VI
In my hired car again, I had the driver take me to the nearest village, where I bought a plug of chewing tobacco, a flashlight, and a box of cartridges at the general store. My gun is a .38 Special, but I had to take the shorter, weaker cartridges, because the storekeeper didn’t keep the specials in stock.
My purchases in my pocket, we started back toward the Shan house again. Two bends in the road this side of it, I stopped the car, paid the chauffeur, and sent him on his way, finishing the trip afoot.
The house was dark all around.
Letting myself in as quietly as possible, and going easy with the flashlight, I gave the interior a combing from cellar to roof. I was the only occupant. In the kitchen, I looted the icebox for a bite or two, which I washed down with milk. I could have used some coffee, but coffee is too fragrant.
The luncheon done, I made myself comfortable on a chair in the passageway between the kitchen and the rest of the house. On one side of the passageway, steps led down to the basement. On the other, steps led upstairs. With every door in the house except the outer ones open, the passageway was the center of things so far as hearing noises was concerned.
An hour went by—quietly except for the passing of cars on the road a hundred yards away and the washing of the Pacific down in the little cove. I chewed on my plug of tobacco—a substitute for cigarettes—and tried to count up the hours of my life I’d spent like this, sitting or standing around waiting for something to happen.
The telephone rang.
I let it ring. It might be Lillian Shan needing help, but I couldn’t take a chance. It was too likely to be some egg trying to find out if anybody was in the house.
Another half hour went by with a breeze springing up from the ocean, rustling trees outside.
A noise came that was neither wind nor surf nor passing car.
Something clicked somewhere.
It was at a window, but I didn’t know which. I got rid of my chew, got gun and flashlight out.
It sounded again, harshly.
Somebody was giving a window a strong play—too strong. The catch rattled, and something clicked against the pane. It was a stall. Whoever he was, he could have smashed the glass with less noise than he was making.
I stood up, but I didn’t leave the passageway. The window noise was a fake to draw the attention of anyone who might be in the house. I turned my back on it, trying to see into the kitchen.
The kitchen was too black to see anything.
I saw nothing there. I heard nothing there.
Damp air blew on me from the kitchen.
That was something to worry about. I had company, and he was slicker than I. He could open doors or windows under my nose. That wasn’t so good.
Weight on rubber heels, I backed away from my chair until the frame of the cellar door touched my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this party. I like an even break or better, and this didn’t look like one.
So when a thin line of light danced out of the kitchen to hit the chair in the passsageway, I was three steps cellar-ward, my back flat against the stair-wall.
The light fixed itself on the chair for a couple of seconds, and then began to dart around the passageway, through it into the room beyond. I could see nothing but the light.
Fresh sounds came to me—the purr of automobile engines close to the house on the road side, the soft padding of feet on the back porch, on the kitchen linoleum, quite a few feet. An odor came to me—an unmistakable odor—the smell of unwashed Chinese.
Then I lost track of these things. I had plenty to occupy me close up.
The proprietor of the flashlight was at the head of the cellar steps. I had ruined my eyes watching the light: I couldn’t see him.
The first thin ray he sent downstairs missed me by an inch—which gave me time to make a map there in the dark. If he was of medium size, holding the light in his left hand, a gun in his right, and exposing as little of himself as possible—his noodle should have been a foot and a half above the beginning of the light-beam, the same distance behind it, six inches to the left—my left.
The light swung sideways and hit one of my legs.
I swung the barrel of my gun at the point I had marked X in the night.
His gunfire cooked my cheek. One of his arms tried to take me with him. I twisted away and let him dive alone into the cellar, showing me a flash of gold teeth as he went past.
The house was full of “Ah yahs” and pattering feet.
I had to move—or I’d be pushed.
Downstairs might be a trap. I went up to the passageway again.
The passageway was solid and alive with stinking bodies. Hands and teeth began to take my clothes away from me. I knew damned well I had declared myself in on something!
I was one of a struggling, tearing, grunting and groaning mob of invisibles. An eddy of them swept me toward the kitchen. Hitting, kicking, butting, I went along.
A high-pitched voice was screaming Chinese orders.
My shoulder scraped the doorframe as I was carried into the kitchen, fighting as best I could against enemies I couldn’t see, afraid to use the gun I still gripped.
I was only one part of the mad scramble. The flash of my gun might have made me the center of it. These lunatics were fighting panic now: I didn’t want to show them something tangible to tear apart.
I went along with them, cracking everything that got in my way, and being cracked back. A bucket got between my feet.
I crashed down, upsetting my neighbors, rolled over a body, felt a foot on my face, squirmed from under it, and came to rest in a corner, still tangled up with the galvanized bucket.
Thank God for that bucket!
