Chapter VI (2)

Two minutes later she was at the base of the excavation, standing in the shadow of an enormous crane which looked not unlike a Martian monster on stilts--a Wellsian _War-of-the-Worlds_ kind of Martian. But nothing like a war of the worlds was taking place about her and the only really ominous thing about the pit was its proximity to the scene of a brutal slaying.

In the depth of the excavation the sunlight seemed deeper and redder than it should have been, the shadows so thickly clustering that they seemed to be conspiring together to cast a pall upon her spirits. But she refused to allow the dismalness of the pit to upset her. Any deep, hewed-out hollow in the earth was dismal, with the damp smells of freshly-turned earth conjuring up a cemetery-like atmosphere.

She didn't envy the men who had to work sixty feet beneath the sidewalk all day long, in rain and slush on bad days and always with the deafening clatter of steam-shovels and riveting machines to add to their woes.

She found the locket without difficulty, because she had a quick eye for tracing the course of small glittering objects falling from a height and the crevice into which it had fallen was a yard long and it stood out.

She picked it up, examined the chain and shook her head in chagrin. One of the tiny links had simply parted and now the chain was in two parts and she would throw it away and get a heavier one this time for sure--no further putting it off. She snapped open the locket, looked at the picture of her father and a twinge of guilt shivered through her. She'd replaced her father's picture with a photograph of Roger, and had carried Roger around her neck like an evil talisman for almost a year. She was cured of that now and she hoped her father would forgive her, if a man dead twenty years could forgive, for what she had done. All of it--not just the disloyalty to his memory she'd committed by giving Roger a preferred place close to her heart.

Her father had been old-fashioned enough to think any kind of an affair a degradation, the equivalent of harlotry undisguised, a living in sin which he could not have forgiven. He'd been a kindly, charitable man, but not without a terrible, inward struggle which would have seared his soul. "That a daughter of mine--"

She glanced at her wrist-watch, and saw that she was still quite early--barely twenty minutes to nine. If she ascended to the street again quickly none of the Eaton-Lathrup office staff would be likely to see her emerging from the excavation, breathless and with a complete lack of dignity, her skirt swirling up above her knees.

She opened her hand-bag, dropped in the locket and snapped the bag shut, tightening her lips a little as her father's handsome, but sad-eyed, rather melancholy face flashed again before her inward vision. She was quite sure she _didn't_ have a father-complex, but the thought of bringing any kind of pain to him--

Oh, damn such thoughts--damn such modern jargon silliness. You'd think people today spent nine-tenths of their lives on psychiatric couches. Perhaps they did--or that's what the head shrinkers wanted everyone to believe. She liked that word--head shrinkers. It put them in their place. A cult, that's what it was. Sweeping the country and poor old Freud himself had known poverty and heartbreak and if he could have gotten twenty dollars an hour he might have been able to smoke better cigars, at least, and taken more rides through the beautiful streets of old Vienna and have gotten in his personal life a few of the compensations genius was entitled to as a young man. How was he to know his theories would make perhaps a billion dollars for practitioners he'd never set eyes on in a far-off land?

She had turned and was just starting back up the slope when she saw the big flat stone. What is there about that kind of stone which fascinates almost everyone, which few people can resist overturning to see what lies beneath? Young school-boys do it all the time--young naturalists in search of beetles and centipedes and all kinds of damp, hueless crawling insects. And adults do it for a dozen reasons, often for the same reason, or to see if there's any grass growing underneath, in a region of barren, tumbled earth, or if it's covering a diamond necklace someone dropped weeks before--just as Ruth Porges had dropped the locket, but had given up more easily than she had done. Or just for the sheer pleasure of overturning a big flat stone, covering dampness, covering mold.

The stone was about forty feet from the base of the crane and almost directly in the path of a sturdy-looking steam shovel with a large enough scoop to lift it up and deposit it in a heap of tumbled earth into which it would sink, and be carted away and dumped elsewhere, along with the tons of earth which had already been scooped out of the pit.

As soon as the construction gang arrived and the clatter started up the stone would lose its identity, become just an impediment to be removed and buried in tons of earth and rubble. Its position on the floor of the excavation had quite possibly been changed already, shifted about a bit by the upheavals going on about it. The earth on both sides of it had a decidedly torn-up, worked over look.

Ruth Porges glanced at her wrist-watch again, hesitated for a moment and told herself that she was a complete fool to allow the stone to interest her.

