I had shed my pajamas and was reaching for my union suit when the boy came back with another wire. This one was from O’Gar, through the Agency:

  ASHCRAFT DISAPPEARED YESTERDAY

  I used the telephone to get Hooper out of bed.

  “Get down to Tijuana,” I told him. “Stick up the house where you left the girl last night, unless you run across her at the Golden Horseshoe. Stay there until she shows. Stay with her until she connects with a big blond Englishman, and then switch to him. He’s a man of less than forty, tall, with blue eyes and yellow hair. Don’t let him shake you—he’s the big boy in this party just now. I’ll be down. If the Englishman and I stay together and the girl leaves us, take her, but otherwise stick to him.”

  I dressed, put down some breakfast and caught a stage for the Mexican town. The boy driving the stage made fair time, but you would have thought we were standing still to see a maroon roadster pass us near Palm City. Ashcraft was driving the roadster.

  The roadster was empty, standing in front of the adobe house, when I saw it again. Up in the next block, Hooper was doing an imitation of a drunk, talking to two Indians in the uniforms of the Mexican Army.

  I knocked on the door of the adobe house.

  Kewpie’s voice: “Who is it?”

  “Me—Parker. Just heard that Ed is back.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. A pause. “Come in.”

  I pushed the door open and went in. The Englishman sat tilted back in a chair, his right elbow on the table, his right hand in his coat pocket—if there was a gun in that pocket it was pointing at me.

  “Hello,” he said. “I hear you’ve been making guesses about me.”

  “Call ’em anything you like.” I pushed a chair over to within a couple of feet of him, and sat down. “But don’t let’s kid each other. You had Gooseneck knock your wife off so you could get what she had. The mistake you made was in picking a sap like Gooseneck to do the turn—a sap who went on a killing spree and then lost his nerve. Going to read and write just because three or four witnesses put the finger on him! And only going as far as Mexicali! That’s a fine place to pick! I suppose he was so scared that the five- or six-hours ride over the hills seemed like a trip to the end of the world!”

  I kept my chin going.

  “You aren’t a sap, Ed, and neither am I. I want to take you riding north with bracelets on, but I’m in no hurry. If I can’t take you today, I’m willing to wait until tomorrow. I’ll get you in the end, unless somebody beats me to you—and that won’t break my heart. There’s a rod between my vest and my belly. If you’ll have Kewpie get it out, we’ll be all set for the talk I want to make.”

  He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from me. The girl came close to my back. One of her hands came over my shoulder, went under my vest, and my old black gun left me. Before she stepped away she laid the point of her knife against the nape of my neck for an instant—a gentle reminder.

  “Good,” I said when she gave my gun to the Englishman, who pocketed it with his left hand. “Now here’s my proposition. You and Kewpie ride across the border with me—so we won’t have to fool with extradition papers—and I’ll have you locked up. We’ll do our fighting in court. I’m not absolutely certain that I can tie the killings on either of you, and if I flop, you’ll be free. If I make the grade—as I hope to—you’ll swing, of course.

  “What’s the sense of scooting? Spending the rest of your life dodging bulls? Only to be nabbed finally—or bumped off trying to get away? You’ll maybe save your neck, but what of the money your wife left? That money is what you are in the game for—it’s what you had your wife killed for. Stand trial and you’ve a chance to collect it. Run—and you kiss it good-bye.”

  My game just now was to persuade Ed and his girl to bolt. If they let me throw them in the can I might be able to convict one of them, but my chances weren’t any too large. It depended on how things turned out later. It depended on whether I could prove that Gooseneck had been in San Francisco on the night of the killings, and I imagined that he would be well supplied with all sorts of proof to the contrary. We had not been able to find a single fingerprint of the killer’s in Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. And if I could convince a jury that he was in San Francisco at the time, then I would have to show that he had done the killing. And after that I would have the toughest part of the job still ahead of me—to prove that he had done the killing for one of these two, and not on his own account.

  What I was working for was to make this pair dust out. I didn’t care where they went or what they did, so long as they scooted. I’d trust to luck and my own head to get profit out of their scrambling—I was still trying to stir things up.

  The Englishman was thinking hard. I knew I had him worried, chiefly through what I had said about Gooseneck Flinn. Then he chuckled.

  “You’re balmy, Painless,” he said. “But you—”

  I don’t know what he was going to say—whether I was going to win or lose.

  The front door slammed open, and Gooseneck Flinn came into the room.

  His clothes were white with dust. His face was thrust forward to the full length of his long, yellow neck.

  His shoe-button eyes focused on me. His hands turned over. That’s all you could see. They simply turned over—and there was a heavy revolver in each.

  “Your paws on the table, Ed,” he snarled.

  Ed’s gun—if that is what he had in his pocket—was blocked from a shot at the man in the doorway by a corner of the table. He took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and laid both palms down on the table-top.