I wanted these people to go away. I didn’t care who or what they were. If they’d depart in peace I’d forgive their sins.
I put my gun inside the bucket and squeezed the trigger. I got the worst of the racket, but there was enough to go around. It sounded like a crump going off.
I cut loose in the bucket again, and had another idea. Two fingers of my left hand in my mouth, I whistled as shrill as I could while I emptied the gun.
It was a sweet racket!
When my gun had run out of bullets and my lungs out of air, I was alone. I was glad to be alone. I knew why men go off and live in caves by themselves. And I didn’t blame them!
Sitting there alone in the dark, I reloaded my gun.
On hands and knees I found my way to the open kitchen door, and peeped out into the blackness that told me nothing. The surf made guzzling sounds in the cove. From the other side of the house came the noise of cars. I hoped it was my friends going away.
I shut the door, locked it, and turned on the kitchen light.
The place wasn’t as badly upset as I had expected. Some pans and dishes were down and a chair had been broken, and the place smelled of unwashed bodies. But that was all—except a blue cotton sleeve in the middle of the floor, a straw sandal near the passageway door, and a handful of short black hairs, a bit blood-smeared, beside the sandal.
In the cellar I did not find the man I had sent down there. An open door showed how he had left me. His flashlight was there, and my own, and some of his blood.
Upstairs again, I went through the front of the house. The front door was open. Rugs had been rumpled. A blue vase was broken on the floor. A table was pushed out of place, and a couple of chairs had been upset. I found an old and greasy brown felt hat that had neither sweatband nor hatband. I found a grimy photograph of President Coolidge—apparently cut from a Chinese newspaper—and six wheat-straw cigarette papers.
I found nothing upstairs to show that any of my guests had gone up there.
It was half past two in the morning when I heard a car drive up to the front door. I peeped out of Lillian Shan’s bedroom window, on the second floor. She was saying good night to Jack Garthorne.
I went back to the library to wait for her.
“Nothing happened?” were her first words, and they sounded more like a prayer than anything else.
“It did,” I told her, “and I suppose you had your breakdown.”
For a moment I thought she was going to lie to me, but she nodded, and dropped into a chair, not as erect as usual.
“I had a lot of company,” I said, “but I can’t say I found out much about them. The fact is, I bit off more than I could chew, and had to be satisfied with chasing them out.”
“You didn’t call the sheriff’s office?” There was something strange about the tone in which she put the question.
“No—I don’t want Garthorne arrested yet.”
That shook the dejection out of her. She was up, tall and straight in front of me, and cold.
“I’d rather not go into that again,” she said.
That was all right with me, but:
“You didn’t say anything to him, I hope.”
“Say anything to him?” She seemed amazed. “Do you think I would insult him by repeating your guesses—your absurd guesses?”
“That’s fine,” I applauded her silence if not her opinion of my theories. “Now, I’m going to stay here tonight. There isn’t a chance in a hundred of anything happening, but I’ll play it safe.”
She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about that, but she finally went off to bed.
Nothing happened between then and sunup, of course. I left the house as soon as daylight came and gave the grounds the once over. Footprints were all over the place, from water’s edge to driveway. Along the driveway some of the sod was cut where machines had been turned carelessly.
Borrowing one of the cars from the garage, I was back in San Francisco before the morning was far gone.
In the office, I asked the Old Man to put an operative behind Jack Garthorne; to have the old hat, flashlight, sandal and the rest of my souvenirs put under the microscope and searched for finger prints, foot prints, tooth-prints or what have you; and to have our Richmond branch look up the Garthornes. Then I went up to see my Filipino assistant.
He was gloomy.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Somebody knock you over?”
“Oh, no, sir!” he protested. “But maybe I am not so good a detective. I try to follow one fella, and he turns a corner and he is gone.”
“Who was he, and what was he up to?”
“I do not know, sir. There is four automobiles with men getting out of them into that cellar of which I tell you the strange Chinese live. After they are gone in, one man comes out. He wears his hat down over bandage on his upper face, and he walks away rapidly. I try to follow him, but he turns that corner, and where is he?”
“What time did all this happen?”
“Twelve o’clock, maybe.”
“Could it have been later than that, or earlier?”
“Yes, sir.”
My visitors, no doubt, and the man Cipriano had tried to shadow could have been the one I swatted. The Filipino hadn’t thought to get the license numbers of the automobiles. He didn’t know whether they had been driven by white men or Chinese, or even what make cars they were.
“You’ve done fine,” I assured him. “Try it again tonight. Take it easy, and you’ll get there.”
From him I went to a telephone and called the Hall of Justice. Dummy Uhl’s death had not been reported, I learned.
Twenty minutes later I was skinning my knuckles on Chang Li Ching’s front door.