When he rose from the telephone he was smiling with pale lips. His eyes were shiny and reckless. His hands shook a little.
The telephone-bell rang again before he had taken his third step. He hesitated, went back to the telephone. “Hello. . . . Oh, hello, Paul.
Yes, I got tired of playing invalid. . . . Nothing special–just thought I’d drop in and see you. . . . No, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m not feeling as strong as I thought I was, so I think I’d better go to bed. . . . Yes, tomorrow, sure. . . . ‘By.”
He put on rain-coat and hat going downstairs. Wind drove rain in at him when he opened the street-door, drove it into his face as he walked half a block to the garage on the corner.
In the garage’s glass-walled office a lanky brown-haired man in once-white overalls was tilted back on a wooden chair, his feet on a shelf above an electric heater, reading a newspaper. He lowered the newspaper when Ned Beaumont said: “‘Lo, Tommy.”
The dirtiness of Tommy’s face made his teeth seem whiter than they were. He showed many of them in a grin and said: “Kind of weatherish tonight.”
“Yes. Got an iron I can have? One that’ll carry me over country roads tonight?”
Tommy said: “Jesus! Lucky for you you could pick your night. You might’ve had to go on a bad one. Well, I got a Buick that I don’t care what happens to.”
“Will it get me there?”
“It’s just as likely to as anything else,” Tommy said, “tonight.”
“All right. Fill it up for me. What’s the best road up Lazy Creek way on a night like this?”
“How far up?”
Ned Beaumont looked thoughtfully at the garageman, then said: “Along about where it runs into the river.”
Tommy nodded. “The Mathews place?” he asked.
Ned Beaumont did not say anything.
Tommy said: “It makes a difference which place you’re going to.”
“Yes? The Mathews place.” Ned Beaumont frowned. “This is under the hat, Tommy.”
“Did you come to me because you thought I’d talk or because you knew I wouldn’t?” Tommy demanded argumentatively.
Ned Beaumont said: “I’m in a hurry.”
“Then you take the New River Road as far as Barton’s, take the dirt road over the bridge there–if you can make it at all–and then the first cross-road back east. That’ll bring you in behind Mathews’s place along about the top of the hill. If you can’t make the dirt road in this weather you’ll have to go on up the New River Road to where it crosses and then cut back along the old one.”
“Thanks.”
When Ned Beaumont was getting into the Buick Tommy said to him in a markedly casual tone: “There’s an extra gun in the side-pocket.”
Ned Beaumont stared at the lanky man. “Extra?” he asked blankly.
“Pleasant trip,” Tommy said.
Ned Beaumont shut the door and drove away.
4
The clock in the dashboard said ten-thirty-two. Ned Beaumont switched off the lights and got somewhat stiffly out of the Buick. Wind-driven rain hammered tree, bush, ground, man, car with incessant wet blows. Downhill, through rain and foliage, irregular small patches of yellow light glowed faintly. Ned Beaumont shivered, tried to draw his rain-coat closer around him, and began to stumble downhill through drenched underbrush towards the patches of light.
Wind and rain on his back pushed him downhill towards the patches. As he went downhill stiffness gradually left him so that, though he stumbled often and staggered, and was tripped by obstacles underfoot, he kept his feet under him and moved nimbly enough, if erratically, towards his goal.
Presently a path came under his feet. He turned into it, holding it partly by its sliminess under his feet, partly by the feel of the bushes whipping his face on either side, and not at all by sight. The path led him off to the left for a little distance, but then, swinging in a broad curve, brought him to the brink of a small gorge through which water rushed noisily and from there, in another curve, to the front door of the building where the yellow light glowed.