IV
I ran up to my room for hat, coat, flashlight and gun.
The Ringgos were standing at the front door when I started downstairs again.
He had put on a dark raincoat, buttoned tight over his injured arm, its left sleeve hanging empty. His right arm was around his wife. Both of her bare arms were around his neck. She was bent far back, he far forward over her. Their mouths were together.
Retreating a little, I made more noise with my feet when I came into sight again. They were standing apart at the door, waiting for me. Ringgo was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. He opened the door.
Mrs. Ringgo addressed me:
“Please don’t let my foolish husband be too reckless.”
I said I wouldn’t, and asked him:
“Worth while taking any of the servants or farm hands along?”
He shook his head.
“Those that aren’t hiding would be as useless as those that are,” he said. “They’ve all had it taken out of them.”
He and I went out, leaving Mrs. Ringgo looking after us from the doorway. The rain had stopped for the time, but a black muddle overhead promised more presently.
Ringgo led me around the side of the house, along a narrow path that went downhill through shrubbery, past a group of small buildings in a shallow valley, and diagonally up another, lower, hill.
The path was soggy. At the top of the hill we left the path, going through a wire gate and across a stubbly field that was both gummy and slimy under our feet. We moved along swiftly. The gumminess of the ground, the sultriness of the night air, and our coats, made the going warm work.
When we had crossed this field we could see the fire, a spot of flickering orange beyond intervening trees. We climbed a low wire fence and wound through the trees.
A violent rustling broke out among the leaves overhead, starting at the left, ending with a solid thud against a tree trunk just to our right. Then something plopped on the soft ground under the tree.
Off to the left a voice laughed, a savage, hooting laugh.
The laughing voice couldn’t have been far away. I went after it.
The fire was too small and too far away to be of much use to me: blackness was nearly perfect among the trees.
I stumbled over roots, bumped into trees, and found nothing. The flashlight would have helped the laugher more than me, so I kept it idle in my hand.
When I got tired of playing peekaboo with myself, I cut through the woods to the field on the other side, and went down to the fire.
The fire had been built in one end of the field, a dozen feet or less from the nearest tree. It had been built of dead twigs and broken branches that the rain had missed, and had nearly burnt itself out by the time I reached it.
Two small forked branches were stuck in the ground on opposite sides of the fire. Their forks held the ends of a length of green sapling. Spitted on the sapling, hanging over the fire, was an eighteen-inch-long carcass, headless, tailless, footless, skinless, and split down the front.
On the ground a few feet away lay an airedale puppy’s head, pelt, feet, tail, insides, and a lot of blood.
There were some dry sticks, broken in convenient lengths, beside the fire. I put them on as Ringgo came out of the woods to join me. He carried a stone the size of a grapefruit in his hand.
“Get a look at him?” he asked.
“No. He laughed and went.”
He held out the stone to me, saying:
“This is what was chucked at us.”
Drawn on the smooth gray stone, in red, were round blank eyes, a triangular nose, and a grinning, toothy mouth—a crude skull.
I scratched one of the red eyes with a fingernail, and said:
“Crayon.”
Ringgo was staring at the carcass sizzling over the fire and at the trimmings on the ground.
“What do you make of that?” I asked.
He swallowed and said:
“Mickey was a damned good little dog.”
“Yours?”
He nodded.
I went around with my flashlight on the ground. I found some footprints, such as they were.
“Anything?” Ringgo asked.
“Yeah.” I showed him one of the prints. “Made with rags tied around his shoes. They’re no good.”
We turned to the fire again.
“This is another show,” I said. “Whoever killed and cleaned the pup knew his stuff; knew it too well to think he could cook him decently like that. The outside will be burnt before the inside’s even warm, and the way he’s put on the spit he’d fall off if you tried to turn him.”
Ringgo’s scowl lightened a bit.
“That’s a little better,” he said. “Having him killed is rotten enough, but I’d hate to think of anybody eating Mickey, or even meaning to.”
“They didn’t,” I assured him. “They were putting on a show. This the sort of thing that’s been happening?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the sense of it?”
He glumly quoted Kavalov:
“Captain Cat-and-mouse.”
I gave him a cigarette, took one myself, and lighted them with a stick from the fire.
He raised his face to the sky, said, “Raining again; let’s go back to the house,” but remained by the fire, staring at the cooking carcass. The stink of scorched meat hung thick around us.
“You don’t take this very seriously yet, do you?” he asked presently, in a low, matter-of-fact voice.
“It’s a funny layout.”
“He’s cracked,” he said in the same low voice. “Try to see this. Honor meant something to him. That’s why we had to trick him instead of bribing him, back in Cairo. Less than ten years of dishonor can crack a man like that. He’d go off and hide and brood. It would be either shoot himself when the blow fell—or that. I was like you at first.” He kicked at the fire. “This is silly. But I can’t laugh at it now, except when I’m around Miriam and the commodore. When he first showed up I didn’t have the slightest idea that I couldn’t handle him. I had handled him all right in Cairo. When I discovered I couldn’t handle him I lost my head a little. I went down and picked a row with him. Well, that was no good either. It’s the silliness of this that makes it bad. In Cairo he was the kind of man who combs his hair before he shaves, so his mirror will show an orderly picture. Can you understand some of this?”
“I’ll have to talk to him first,” I said. “He’s staying in the village?”
“He has a cottage on the hill above. It’s the first one on the left after you turn into the main road.” Ringgo dropped his cigarette into the fire and looked thoughtfully at me, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know how you and the commodore are going to get along. You can’t make jokes with him. He doesn’t understand them, and he’ll distrust you on that account.”
“I’ll try to be careful,” I promised. “No good offering this Sherry money?”
“Hell, no,” he said softly. “He’s too cracked for that.”
We took down the dog’s carcass, kicked the fire apart, and trod it out in the mud before we returned to the house.