Nora came instantly to open the door. Her round freckled face was pale and tear stricken, swollen for need of sleep. He shuffled quickly past her, anxious to get off the street before that prowl car came back, yet trying not to show his terror. He looked hopefully about the neat little living room, and failed to see anything of Sam.
"Why, Will!" A tired relief lighted her blue-circled eyes. "I'm so glad you came—it's been such a dreadful night!" She looked at his own haggard desperation, and gave him a wan little smile of sympathy. "You look worn out yourself, Will. Come on to the kitchen, and I'll pour you a cup of coffee."
"Thank you, Nora." he nodded gratefully, aware that his teeth were chattering with cold. He wanted that warming coffee urgently, but a closer necessity made him pause. "Is Sam here?" he asked breathlessly. "I've got to talk to Sam."
Her swollen eyes turned away.
"Sam isn't here."
"I saw that Foundation car," he said. "I thought Sam would be here."
Her colorless lips tightened stubbornly.
"Sorry—I didn't mean to pry." His shivering hands opened in a gesture of appeal. "I just hoped Sam would be here—because I'm in trouble too, and I think we could help each other. Please—may I have that coffee?"
She nodded silently, and he followed her back through the small house. The shades were down, the lights still burning. He shivered to something more than the aching cold in him as they passed the door of Sam's study, where the deadly thing in that wooden box had almost trapped him once.
His human nostrils couldn't smell that lethal sweetness, however. He knew the box was gone, and he could see that Nora's stiff mistrust was melting. Tiptoeing as they passed the nursery door, she touched her quivering lips—she was almost sobbing.
"Little Pat's asleep," she whispered. "I thought she'd surely wake when the police were here—they stayed for hours, trying to make me say where Sam went." She must have seen his apprehensive start. "Don't you worry, Will," she added softly. "I didn't tell them anything about you phoning me to warn Sam."
"Thanks, Nora." He shrugged wearily in the loose red robe. "Though I don't suppose it matters—the police are hunting me for something more than that."
She didn't ask any questions. She just nodded for him to sit at the white-enameled kitchen table and poured strong hot coffee from the percolator on the stove and brought cream and sugar for him.
"Thank you, Nora," he whispered huskily. He gulped the fragrant, scalding bittersweetness, his eyes blurred with tears of gratitude and pain. His solitary desperation thawed, and a sudden impulse made him blurt the thing he hadn't meant to say: "Rowena Mondrick's dead!"
Her swollen eyes looked at him, dark with shock.
"She escaped from Glennhaven." A numb puzzlement dulled his voice. "She was found dead on Deer Creek bridge. The police think I ran her down. But I didn't." His quavering voice went on too high. "I know I didn't!"
She sat down heavily across the little white table. Her dark weary eyes dwelt upon his wild face for a long time. She nodded at last, with a faint, tear-blotted smile.
"You sound just like Sam did," she whispered. "He was so frightened, and he couldn't understand, and he didn't know what to do." Her dark-shadowed eves searched his own drawn face again. "Will, I think there's something very dreadful behind all this. I think you're the innocent victim of it, as much as Sam is. Do you—do you really believe you can help him?"
"I think we can help each other, Nora."
Barbee tried to stir his coffee again, and had to lay down the spoon and fold his hands to stop their shuddering when he heard a siren wailing. Nora frowned at that noise; she went to listen at the nursery door, and silently poured more coffee for him. That droning scream receded at last, down some other street, and he dared to pick up his spoon.
"I'm going to tell you about Sam." She tried to swallow, as if agony choked her. "Because he does need help—so terribly!"
"I'll do all I can," Barbee whispered huskily. "Where is he?"
"I don't know—really." She shook her blonde, disheveled head, her reddened eyes dull with a hopeless bewilderment. "He didn't trust me to know—that's the dreadful thing." She gulped again, and whispered: "I'm afraid I'll never see him again."
"Can you tell me what happened?"
Her plump shoulders quivered and then stiffened angrily, as if in vain defiance of her sobs.
"I called him right back," she said. "Right after I talked to you. I told him you said the police would be looking for him to explain how Nick was killed." She watched Barbee with a brooding puzzlement. "His voice sounded funny, Will, when I told him that. He wanted to know how you knew anything about it." Her tight voice sharpened uneasily. "How did you, Will?"