Oh, well--why not? It would take her only a second or two to bend and overturn it.

When she started to lift it she discovered that it was even heavier than it looked, but she didn't let that discourage her. She tugged and the end she was gripping came completely loose and the rest of the stone began to rise also.

She toppled it with a single, vigorous heave, exposing the hard-packed earth underneath--an oblong of earth about two feet in length and twelve or fifteen inches wide.

She stared down at it, a cold chill coursing up her spine and all the blood draining from her face. The gun was half-buried in the earth, but its outlines were distinctly visible, as if it had been quite deeply buried at first, but had arisen to the surface of the earth when the ground about it had been shaken by the steam shovel, precisely as a corpse will arise to the surface of a lake when a dynamite blast has been set off in close proximity to it.

Closely packed as the earth was, it took her only a moment to work the gun free from its clinging overlay of earth and small pebbles. Her lips were shaking now and she could scarcely breathe, but she continued to dig and wrench at the weapon with her fingers until the butt was firmly in her clasp and the long black metal barrel, capped with a bulky-looking silencer, was pointing directly toward the slope.

If the killer had materialized before her at that moment at the base of the slope, ghostly and threatening, she would have screamed in terror and fired and fired again, not caring at all that deep in her mind another voice, also her own, would be screaming at her that it was only a specter and that she was completely alone.

She had seen the gun before--it had been shown to her with pride. And she had seen and talked with the killer, and even allowed the killer to compliment her on her hair-do, and drop a dime in a jukebox and say to her: "Just listen. Isn't that quite a song? Not the sort of song you'd expect to come out of a jukebox, is it?"

She had seen the gun before and she had talked to Lathrup's slayer, not once, but many times.

She knew exactly who the killer was. Knew, too, that that cunning, fiendish individual was still at large. But when you met and talked with a monster, a fiend--how could you know, if you had no warning, no reason to suspect the truth?

The police, too, would not be likely to suspect the truth, ever--unless she told them.

_Unless she told them!_ Unless she went to them and said: "There is a remorseless slayer loose in the city and some night ... soon now perhaps, very soon ... another woman may be found slain, more horribly slain this time, her throat slashed from ear to ear." It may have been only a solitary crime, brought about by uncontrollable rage. But how can you know, how can you be sure ... when I myself suspected nothing and we were such close, good friends?

There is nothing ordinary about a killer, nothing predictable ... even a killer with completely innocent eyes, who can smile and order a cocktail and say: "Heads I pay. Tails we go Dutch."

A little whimsical fun, on the part of a dangerous killer. You enter one door and you meet a charming individual, light-hearted, brimming over with a friendly interest in you, your problems, your daily concerns. You enter another door and you meet the same individual, but only for a moment. There's suddenly a tiger close to you, with an odor of death everywhere and long, quivering flanks move in and out, in and out, and, low-crouching, you see death creeping toward you with bared fangs.

It seemed to her that her heart had become encased in ice--in a solid block of ice--and was no longer beating.

Should she go to the police? Dared she tell, did ... did she really want to send Lathrup's slayer to the electric chair?

Supposing it had been a solitary crime, brought on by a wrong so terrible and cruel and heartless that the killer hadn't been a tiger at all? Was there not a killer in everyone, if the provocation was great enough, if all the civilized layers of the human mind were to be stripped away by the inhuman conduct of someone who was bent on destroying you, with no mercy shown, no slightest trace of compassion, no yielding at any point?

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Had she not herself been one of Lathrup's victims? Had she not once had an almost uncontrollable desire to make Lathrup suffer as she had suffered, to pay in full measure for the crime which Lathrup had committed in cold blood, with nothing really to gain, for she hadn't wanted Roger to go to bed with her for more than a week or two, if she could have endured him as a lover for even that short length of time. Hadn't she taken Roger away from her, stolen his love just to indulge a cruel whim, just because she happened to be a little bored at the time, and also had a streak of sadism in her nature which made her enjoy inflicting so cruel an injustice upon a woman she had no real reason to dislike?

Hadn't that injustice made her want to die, and aroused in her so furious a resentment that she had pictured herself fastening her fingers in Lathrup's throat and forcing her backwards across the desk and pressing and pressing until Lathrup ceased to draw breath?

She wouldn't have done it, of course. But did she really want to send one of Lathrup's other victims to the electric chair, simply because he was a little more primitive than she could ever be and had become, for a moment, a kind of madman, driven to desperation by a wrong which, for all she knew to the contrary, might have been much greater than the one which Lathrup had inflicted on her?

