Part 2 (1/2)

May we come in and fix it?”

Gentle-looking old Tex Haven started to open the door.

His daughter grabbed his arm, breathed, ”No!”

To the man on the other side of the door, the girl said, ”Just a minute, until I get into a robe. I'm taking a bath.”

Tex Haven knocked the fire out of his corncob, poured the smoldering tobacco into a tray, put the pipe in his pocket.

”'Twould have fooled me,” he said in a voice so low that it was hardly audible.

Rhoda Haven said, ”I may be wrong. But I think trouble of this kind only originates in the mechanical ringer at the switchboard. I doubt if it would be our instrument.”

Each day since coming to the Tower Apartments, one of their first morning acts had been to carefully pack all their belongings in two handbags.

Tex and Rhoda Haven moved swiftly, got the two bags, whipped to a window and went down a fire escape. From the bottom of the fire escape, they dropped into a garden where the shrubbery was thick and where pigeons fluttered and cooed.

Three men stood up in the bushes. They held guns.

One gun-holder said, ”We figured the phone gag might not work, in which case you'd maybe be going this way.”

Tex Haven eyed them mildly.

”You-uns downright serious about this?” he asked.

”What do you think?” one said. ”Horst sent us. We want that piece of shark skin.”

Tex Haven said, ”Waal, in such case-”

QUITE a number of people had seen old Tex Haven go into a gun fight at one time or another, and not many of them had ever been able to explain where he got his guns. There was apparently some kind of magic about it. One minute the mild-looking old codger's hands would be empty-next they were full of spouting iron.

Tex Haven fired once with his right hand and once with his left. One man barked and turned around from the force of a bullet in his shoulder. A second man stood for a moment very stiff and dead, hit between the eyes, before he fell.

Rhoda Haven doubled down, scooped a handful of soft dirt, sent it toward the face of the third man. He snarled, tried to turn his head from the flying dirt and shoot the girl at the same time. His shot echoes gobbled into the echoes of Tex Haven's shots. The bullet missed the girl.

Tex Haven flicked his guns at the man.

A fourth man came into the garden fifty yards away. It was Horst. He lifted a long-barreled revolver deliberately.

Tex Haven saw Horst aiming and suddenly flattened. The man Haven had been about to shoot ran away. Tex Haven let him go; Haven seemed to have more respect for Horst's marksmans.h.i.+p than desire for the life of the running man.

More men came into the garden. The place began to convulse with ripping shot crashes.

Tex and Rhoda Haven crawled slowly and carefully. Old Tex kept his gun ready. Neither seemed particular excited, and each dragged one of the suitcases. They got behind a fountain which was spouting three streams of water into a concrete bowl that overflowed into a fake brook, that trickled across the garden and eventually vanished into a sewer through a grille. Tex and Rhoda Haven got into the brook, were very wet by the time they reached the grille.

Horst and his men had lost track of them. When the Havens came up, they had the advantage of surprise. Horst had climbed on a garden bench, was staring. He had nerve, at least. But he flung himself off the bench when old Tex Haven leaped up and fired.

Shot sound again slammed through the garden. Bullets knocked red dust off bricks, broke two windows, frightened the pigeons anew.

Tex and Rhoda Haven dived into a narrow pa.s.sage that led to the back street. They ran down the street.

Inside the apartment house, residents were very quiet, although occasionally one stole a furtive look from a window. A woman had been screaming, but had stopped. The snarling sirens of police cars were already approaching.

The Havens got into a subway and took a southbound train.

THERE was no trace of excitement in the manner of Tex Haven or his daughter. Sitting beside her suitcase, the girl idly contemplated the allurements of a tooth paste as set forth by a car poster, and old Tex Haven even purchased a tabloid newspaper from a newsboy who was working the subway train, and calmly scanned it.

Once Tex Haven said in a low voice, ”n.o.body 'cept Jep Dee knowed we was livin' at them Tower Apartments.”

”Jep never told Horst,” Rhoda Haven said quickly.

”Betcher life he didn't. Horst likely learned from that letter. He 'peared to know a piece of shark skin was in it.”

They changed subway trains three times, s.h.i.+fted to taxicabs and used four different cabs.

The hotel to which they went eventually was small and respectable, had a proprietor notable for the size of his stomach and the proportions of his black mustache, who nearly fell over when he saw his guests, then exploded a delighted, ”Tex Haven, you old bobcat in a rabbit skin!”

”Professor Smith and daughter be the names,” Tex Haven said mildly.

”Oh, ho! So you're charming snakes again?”

”Bein' charmed, more like.”The Havens were shown to a suite of two small rooms, which were on the upper floor so the windows could not be shot into conveniently, and which had a handy fire escape.

Tex Haven called his daughter's attention to an item in the tabloid newspaper which he had bought in the subway.

”Be a mite clearer, you read this,” he said.

Date-lined Key West, Florida, the newspaper item told of the mysterious man named Jep Dee, who had been found, a torture victim, on an uninhabited coral island.

”Poor Jep,” Rhoda Haven said in a low voice.

”Looks as if,” Tex Haven said, ”they ketched Jep Dee.”

He got out his corncob pipe and filled it with fragments of poisonous-looking black Scotch tobacco which he tore, with difficulty, from a plug that was about the shape of a fountain pen, and fully as black and hard. Then he leaned back in a chair and let out clouds of smoke that smelled as if it came from a fumigator's smudge pot. Later, he cleaned and reloaded his guns carefully. There were five of the guns, of a.s.sorted sizes, and carried in different places about his long person.

By that time he appeared to have finished his thinking.

”Jep Dee found what him an' us are after, figures as if,” he said.

”Yes,” said Rhoda Haven.

”They kotched Jep, an' treated him sort of poorly. We don't know why they treated him that way, but we might smack a guess.”