it a second time on his magnificent teeth, but giving him far the worst of the exchange. However, he had me by the wrist again before I could reach for my own revolver, and luckily — so swift he was — before he even guessed that that was my intention!

  The heat was already terrific. Once or twice when a draft caught them the flames licked over the top of the cellar stairs, and he started to force me backward toward that hell, grinning in my face malevolently as he stepped forward like a great fat dancingmaster — only it was muscle that made him bulk so big. It was the first time I ever felt really helpless in the grasp of a stronger man, and after the first strain that warned me of his enormous power I wasted no more energy on trying that issue with him. I relaxed my muscles suddenly. By the light that roared behind me I could see the triumphant malice in his face; but he was in no hurry; he was enjoying the foretaste of victory — grinning like a great ape. You could see bow he had been so easily mistaken for Italian by men who were not suspicious of an alias, yet his face grew more Mongolian as you examined it. And he took care that I should examine it, thrusting it close to mine in order to peer into my eyes.