She suddenly remembered that there was a term for that in law which two or three states recognized as a justifiable legal defense in a first-degree murder case. An irresistible impulse. A man might know the difference between right and wrong and hence be legally sane and yet be compulsively driven to kill.

It was horrible, yes. She'd always go in fear of such a man and you couldn't think of him as entirely normal and he wouldn't deserve to get off scot-free. You could be modern and enlightened and humane and fight for a more civilized legal code, but there had to be a streak of hard cruelty in all killers which set them apart from men and women who merely killed in their thoughts. Or if you wanted to think of it in another way, their ability to go all the way--irresistible impulse or not--was a very terrible thing; it did make them wild beasts in a sense, more tigerlike that the overwhelming majority of mankind.

Her hands shook so she had difficulty opening her hand-bag again and putting the gun into it. But she was breathing a little more easily now, and there was a less frightened look in her eyes. The killer wouldn't know she'd found the gun, and she certainly had no intention of confronting him with it. She'd hide it somewhere or get rid of it--perhaps go right over to the East River at noon and very cautiously throw it in. Unless--she did decide to ... to go to the police. Had she any right to take so much for granted--that he wasn't a human monster who might not kill again?

If she got rid of the gun she'd be committing a very serious crime. She could be sent to prison for a long term of years. An accessory to murder after the event was what concealing that kind of evidence would make her.

She wasn't a criminal. She knew deep in her heart that she wasn't. But the law took a very dim view of that kind of personal interpretation of what was or wasn't a criminal act.

She'd have to decide. She'd have all morning to decide, to think about it. She'd put the hand-bag in her desk and pretend that nothing had happened to upset her, that it was a perfectly normal morning as far as she was concerned, if a morning six days after a murder could be thought of as normal. Eaton would come into her office, smiling a little, still worrying about the problem of replacing Lathrup, and putting twice the usual amount of responsibility on her shoulders, and on the shoulders of Lynn Prentiss and Macklin and Ellers--who would probably be too tight to give a damn. With Lathrup gone he probably wouldn't be fired, although he deserved to be, with his inability to remain sober two days in a row. The whole staff had been under quite a strain.

It helped her to swear inwardly, to be as cynical and hard-boiled as she could in a moment of torment and uncertainty such as this. Her father's face in the locket flashed once more across her mind and she thought: "Poor dad! Poor gentle, kind, moralistic, unworldly dad, who never quite knew what it was all about and whom I loved so very much. Do you know what your darling daughter has become? She has not only slept with a man out of wedlock, she's about to become an accessory to murder after the event. Or she may decide not to. It would make her much more of a hypocrite and less honorable and decent, actually, because she wanted to kill Lathrup herself. But maybe you'd prefer her to stay on the right side of the law."

Climbing up out of the excavation took her less than three minutes but she was conscious every moment of the bulge which the big pistol made in her hand-bag--it was a miracle she'd been able to fit it in--and she hoped no one would notice how lopsided and distended the bag looked when she arrived at street level.

It was only when she reached the pavement above the pit again that she realized that the worst possible calamity had taken place. Not one member of the office staff but three saw her climb out of the excavation, for it was now five minutes to nine and a rush to reach the office on time was in progress.

Lynn Prentiss passed and stopped to stare, raising her eyebrows slightly and then continuing on, as if she did not wish to embarrass a fellow editor in any way. But there had been more than a glimmer of bewilderment in her eyes, as if she found it difficult to picture Ruth Porges scrambling out of an excavation in such haste and in so undignified a manner. What could have prompted her to climb down in the first place? A rendezvous with the foreman of the construction gang? Unthinkable ... if you knew what kind of a girl Ruth Porges was--

Then Tommy Anders, the oldest of the two office boys passed, turning what was probably the sports pages of a morning newspaper, and probably not even seeing her, although he was looking straight in her direction. Then Susan, who had the courtesy not to stare at all, but must have been as startled as Lynn, and just as bewildered.

All she had to do was stand very still with the bag in plain view and everyone who hadn't reached the office a little earlier would know that she'd been behaving in a very strange manner, because there was dust all over her skirt and she was still breathless from her exertions. A half-dozen more Eaton-Lathrup employees would see her and perhaps even Eaton himself. And they'd be sure to notice the bulge in her hand-bag. The awful thought flashed across her mind that the very outlines of the gun might be visible.