  “Stay where y’r at!” Gooseneck barked at the girl.

  Gooseneck glared at me for nearly a minute.

  When he spoke it was to Ed and Kewpie.

  “So this is what y’ wired me to come back for, huh? A trap! Me the goat for yur! I’ll be y’r goat! I’m goin’ to speak my piece, an’ then I’m goin’ out o’ here if I have to smoke my way through the whole damn’ Mex army! I killed yur wife all right—an’ her help, too. Killed ’em for the thousand bucks—”

  The girl took a step toward him, screaming:

  “Shut up, damn you!”

  “Shut up, yourself!” Gooseneck roared back at her, and his thumb raised the hammer of the gun that threatened her. “I’m doin’ the talkin’. I killed her for—”

  Kewpie bent forward. Her left hand went under the hem of her skirt. The hand came up—empty. The flash from Gooseneck’s gun lit on a flying steel blade.

  The girl spun back across the room—hammered back by the bullets that tore through her chest. Her back hit the wall. She pitched forward to the floor.

  Gooseneck stopped shooting and tried to speak. The brown haft of the girl’s knife stuck out of his yellow throat. He couldn’t get his words past the blade. He dropped one gun and tried to take hold of the protruding haft. Halfway up to it his hand came, and dropped. He went down slowly—to his knees—hands and knees—rolled over on his side—and lay still.

  I jumped for the Englishman. The revolver Gooseneck had dropped turned under my foot, spilling me sidewise. My hand brushed the Englishman’s coat, but he twisted away from me, and got his guns out.

  His eyes were hard and cold and his mouth was shut until you could hardly see the slit of it. He backed slowly across the floor, while I lay still where I had tumbled. He didn’t make a speech. A moment of hesitation in the doorway. The door jerked open and shut. He was gone.

  I scooped up the gun that had thrown me, sprang to Gooseneck’s side, tore the other gun out of his dead hand, and plunged into the street. The maroon roadster was trailing a cloud of dust into the desert behind it. Thirty feet from me stood a dirt-caked black touring car. That would be the one in which Gooseneck had driven back from Mexicali.

  I jumped for it, climbed in, brought it to life, and pointed it at the dust-cloud ahead.

  The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks—its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.

  The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious.

  I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up—missed it by a hair—and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.

  The roadster was empty. I kept on.

  From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.

  He fired again from the shelter of his car, and then dashed for a narrow arroyo—a sharp-edged, ten-foot crack in the earth—off to the left. On the brink, he wheeled to snap another cap at me—and jumped down out of sight.

  I twisted the wheel in my hands, jammed on the brakes and slid the black touring car to the spot where I had seen him last. The edge of the arroyo was crumbling under my front wheels. I released the brake. Tumbled out.

  The car plunged down into the gully after him.

  Sprawled on my belly, one of Gooseneck’s guns in each hand, I wormed my head over the edge. On all fours, the Englishman was scrambling out of the way of the car. The car was mangled, but still sputtering. One of the man’s fists was bunched around a gun—mine.

  “Drop it and stand up, Ed!” I yelled.

  Snake-quick, he flung himself around in a sitting position on the arroyo bottom, swung his gun up—and I smashed his forearm with my second shot.

  He was holding the wounded arm with his left hand when I slid down beside him, picked up the gun he had dropped, and frisked him to see if he had any more. Then twisting a handkerchief into a tourniquet of a sort, I knotted it around his wounded arm.

  “Let’s go upstairs and talk,” I suggested, and helped him up the steep side of the gully.

  We climbed into his roadster.

  “Go ahead, talk your head off,” he invited, “but don’t expect me to add much to the conversation. You’ve got nothing on me. You saw Kewpie bump Gooseneck off to keep him from peaching on her.”

  “So that’s your play?” I inquired. “The girl hired Gooseneck to kill your wife—out of jealousy—when she learned that you were planning to shake her and return to your own world?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not bad, Ed, but there’s one rough spot in it. You are not Ashcraft!”

  He jumped, and then laughed.

  “Now your enthusiasm is getting the better of your judgment,” he kidded me. “Could I have deceived another man’s wife? Don’t you think her lawyer, Richmond, made me prove my identity?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Ed, I think I’m a smarter baby than either of them. Suppose you had a lot of stuff that belonged to Ashcraft—papers, letters, things in his handwriting? If you were even a fair hand with a pen, you could have fooled his wife. As for the lawyer—his making you identify yourself was only a matter of form. It never occurred to him you weren’t Ashcraft.

  “At first your game was to bleed Mrs. Ashcraft for an allowance—to take the cure. But after she closed out her affairs in England and came here, you decided to wipe her out and take everything. You knew she was an orphan and had no close relatives to come butting in. You knew it wasn’t likely that there were many people in America who could say you were not Ashcraft.”

  “Where do you think Ashcraft would be while I was spending his money?”