Barbee couldn't meet her tortured eyes.
"Just my usual newspaper connections." He shifted uncomfortably, repeating that feeble lie. "I've got to protect my sources." He tried to lift his cup, and brown coffee splashed in his saucer. Desperately he muttered: "What else did Sam say?"
Nora lifted the corner of her white apron to daub at her wet eyes.
"He said he had to go away—and he couldn't tell me where. I begged him to come home, but he said he hadn't time. I asked why he couldn't just explain to the police. He said they wouldn't believe him. He said his enemies had framed him too cunningly." A puzzled dread hushed her sobbing voice. "Who are Sam's enemies, Will?"
Barbee shook his head blankly.
"It's a frightful plot, Will!" A stricken, uncomprehending terror was in her whisper. "The police showed me some of the evidence they've found— trying to make me talk. They told me what they think. I—I just won't believe it!"
Barbee rasped hoarsely, "What evidence?"
"There's a note," she murmured faintly. "It's written on a piece of yellow paper in Nick's handwriting —or a good imitation. It tells how they quarreled on the way back from Asia over the treasure they brought in that green wooden box. Sam wanted it for himself, and tried to make Nick help him get it—that's what the note says, Will."
Her head shook in frantic protest.
"It says Sam gave Dr. Mondrick an overdose of his heart medicine, to kill him at the airport—just to keep him from putting that treasure in the Foundation museum. It says Sam tinkered with the brakes and steering gear of our car so that Rex Chittum would be killed on Sardis Hill—it does seem funny Sam would have him borrow our old car, when the Foundation has better ones." Her dry, dull voice was horror-haunted. "And finally it says that Nick was afraid Sam was going to kill him, to keep the secret of the other killings and get all the treasure for himself."
Nora gulped, and her voice turned high.
"The police think he did. They believe Nick really wrote that note. They say Sam and Nick were alone in the room. They found a broken chair and a trail of blood to the window. They think Sam killed him and threw him out—but you know Nick used to walk in his sleep." Her voice was flat with horror, unconvinced. "You surely remember that?"
Barbee nodded, and saw her desperate hope.
"I remember," he said hoarsely. "And I don't think Nick Spivak wrote that note."
The sleek she-wolf must have written it, he thought, when she sprang upon Nick's desk and took his pencil in her paws while that great armored snake was dragging Nick's body to the window. But that was madness—he dared not speak of that.
"Didn't Sam come here at all?" he asked faintly.
She shook her head dazedly, and then she must have caught the meaning of his nod toward the sedan parked in front of the house.
"Oh—that car!" She caught her breath. "Sam had a man bring that from the Foundation garage yesterday for me to use in place of ours—the one Rex was killed in." Her brooding eyes clung to Barbee's face. "Sam said on the phone he thought the enemy wouldn't know our car, but somehow they did."
Barbee dropped his eyes and stirred his coffee.
"Do you know what Sam did?"
"Only that he went away." She jabbed angrily at her tears again. "I don't kno
w where. He said something about the deaths of Dr. Mondrick and Rex and Nick leaving him with a terribly important job to do alone. He wouldn't say what. I told him to take this car, but he said he hadn't time to come home. He said he would take a station wagon that belongs to the Foundation. He wouldn't tell me where."
She blew her nose hard on a paper napkin."
"Will," she whispered huskily, "what can we do to help him?"
"We've got to find him first." Barbee lifted his quivering cup, trying to think. "But—I think I can," he whispered slowly. "I think I can find him—because he knows every officer in four states will be looking for that station wagon by noon. I think I know where Sam would go."
She leaned across the little white table, desperately.
"Where, Will?" she sobbed hoarsely. "Where is he?"
"Just a hunch." Barbee shrugged uncomfortably in the red hospital robe. "Maybe I'm wrong—I don't think so. If I'm right, it's still better if you don't know.
I imagine the police will soon be here again—looking for me as well as Sam."
Her white hands flew to her throat.
"Police!" she gasped. "You wouldn't—lead them?"
