Part 1 (2/2)

At last Creswold said: ”Alright, I'll meet you there. Wait for me. I'm glad you have it fixed.”

Turning toward Lenstrom, Creswold shrugged as he saw how heavily the storm was las.h.i.+ng at the window. He had the air of a man accepting a task whether or not he liked it.

”I'll see you later, Lenstrom,” said Creswold. ”Meanwhile hold everything. I may have more to tell you.

One of my scouts has picked up a few new angles. There's a lot of them in this county--scouts and angles both.”

Lightning and thunder, teamed in a terrific broadside, followed Creswold's hurried departure from the hotel room. Cringing beside the door, fearing to touch its metal k.n.o.b, Lenstrom gave a fearful glance toward the window.

Outside, the downpour had obliterated the entire scene. Those houses on the far hill were gone--not only from Lenstrom's sight but from his mind as well. The fury of the cloudburst terrified the timid man with the piggish face. He didn't like the town of Lamira, when it stormed.

Ralph Lenstrom wasn't going to like Lamira even afterward.

II.A LITTLE matter like a terrific thunderstorm might alarm the soft townsfolk in Lamira--particularly newcomers like Preston Brett, the man who thought he owned the town. But it didn't bother the county crowd that patronized the Old Bridge Tavern. They were hill-folk, like Claude Bigby.

What if the storms did hurl their hardest bombardment through the narrow, sloping gorge; there, where the old bridge crossed the turbulent Kawagha as it tumbled toward the mill valley? These people were used to the river's roar. A rousing thunderstorm simply added to the accustomed tumult. Once in a while a pa.s.sing storm splintered a towering pine tree and crashed it somewhere near the inn; when it did, the drinks were on the house.

It was just an old Kawagha custom, dating from the days when teamsters used to lash their horses to the limit so they could reach the tavern by the old bridge and find an excuse for sampling its liquid wares, with a chance for a free tripper. Ramshackle though the tavern was, it had stood the test of a century.

Only one building in this region was older; the house where Claude Bigby lived.

There were Bigby portraits in the Old Bridge Tavern, beginning with the glowering old original who had felled Indians with his axe along with trees. He had been noted for saying--and proving--that an axe was just the same as a tomahawk, except that it had a longer reach. They had been hard men, these Bigbys, to others than their friends.

The last portrait in the line behind the tavern bar was a modern photograph. It was enlarged and chrome-tinted. It had the straight Bigby nose, the broad eyes and the square chin, proving that the Bigby line lost none of its determination in its present scion, Claude.

Old Clem Jolland, who ran the inn, had a habit of toasting Claude's picture in antic.i.p.ation of his patron's occasional visit. At those times the drinks were on Mr. Bigby instead of the house. But since Bigby had a preference for riding out thunderstorms in his own residence, Clem was at present counting other faces.

There was a chance that he might soon be pouring an obituary for some stricken pine tree.

”Nine of you,” said Clem, dourly. ”Which guy snuk in, hoping for a free? There was only eight, last time I counted. How about you, Zeke Stoyer?”

Clem shot the question at a stoop-shouldered man with a morbid, drawn face. With a shake of his head, Zeke planked a half-dollar on the bar.

”I was here afore,” he argued. ”Guess I was using the telephone last time you counted. Anyway, here's for a drink, out of my own money.”

”Out of somebody else's money,” sneered Clem, ”Getting important, aren't you, using the telephone?

Who were you calling? Maybe to Mr. Bigby, huh, to apologize for falling asleep without counting his sheep the last time you were tending them?”

”They found the sheep that got lost,” returned Zeke. ”Maybe I hain't worked for Mr. Bigby since, but it's only because he can't find nothing for me to do.”

”He says different, Mr. Bigby does,” confided Clem. ”He says that if you ever ask him for another job, he'll horse-whip you over into the sheep pasture that this Brett guy has spoiled worse'n if he turned it over to cows. By the way”--Clem's eye went angry--”you've been going around to Brett's a lot lately, huh?”

”Only to deliver packages,” returned Zeke, tapping an expressman's badge on his cap. ”Same as I do to Bigby's house occasional. Same as I'm doing right now.”

Zeke gestured to a square package lying on a chair near the bar. Eyeing it, Clem waited until approachingthunder had followed a lightning flash. Then, the proprietor asked: ”A package for me?”

”Naw.” Zeke shook his head. ”Jest something I'm taking into Lamira. Didn't like to leave it laying in the open truck. Guess I'll ride it on the seat alongside me. S'long, Clem, and I hope two pines get busted.”

Clem's jaw dropped as Zeke picked up the package and sauntered out through a rear exit. Never before had an eligible party walked out on a chance for a free drink at the Old Bridge Inn. Zeke's action amazed the regulars, too, until one tilted his head, listened between thunder claps, and laughed.

”Don't hear no backfire from Zeke's truck,” the fellow said. ”Likely he's just parking the package and coming back through the shed. He'll be waiting until a big tree goes and then coming in for his drink. You counted him, Clem.”