And of course it would be all over the office in another half hour, and--_he_ would know. That was the really terrible, frightening thing. Even if he didn't pass and see her, along with the others, he'd be sure to know. At least twenty people would know and he'd be among them. Lathrup's slayer, shaken as he'd failed to be by all the police questioning, although she remembered--now that she thought about it and knew the truth about him--he had paled visibly once and almost betrayed himself. He'd said the wrong thing and had been forced to cover up quickly.

The man who had entered Lathrup's office six days before and shot her dead would know that a girl he couldn't possibly have imagined he'd have any reason to fear had gone down into the excavation where he'd hidden the murder weapon and had found it, and he'd remember that he had once showed it to her, and if she went to the police with it--

Or was she taking too much for granted again, letting her fear completely distort her thinking? He'd have no way of knowing she'd climbed all the way down to the bottom of the excavation. He wasn't stupid, he'd consider the possibility that she'd simply dropped something--as she had--and climbed down a few feet to recover it. A book perhaps, or her lipstick. He might not even give the matter a second thought, even though he knew where he'd hidden the gun, and how dangerous it would be if someone stumbled on it ahead of the steam shovel.

It was all very strange anyway. Why hadn't he gotten rid of the gun in a simpler, safer way--simply tossed it into the river, as she had thought of doing? Or driven out into the country somewhere and tossed it into a lake or buried it? It wasn't as easy to get rid of small objects of a dangerous nature as some people thought--even small phials of poison had a way of turning up again and sending murderers to the gallows. She'd read about such cases often enough. But still--

She suddenly thought she knew why he'd hidden the gun under a stone in the excavation, probably taking care to see that it was buried first pretty deeply. The gun had probably been down there since the day of the murder. He'd had to get rid of it quickly, had to make sure the police wouldn't find it anywhere about the office and trace it to him fast. And as the excavation was only a short distance from the office his hiding it there made sense, was logical enough. He'd probably climbed down during a lull in the construction work, when the pit was deserted, and gambled on the steam shovel scooping the gun up and carrying it off within a fairly short time. Possibly it hadn't even occurred to him it would still be there after six days. Quite possibly it had almost gone into the shovel. Been lifted up, tossed about and reburied. A steam shovel functioned erratically at times and the tumbled, heaved-up look of the earth all around the stone made that guess--of course it was only a guess--seem quite plausible to her.

It had probably continued to worry him, kept him anxious, robbed him of sleep--if a man with blood on his hands could ever not be robbed at times of sleep. But even a nightmare kind of anxiety was better than immediate apprehension by the police. If he'd climbed down into the excavation again later, to make sure that the gun _had_ gone into the scoop and been caught with the weapon in his hands or even just searching for a weapon that had vanished he'd be taking the same kind of risk a murderer with a psychopathic streak does when he returns to the scene of his crime in the grip of a morbid compulsion.

She'd just taken, all unwittingly, the same kind of risk herself but she was quite sure the police wouldn't suspect her, and if they did she'd have no trouble in clearing herself. Only the killer would suspect her--of knowing precisely who he was.

She felt suddenly that she'd been wrong about his not suspecting she'd gone all the way to the bottom. He'd be sure to suspect a little, when it went flying about the office that she'd been seen emerging from the pit. He'd hardly dismiss it with a shrug, even though he'd have no way of knowing for sure she'd succumbed to an irresistible impulse ... to overturn a big, flat stone.

She came to a sudden, perhaps not completely wise decision. She wouldn't go to the office at all this morning. She'd go straight back home and decide what to do about the gun in the privacy of her own apartment.

Let Eaton think what he wished, let all the others gossip about her. Compared to what she'd just discovered it had about as much importance as a microscopic hair on the leg of a gnat. She could plead illness, a sudden attack of migraine. It was a good enough excuse.

Better to return home at once with the gun and come to as completely wise a decision as she was capable of. If she decided to go to the police, there was nothing to be lost by waiting until noon.

* * * * *

It was strange, it never ceased to amaze Ruth Porges, how much familiar surroundings, a chair you sat in daily, a painting on the wall that had become as well-known to you as the face and even the shared thoughts of an old friend, a potted palm you'd watch grow and watered dutifully for years--just how much such objects helped you to think clearly when you were in a tormented frame of mind.

She'd made her decision now and she felt no remorse, no sense of guilt at all. She was probably a very unusual person in some respects, but she had long since ceased to reproach herself because she felt compelled at times to behave in an unusual way.