"Of course not, Nora." He tried to smile at her concern. "I'll take precautions—my danger is as great as Sam's. Now, suppose you gather up some things he'll need. Rough clothing, boots, sleeping bag, matches, frying pan, a few groceries, a light rifle— maybe you have the light personal equipment he brought back from the expedition?"
She nodded, rising eagerly.
"I'll need that car," he added, "to get to where he is."
"Take it," she said. "Take anything you need—and let me write a note for Sam."
"Okay—but step on it," he told her. "The cops are after me too, remember." He stood up, facing her gravely. "Nora, I've had just the vaguest glimpse of what's behind this, but I think it's worse than it looks—and it looks pretty ugly. We've got to help Sam, for a lot more than just his own sake. He's the last hope—against something worse than most men ever fear."
She nodded slowly, clutching the edges of the little table.
"I know that, Will." Her dark-circled eyes were very wide, and she shuddered. "Sam wouldn't ever tell me—not even after the dreadful night when he had the box here and something killed Pat's little dog. I could see that made him sick, and I've felt something wrong ever since that plane landed with them." Her dry voice dropped. "Something waiting just out of sight, silent and grinning and dreadful, too hideous to have a name."
But it did, Barbee thought. It was named the Child of Night.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Not All Human
Listening breathlessly for the whine of the prowl cars, Barbee went in the bathroom to change the felt slippers and the hospital robe for walking shoes and khakis of Sam's, making the shoes fit with two pairs of heavy socks. Nora had gathered blankets and clothing and food and equipment. He made a pack as heavy as he could stagger under, while she wrote her note to Sam.
"Don't tell the cops you've seen me," he warned her harshly. "Don't tell them anything—for all we know, they may be working with these enemies of Sam's."
"I won't." She swallowed hard. "Help him, Will!"
He looked up and down the quiet street again and tossed his pack into the back seat of the Foundation sedan. It started easily. He waved at Nora's white face in the doorway, grinning with a hope he didn't feel, and drove down Pine Street at a careful eighteen miles an hour.
Once a siren howled somewhere behind him, but he drove on quietly and managed at last to breathe again. He turned south on the first through street to Center, and west on Center toward the state highway. Still he kept to an inconspicuous legal speed, and he heard no other siren. Ten miles west, he turned north on a rutted dirt road toward the hills.
Driving, he had time to try to analyze the hunch that he could find Sam Quain. Quain was an outdoor man who had roughed it on four continents. Expecting the police to broadcast a warning for him, he would want to get off the roads. His boyhood had been spent on a ranch in these hills, and his instinct would be to seek them.
Quain would be burdened, no doubt, with the box from Asia—surely he wouldn't abandon that. It was heavy—whether or not it was actually lined with silver. Barbee recalled the way Rex Chittum and Nick Spivak had stooped to its weight when they carried it off the chartered plane. Unaided, Sam couldn't carry it far. He would choose some secluded refuge that he could approach by car.
Barbee knew the spot!
Perhaps there were flaws in the logic of his explanation. That didn't matter. The hunch itself had been a sudden, certain intuition. The bungling effort at analysis must have left out much of his unconscious reasoning—if hunches were that. But he knew where Sam would be.
A vivid picture of the place had flashed across his mind while he sat in Nora's kitchen. On a Christmas vacation, one mild winter when the snows were light, he had been riding with Sam and Rex up a little-used road that twisted through the hills to where an abandoned sawmill had gone to rust, when Sam reined in his pony to point out a smoky streak on the bare, iron-reddened cliff above Laurel Canyon. That dark streak, Sam said, marked an Indian cave.
Barbee knew that cave would be the place. Far from any used roads, it was yet accessible to such a driver as Sam. There was timber enough to hide the station wagon, even from search by air. There was firewood, shelter enough, water in Laurel Creek. He would be able to carry that precious box up to the cave, and it was still a natural fortress as it had been a thousand years ago. Such were the reasons Barbee found, but the conclusion had gone before. Sam had to be there.
Twice he parked for an hour where the black sedan would be concealed and climbed to where he could watch the lonely track behind. He saw no hint of any pursuit—but the fresh tire-pattern in the weedy ruts assured him that Sam Quain must really be ahead.