  “Dead,” I said.

  That got to him, though he didn’t get excited. But his eyes became thoughtful behind his smile.

  “You may be right, of course,” he drawled. “But even at that, I don’t see just how you expect to hang me. Can you prove that Kewpie didn’t think I was Ashcraft? Can you prove that she knew why Mrs. Ashcraft was sending me money? Can you prove that she knew anything about my game? I rather think not.”

  “You may get away with it,” I admitted. “Juries are funny, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d be happier if I knew a few things about those murders that I don’t know. Do you mind telling me about the ins and outs of your switch with Ashcraft?”

  He puckered his lips and then shugged. “I’ll tell you. It won’t matter greatly. I’m due to go over for this impersonation, so a confession to a little additional larceny won’t matter.

  “The hotel-sneak used to be my lay,” the Englishman said after a pause. “I came to the States after England and the Continent got uncomfortable. Then, one night in a Seattle hotel, I worked the tarrel and put myself into a room on the fourth floor. I had hardly closed the door behind me before another key was rattling in it. The room was night-dark. I risked a flash from my light, picked out a closet door, and got behind it.

  “The clothes closet was empty; rather a stroke of luck, since there was nothing in it for the room’s occupant to come for. He—it was a man—had switched on the lights by then.

  “He began pacing the floor. He paced it for three solid hours—up and down, up and down, up and down —while I stood behind the closet door with my gun in my hand, in case he should pull it open. For three solid hours he paced that damned floor. Then he sat down and I heard a pen scratching on paper. Ten minutes of that and he was back at his pacing; but he kept it up for only a few minutes this time. I heard the latches of a valise click. And a shot!

  “I bounded out of my retreat. He was stretched on the floor, with a hole in the side of his head. A bad break for me, and no mistake! I could hear excited voices in the corridor. I stepped over the dead chap, found the letter he had been writing on the writing-desk. It was addressed to Mrs. Norman Ashcraft at a Wine Street number in Bristol, England. I tore it open. He had written that he was going to kill himself, and it was signed Norman. I felt better. A murder couldn’t be made out of it.

  “Nevertheless, I was here in this room with a flashlight, skeleton keys, and a gun—to say nothing of a handful of jewelry that I had picked up on the next floor. Somebody was knocking on the door.

  “Get the police!” I called through the door, playing for time.

  “Then I turned to the man who had let me in for all this. I would have pegged him for a fellow Britisher even if I hadn’t seen the address on his letter. There are thousands of us on the same order—blond, fairly tall, well set up. I took the only chance there was. His hat and topcoat were on a chair where he had tossed them. I put them on and dropped my hat beside him. Kneeling, I emptied his pockets, and my own, gave him all my stuff, pouched all of his. Then I traded guns with him and opened the door.

  “What I had in mind was that the first arrivals might not know him by sight, or not well enough to recognize him immediately. That would give me several seconds to arrange my disappearance in. But when I opened the door I found that my idea wouldn’t work out as I had planned. The house detective was there, and a policeman, and I knew I was licked. But I played my hand out. I told them I had come up to my room and found this chap on the floor going through my belongings. I had seized him, and in the struggle had shot him.

  “Minutes went by like hours, and nobody denounced me. People were calling me Mr. Ashcraft. My impersonation was succeeding. It had me gasping then, but after I learned more about Ashcraft it wasn’t so surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat—the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type—typical blond Englishmen.

  “Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing. But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening.

  “I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things—memorizing them—and practicing his signature. Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to cash them in the morning.

  “I stayed in Seattle for three days—as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled on to something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his wife should keep me from being charged with murder if anything slipped, and I knew I was safer seeing the thing through than running. When the excitement had quieted down I packed up and came down to San Francisco, resuming my own name—Edward Bohannon. But I held onto all of Ashcraft’s property, because I had learned from it that his wife had money, and I knew I could get some of it if I played my cards right. She saved me the trouble. I ran across one of her advertisements in the Examiner, answered it, and—here we are.”

  “But you didn’t have Mrs. Ashcraft killed?”

  He shook his head.

  I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and put two of them on the seat between us.

  “Suppose we play a game. This is just for my own satisfaction. It won’t tie anybody to anything—won’t prove anything. If you did a certain thing, pick up the cigarette that is nearer me. If you didn’t, pick up the one nearer you. Will you play?”

  “No, I won’t,” he said emphatically. “I don’t like your game. But I do want a cigarette.”

  He reached out his uninjured arm and picked up the cigarette nearer me.

  “Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Now I hate to tell you this, but I’m going to swing you.”

  “You’re balmy, my son.”

  “You’re thinking of the San Francisco job, Ed,” I explained. “I’m talking about Seattle. You, a hotel sneak-thief, were discovered in a room with a man who had just died with a bullet in his head. What do you think a jury will make out of that, Ed?”