She'd hid the gun where she didn't think it would be found easily, if the police should suspect anything--they still kept dropping in at the office--and called unexpectedly within the next few hours to question her about her descent into the excavation and her sudden decision to take the day off. As soon as it became dark she'd take a taxi to the East River on the upper East Side, get out a few blocks from the esplanade that overlooked the most turbulent part of the river, walk calmly through the beautiful park that ended in an ascending terrace, and make sure that all of the nearby benches were unoccupied. Then she'd move quickly to the iron railing and toss the gun as far out into the river as she could.

Did they ever drag the East River for a murder weapon? Could they, with any real hope of finding it? She didn't know for sure, but she rather suspected they couldn't.

And how would anyone ever know, or even remotely suspect, where she'd tossed the gun? They'd have to drag the Hudson also and the bay all the way to Staten Island, because you could drop a gun from a ferry too.

She knew she couldn't morally justify what she was planning to do. It would have been useless to try. But if she had hated Lathrup herself enough to want to kill her, she couldn't see herself in the role of a hypocritical betrayer, sending to his death a man who had lost control completely and gone all the way. If the police had stumbled on the gun themselves, without her help, it would have been quite different. But having opened a Pandora's box, the horror that had come out had to be destroyed. It was her responsibility--hers alone. That the box had been a big flat stone that she had overturned impulsively, with no knowledge of what lay concealed underneath, changed nothing. The same woman's curiosity which had betrayed Pandora had been at work in her. It was the most destructive kind of curiosity in the world, but she had succumbed to it and must pay the price, even if it would mean that she would have to wear a gray prison uniform for four or five years.

Probably the killer should be caught and compelled to defend himself before the law, bolstering his defense with whatever justification he could offer. But she couldn't--she refused pointblank--to become the instrument of his destruction. It was a twisted way of thinking, perhaps, but it was her way and she would have to act upon it.

She had gone into the kitchen and was percolating some coffee when the doorbell rang. It didn't alarm her particularly or even bring the image of a policeman with one finger firmly pressed to the bell into her mind.

The doorbell usually rang eight or ten times a day when she was at home. Tradesmen mostly, with groceries she'd ordered by telephone the day before or a special delivery letter from the office with proofs that required a quick checking-over, or just a neighborly visit from the over-talkative girl who lived in the apartment across the hall. Sally Draper could be an awful pest at times--

Then she remembered that no one would expect her to be home on a week-day morning and did become a trifle uneasy. But salesmen and peddlers were always calling, weren't they, defiantly ignoring the big warning sign posted in the hall?

She turned off the gas under the percolator, removed the slightly soiled apron she'd put on to protect the severe, freshly-laundered office dress she'd been too emotionally upset to take off on arriving home and went to answer the bell, crossing the living room with a slight quickening of her pulse.

She paused for the barest instant with her hand on the knob of the front door, trying quickly to decide just what she had better say if it actually was a policeman.

Then she opened the door wide.

Her first impulse, prompted by sheer terror, was to close it again instantly, slam it in his face with all her strength. But he just stood there, staring at her so quietly, with not the slightest trace of hostility in his eyes, that she forced herself to remain calm. And when his expression changed, and his eyes narrowed to gleaming slits and his jaw hardened, he was too quick for her.

He brushed past her into the apartment and swung about to face her, nodding toward the door.

"Better put the chain on," he said. "I imagine the super has a key, and this is one time when we can't afford to chance any kind of interruption."

There was something about the way he was looking at her that compelled instant compliance. She closed the door, clicked the lock on, and inserted the head of the chain into the metal groove on the right side of the door. Her fingers shook as she ran it the full length of the groove.

He was staring at her very steadily now, his eyes still slitted. "You found it, didn't you?" he asked.

"Found what? I just don't understand. I didn't go to the office this morning because--"

"Because you found it," he said, not giving her time to finish, and taking a slow step toward her.

"No, you must listen. Please ... I...."

"Where is it? What have you done with it?" he demanded.

She shook her head, her lips deathly pale now. She was trembling so violently that it was like ... a confession. How could she hope to deceive him when he already knew, when the truth was written in her eyes?

"I showed it to you once," he said. "That's the bad part ... the really bad part. Just one word from you could send me to the chair. You wouldn't even have to turn it over to the police."

He took another slow step toward her and quite suddenly ... she knew. He'd come here to kill her. Even if she told him where the gun was hidden, even if she put it into his hands and swore that she'd keep silent, that not even police brutality could force the truth out of her, he'd never feel secure while she remained alive.