The guess wasn't entirely wrong. Zeke was in the shed that the customer mentioned, but he hadn't made a return trip from his truck. In fact Zeke hadn't gone to the truck at all. As for the package, he didn't intend to deliver it. In the shed, Zeke had wedged an old chair under the door k.n.o.b so that if anyone tried the door, it would stick. He was opening the package and getting it ready for business.

The contents of the package consisted chiefly of a square black box that Zeke handled very carefully. He poked it between two upright timbers of the main wall. He then uncoiled a long wire that was around the box and climbed a ladder until he reached the lean-to roof of the shed.

Right then, a vivid flash of lightning ripped. A few seconds later, the ensuing rumble of thunder sent reverberations up the gorge. The storm was getting very close, so close that the ladder shook under Zeke's knees. Though whether the thunder jarred it was a question. More likely the fault was Zeke's, for he was acting nervously.

Hurriedly, Zeke thrust a short metal rod through the roof of the shed, through a knot-hole that he had noted earlier. Scrambling down the ladder, he screwed a plug and cord into a hanging lamp socket. Like the rod and wire, these were attached to the black box. It immediately began to hum.

There was another flash of lightning and by the time the thunder came, Zeke was half way through the outer door. The storm was slowing. The low clouds met the narrow winding gorge, giving Zeke more time than he expected. Hopping back into the shed, he grabbed heaps of newspapers that were stacked in a corner. He skeltered them over the buzzing box. Grabbing a large kerosene can, Zeke poured its entire contents on the floor. He let the liquid trickle under the chair-barred door.

With the next thunder-clap, Zeke was through the outer door and gone into the first sweep of rain that lashed through the gorge. He couldn't have chosen a better moment for departure, because he merged with the downpour as though it had swallowed him. The sprawling inn was gone from sight by the time Zeke caught his breath and threw a hunted look across his bowed shoulder.

Zeke's truck wasn't parked in the one-time stable yard behind the inn, where it should have been. He had left it at a turnout in the road, a short distance toward town. There, the highway made a level hairpin turn, before taking the twisty slope down toward Lamira. Just before that grade stood the old bridge that crossed the Kawagha. It lead into a side road that traced an offshoot of the gorge, but Zeke wasn't concerned with those particulars.

Only the turnout was important and there was a reason why Zeke had chosen it. If Zeke had been parked in the old yard, he would have been forced to drive out the other direction and go clear around the inn, where the highway curved in plain sight of it. Zeke wanted to be as far away from the inn aspossible when something happened. He was therefore following a well-laid plan.

Loping along a path among the trees, Zeke was a hundred yards away when another flash of lightning came, with the thunder close upon it. Stopping short, Zeke huddled tensely. Relaxing, he laughed hoa.r.s.ely and wiped the rain from his face as though mistaking it for a ma.s.s of perspiration.

Still ahead of his own game, Zeke had no cause for worry now. The lightning flash had shown him the short but steep embankment leading down between two brush-flanked trees. It sloped squarely to the road, where his truck was standing in the turnout on the other side. All Zeke had to do was clutch those two slender trees, let himself down carefully, and hop over to the truck.

He calculated on accomplis.h.i.+ng it before another lightning flash. Though the embankment was already muddy, a slight slide wouldn't hurt.

In fact, the slide would have helped if Zeke had taken it, which he didn't.

As Zeke gripped the trees, the nearest bush stirred. The trees were at a slight angle and the bush was therefore perfectly placed for the next thing that happened. In the preternatural twilight, beneath the heavy storm cloud, a pair of heavily gloved hands took an angled grip upon Zeke's neck.

There was the strength of a vise in those clamping hands and the bulge in the gloves told why. The broad palms of the thick gloves contained strips of soldering metal that was pliable under pressure. Those two strips became the segments of a collar that included Zeke's windpipe. Nor could Zeke fight against them, for when he threw back his own hands to attempt a struggle, he lost his footing on the edge of the embankment. He could only claw madly to regain a hold upon the supporting trees.

Lightning zigzagged sharply and with its flash, Zeke writhed like the occupant of an electric chair. His backward lurch obscured the murderous foe who clutched him. As Zeke sagged forward, a roll of thunder boomed a ponderous knell. That writhe was Zeke's last; in the darkness, he became a different type of victim, a figure that seemed dangling from a hangman's noose.

The hands unclamped, the gloves spreading the improvised metal collar. Zeke's feet were on the embankment, so his fall was strictly a forward topple that didn't carry him far. His arms, twisted as crazily as the boughs of the gnarled trees, caught against the trunks and steadied him, thanks to the directing placement from the murderer's hands.

Only a slight jog was needed to pitch Zeke over the embankment brink, but in the blackness, the killer waited before delivering that final touch. In fact, all was so silent that the body of Zeke Stoyer seemed alone and forgotten.

Why had the murderer provided this strange sequel to his crime?

What could he be awaiting amid the soft whine of the wind that accompanied the patter of the drenching rain?

The answer came cutting through the singular mist that accompanies a thunder storm only when it drives itself into a pocket of rising land.

That answer was the smooth throb of an automobile motor. It purred above the m.u.f.fled obbligato of the Kawagha River as it tumbled through its deep and rocky gulch!

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