Noon had passed before he reached Bear Canyon. The morning had turned warm, but heavy clouds had hidden the sun again and a rising south wind promised rain. He drove harder, fearful of a downpour that would turn these neglected ruts into a river.
Beneath the tall red cliffs above Laurel Canyon, the station wagon had been so deftly hidden, screened with weeds where the trail twisted between a granite boulder and an overhanging tree, that he almost rammed it before he saw it. He left the sedan hidden beside it, and started the climb with his pack.
Ascending Laurel Canyon, he walked boldly in the open. He knew Sam Quain—and knew that any attempt to stalk him now would be suicidal. Dull human senses brought him no clues, but an intuition as keen as the senses of the gray wolf he had been told him that Sam Quain held his life suspended.
"Sam!" Apprehension quivered in his hail. "It's Barbee—with supplies."
He gasped with alarm and quick relief when the fugitive stepped out of a red-splashed clump of scrub oak, unexpectedly near. Quain's bronzed and haggard head was bare, his shirt muddy and torn. His raw-boned body seemed to droop with a dead exhaustion, but the level revolver in his big hand looked as deadly as his hard voice sounded.
"Barbee—what the devil are you doing here?"
"I just brought some things you need." Barbee turned hastily to show the pack, holding up his hands. "You don't have to worry—I hid the car, and my trail is as safe as yours. Nora sent a note."
Quain's drawn, red-stubbled face failed to soften.
"I ought to kill you, Barbee." His voice was thick and hard and strange. "I should have killed you long ago—or Dr. Mondrick should. But I guess you aren't all bad—your warning to Nora saved me from the police last night, and I do need that pack."
Barbee tramped on, with both hands lifted, until the gun beckoned him to stop.
"Sam—can you trust me now?" Pleading quivered in his voice. "I want to help—if you'll only tell me what this is all about. Yesterday I went to Glennhaven. I thought I was losing my mind. Maybe I am—but I think there's something more."
Quain's red-rimmed eyes narrowed watchfully.
"
There's more," his hard voice grated. "Plenty more."
Darkening clouds had lowered about the peaks, and now the strong south wind that blew up Laurel Canyon seemed suddenly cool and damp. Thunder rumbled dully against the cliffs above, and the first huge raindrops crashed against the red hanging oak leaves and splashed their faces, cold as ice.
"Take the pack," Barbee urged. "Read Nora's note—and please let me help."
At last, reluctantly, Sam Quain gestured with the gun.
"Come on out of the rain," he muttered harshly. "I don't know how much of this black deviltry you've done—consciously or not. I don't know how far to trust you. But I suppose it can't make things much worse to tell you what I know."
The cave itself was invisible from below, although that thin stain of ancient smoke betrayed it. Sam Quain pointed the way with his gun, and waited for Barbee to stumble ahead with the pack. They climbed half-obliterated steps in a water-cut chimney, where one armed man might hold off a hundred.
A long horizontal fissure above that narrow stair, the cave had been gouged by the chisel of time between two strata of hard sandstone. The roof was black with smoke of ancient fires. Hidden in the deepest corner, where the roof sloped down to the floor, Barbee saw the battered wooden box from Asia. He dropped the pack, hopefully eyeing that crude coffer.
"Not yet," Quain rapped harshly. "I've got to eat."
As soon as he had got his breath back from the climb, Barbee unrolled the pack. He made coffee on a tiny primus stove, fried bacon, and opened a can of beans. Using a flat stone for a table, Quain ate and drank avidly. Stationed warily between Barbee and the box, he kept the gun near his hand. His narrowed, bloodshot eyes roved restlessly between Barbee and a bend of the Laurel Canyon trail that lay visible beneath the rock chimney.
Barbee waited impatiently while he ate, uneasily aware of the thickening storm. The dark ceiling of ragged clouds crept lower about the peaks. Thunder crashed above and boomed and rumbled in the gorge below. Gusts of wind blew icy rain into the cave. Heavy rain, he knew, would flood the trails and trap them here. Quain cleaned his tin plate at last, and Barbee prompted anxiously: "Okay, Sam—tell me."
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