here?” she asked. I kept getting the impression she was scared of him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not. Say, is he married?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
She saw the ash-tray then and looked away from me. I watched her as she kept glancing nervously around and it was obvious she didn’t like the idea of our being in here. We went back outside. I walked out to the car and hit the horn-button three or four long blasts. Sound rolled out across the timber and then died away while we listened. There was no answer.
A small shed stood beside the derrick platform, over across the clearing, but from here we could see that the door was locked and he wasn’t anywhere around it. At the side of the shack a trail led down into a wooded ravine, and when she saw me looking down that way she said, “He might be down at the spring where he gets his water. I’ll walk down and see.”
“All right,” I said, starting to go with her.
“It’s all right,” she protested. “I’ll go. Why don’t you just wait by the car?”
I started to say something, and then shut up. For some reason she didn’t want me to go. Maybe she was afraid of me. I’ve got a homely, beat-up face, and I’m pretty big.
“O.K.,” I said. I sat down on the side of the porch and lighted a cigarette. She went down the trail. I could catch only glimpses now and then of the blonde head and the crisp blue of her dress, and then she went out of sight around a turn. I waited, smoking, and wondering what she was nervous about. When I looked again she was halfway up the trail, coming back. I watched her, thinking how it would be, the way you always do, and how pretty she was. She was a little over average height and had a lovely walk, even in the flat sandals, and there was something oddly serious about her face, more so than you’d expect in a girl who couldn’t be over twenty-one. She looked like someone who could get hurt, and it was strange I thought about it that way because it had been a long time since I’d known anyone who was vulnerable to much of anything. Her legs were long and very nice, and she wore rather dark nylons.
I stood up. “We might as well go,” I said. “He may not be back all day.”
“Oh,” she said. “I found him. He was down at the spring.”
I probably stared at her. She hadn’t been out of sight more than two or three minutes. Arid why hadn’t he come back with her?
“Did you get the car keys?” I asked.
She didn’t look at me. “No. He paid me. Both payments. We won’t have to take it.”
I shook my head. “You must be a fast talker,” I said. “I’m glad I don’t owe you any money.”
She turned towards the car. “Oh, he’d been intending to pay it. He just hadn’t been to town. Hadn’t we better go?”
“I guess so,” I said. The whole thing was queer, but if he’d paid her there was no use hanging around.
We had just reached the car and were starting to get in when I looked up and saw the man walking towards us. He had come out of the trees on the road we had come in on, and was carrying a gun which looked like a .22 pump in the crook of his arm. She saw him, too. Her eyes were uneasy and when she glanced quickly sidewise at me, I knew it was Sutton and that she had been lying when she said she’d seen him down at the spring.
2
He was A big man, around six feet and heavy all the way up, and walked with a peculiar short stride which some people might have called mincing but wasn’t. It was the flat-footed shuffle of a bear or a heavyweight fighter, and men who move that way are balanced and hard to push off their feet. He was dressed in bib overalls and a faded blue shirt, and besides the gun he was carrying two fox squirrels by their tails. He appeared to be around thirty-five or thirty-eight, with a stubble of dark beard on an unlined, moon-shaped face, and he had the expression in his eyes of a man enjoying some secret and very dirty joke.