His way was uphill, up a hill frequently slippery, always uneven, through brush that tore his face and hands, caught his clothing. Three times he fell. He stumbled many times. The whistle did not come again. He did not find the Buick. He did not find the road along which he had come.
He dragged his feet now and stumbled where there were no obstructions and when presently he had topped the hill and was going down its other slope he began to fall more often. At the bottom of the hill he found a road and turned to the right on it. Its clay stuck to his feet in increasing bulk so that he had to stop time after time to scrape it off. He used his pistol to scrape it off.
When he heard a dog bark behind him he stopped and turned drunkenly to look back. Chose to the road, fifty feet behind him, was the vague outline of a house he had passed. He retraced his steps and came to a tall gate. The dog–a shapeless monster in the night–hurled itself at the other side of the gate and barked terrifically.
Ned Beaumont fumbled along an end of the gate, found the catch, unfastened it, and staggered in. The dog backed away, circling, feinting attacks it never made, filling the night with clamor.
A window screeched up and a heavy voice called: “What the hell are you doing to that dog?”
Ned Beaumont laughed weakly. Then he shook himself and replied in not too thin a voice: “This is Beaumont of the District Attorney’s office. I want to use your phone. There’s a dead man down there.”
The heavy voice roared: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Shut up, Jeanie!” The dog barked three times with increased energy and became silent. “Now what is it?”
“I want to phone. District Attorney’s office. There’s a dead man down there.”
The heavy voice exclaimed: “The hell you say!” The window screeched shut.
The dog began its barking and circling and feinting again. Ned Beaumont threw his muddy pistol at it. It turned and ran out of sight behind the house.
The front door was opened by a red-faced barrel-bodied short man in a long blue night-shirt. “Holy Maria, you’re a mess!” he gasped when Ned Beaumont came into the light from the doorway.
“Phone,” Ned Beaumont said.
The red-faced man caught him as he swayed. “Here,” he said gruffly, “tell me who to call and what to say. You can’t do anything.”
“Phone,” Ned Beaumont said.
The red-faced man steadied him along a hallway, opened a door, said: “There she is and it’s a damned good thing for you the old woman ain’t home or you’d never get in with all that mud on you.”
Ned Beaumont fell into the chair in front of the telephone, but he did not immediately reach for the telephone. He scowled at the man in the blue night-shirt and said thickly: “Go out and shut the door.”
The red-faced man had not come into the room. He shut the door.
Ned Beaumont picked up the receiver, leaned forward so that he was propped against the table by his elbows on it, and called Paul Madvig’s number. Half a dozen times while he waited his eyelids closed, but each time he forced them open again and when, at last, he spoke into the telephone it was clearly.
“‘Lo, Paul–Ned. . . . Never mind that. Listen to me. Mathews’s committed suicide at his place on the river and didn’t leave a will. . Listen to me. This is important. With a lot of debts and no will naming an executor it’ll be up to the courts to appoint somebody to administer the estate. Get that? . . . Yes. See that it comes up before the right judge–Phelps, say–and we can keep the Observer out of the fight–except on our side–till after election. Got that? . . . All right, all right, now listen. That’s only part of it. This is what’s got to be done now. The Observer is loaded with dynamite for the morning. You’ve got to stop it. I’d say get Phelps out of bed and get an injunction out of him–anything to stop it till you can show the Observer’s hired men where they stand now that the paper’s going to be bossed for a month or so by our friends.