He'd never trust her completely ... because he didn't know her _that_ well. She'd never really been close to him. Oh, if only she had. If only they'd been lovers, and she'd gone to bed with him ... anything. The thought revolted her even now, but it was better than dying ... and now she was going to die.

He wasn't the kind of man who propositioned every pretty woman he met. She would have had to let him know unmistakably that she was ... that kind. He'd respected her too much to make even a pass the few times she'd gone out with him. There had been something terribly decent about him ... and she'd admired him for it, respected him in return.

But it would have been better, far better, if she'd let him think her a whore. A killer could trust a slum prostitute because that kind of woman was herself an enemy of the law. Or felt put upon, an outcast, just as he himself had now become, because when he'd killed Lathrup he'd put himself beyond the pale.

She'd never been close to him, that was the trouble. He didn't know that there was a fierce kind of loyalty in her that would never have permitted her to turn informer, because she herself had been a criminal in her thoughts and had wanted Lathrup to die.

He could never have thought her a street-walking strumpet, but if she had slept with him he'd have known just what kind of woman she was, how fierce and determined her loyalty could be. Now it was too late ... much too late ... and she was going to die.

It seemed unjust, horribly cruel and unnecessary. But how could she make him see that?

"You've hidden it somewhere about this apartment," he said. "I'm sure of that. You'd better tell me--fast."

She shook her head, a faint glimmer of hope arising in her. If she refused to tell him where she'd concealed the gun he might not kill her until he knew. He'd have to know, have to find it. Or would he? If she was dead, unable to testify against him, the gun might have been so well-hidden it would never turn up again. He might even jump to the conclusion she'd gotten rid of it already or take a chance on that and--

No, no, _no_! Now she was thinking crazily. Getting rid of the gun would mean she was capable of sympathizing with what he'd done, understanding it--would mean that she was on _his_ side. And that was the very thing something deep in her nature, her every reasoning instinct, told her he'd never believe. The closeness again. She could plead with him until she was hoarse, but he'd never believe that. He'd kill her anyway. Kill her first perhaps and search the apartment for the gun afterwards....

And that seemed to be what he had made up his mind to do. He was losing patience with her; she could see that plainly enough and the tight knot of fear which was constricting her heart began to tighten even more, and she swayed a little and had to bite down hard on her tongue to keep from screaming.

It wasn't just that he was losing patience with her. There was a heightened tenseness in him, a kind of muscular rigidity that was making his neckcords bulge, his shoulders stiffen. She could sense it, feel it--that dangerous tension mounting in him.

He might want to search for the gun first, but there were times when the human mind went out of control, lost all of its capacity to reason intelligently.

His face was twisting terribly. She tried not to look at him, tried to avoid his eyes, and managed to do so for an instant. But she knew he was still looking at her, that his eyes were burning with a slow, merciless kind of rage simply because she had discovered the truth about him.

He was drawing closer to her suddenly. His feet made a scuffling sound as he advanced upon her and he was breathing in a strange way, hoarsely, almost raspingly.

Closer he came and closer, but still she dared not look at him. And then she did look and saw the glaze of fury in his eyes and she screamed in wild terror, knowing even as she screamed that no help could come to her.

She fought him desperately, trying to push his arms away, trying to get free of his arms that were beginning to tighten about her. It wasn't a lust-crazed lover's embrace. If only it had been there might have been some hope for her. But how could she hope to escape from the embrace of a man so goaded, the embrace of a man who thought that his own life would be forfeited if he did not silence her quickly and forever.

The harder she struggled the closer his arms came and then it wasn't his arms but his hands she had most to fear. They were reaching for her throat and there was no way she could keep them from encircling her throat and tightening cruelly, no way of avoiding the strangling grip of his strong, muscular fingers.

His thumbs sank into the soft flesh just above her wind-pipe, and began to press ... and to press....

She could only shake her head, frantically back and forth, and plead dumbly. "No. Please don't. There's no need. I'd have thrown the gun--"

When he finally arose and left her she was lying stretched out full length on the floor, her sightless eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, as if it were a great, rushing river sweeping above her and carrying with it a gun which he spent thirty-five minutes trying to find, ransacking the apartment and cursing softly from time to time, and even crying out once in savage rage and frustration.

He did not find it, and left the apartment without even stopping to look once more at the swollen, purplish face and protruding tongue of a woman who would have gone to prison to protect him.