The news of Whisper’s capture spread quickly. When Noonan, the coppers he had brought along, and I took the gambler and the now conscious Jerry into the City Hall there were at least a hundred people standing around watching us.

All of them didn’t look pleased. Noonan’s coppers—a shabby lot at best—moved around with whitish strained faces. But Noonan was the most triumphant guy west of the Mississippi. Even the bad luck he had trying to third-degree Whisper couldn’t spoil his happiness.

Whisper stood up under all they could give him. He would talk to his lawyer, he said, and to nobody else, and he stuck to it. And, as much as Noonan hated the gambler, here was a prisoner he didn’t give the works, didn’t turn over to the wrecking crew. Whisper had killed the chief’s brother, and the chief hated his guts, but Whisper was still too much somebody in Poisonville to be roughed around.

Noonan finally got tired of playing with his prisoner, and sent him up—the prison was on the City Hall’s top floor—to be stowed away. I lit another of the chief’s cigars and read the detailed statement he had got from the woman in the hospital. There was nothing in it that I hadn’t learned from Dinah and MacSwain.

The chief wanted me to come out to his house for dinner, but I lied out of it, pretending that my wrist—now in a bandage—was bothering me. It was really little more than a burn.

While we were talking about it, a pair of plain-clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with. It had broken a rib for him, and he had taken a back-door sneak while the rest of us were busy. Noonan’s men had picked him up in a doctor’s office. The chief failed to get any information out of him, and sent him off to the hospital.

I got up and prepared to leave, saying:

“The Brand girl gave me the tip-off on this. That’s why I asked you to keep her and Rolff out of it.”

The chief took hold of my left hand for the fifth or sixth time in the past couple of hours.

“If you want her taken care of, that’s enough for me,” he assured me. “But if she had a hand in turning that bastard up, you can tell her for me that any time she wants anything, all she’s got to do is name it.”

I said I’d tell her that, and went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o’clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.

Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.

We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of the City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.

I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.

I backed into an alley entrance and slid my gun loose. The car came abreast. An arc-light brightened two faces in the front of the car. The driver’s meant nothing to me. The upper part of the other’s was hidden by a pulled-down hat. The lower part was Whisper’s.

Across the street was the entrance to another block of my alley, lighted at the far end. Between the light and me, somebody moved just as Whisper’s car roared past. The somebody had dodged from behind one shadow that might have been an ash-can to another.

What made me forget Whisper was that the somebody’s legs had a bowed look.

A load of coppers buzzed past, throwing lead at the first car.

I skipped across the street, into the section of alley that held a man who might have bowed legs.

If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn’t armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.

Three-quarters of a block of this, and a shadow broke away from another shadow—a man going pell-mell away from me.

“Stop!” I bawled, pounding my feet after him. “Stop, or I’ll plug you, MacSwain.”

He ran half a dozen strides farther and stopped, turning.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, as if it made any difference who took him back to the hoosegow.

“Yeah,” I confessed. “What are all you people doing wandering around loose?”

“I don’t know nothing about it. Somebody dynamited the floor out of the can. I dropped through the hole with the rest of them. There was some mugs standing off the bulls. I made the back-trotters with one bunch. Then we split, and I was figuring on cutting over and making the hills. I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I just went along when she blew open.”

“Whisper was pinched this evening,” I told him.

“Hell! Then that’s it. Noonan had ought to know he’d never keep that guy screwed up—not in this burg.”

We were standing still in the alley where MacSwain had stopped running.

“You know what he was pinched for?” I asked.

“Uh-huh, for killing Tim.”

“You know who killed Tim?”

“Huh? Sure, he did.”

“You did.”

“Huh? What’s the matter? You simple?”

“There’s a gun in my left hand,” I warned him.

“But look here—didn’t he tell the broad that Whisper done it? What’s the matter with you?”

“He didn’t say Whisper. I’ve heard women call Thaler Max, but I’ve never heard a man here call him anything but Whisper. Tim didn’t say Max. He said MacS—the first part of MacSwain—and died before he could finish it. Don’t forget about the gun.”

“What would I have killed him for? He was after Whisper’s—”

“I haven’t got around to that yet,” I admitted, “but let’s see: You and your wife had busted up. Tim was a ladies’ man, wasn’t he? Maybe there’s something there. I’ll have to look it up. What started me thinking about you was that you never tried to get any more money out of the girl.”

“Cut it out,” he begged. “You know there ain’t any sense to it. What would I have hung around afterwards for? I’d have been out getting an alibi, like Whisper.”

“Why? You were a dick then. Close by was the spot for you—to see that everything went right—handle it yourself.”

“You know damned well it don’t hang together, don’t make sense. Cut it out, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t mind how goofy it is,” I said. “It’s something to put to Noonan when we get back. He’s likely all broken up over Whisper’s crush-out. This will take his mind off it.”

MacSwain got down on his knees in the muddy alley and cried:

“Oh, Christ, no! He’d croak me with his hands.”

“Get up and stop yelling,” I growled. “Now will you give it to me straight?”

He whined: “He’d croak me with his hands.”

“Suit yourself. If you won’t talk, I will, to Noonan. If you’ll come through to me, I’ll do what I can for you.”

“What can you do?” he asked hopelessly, and started sniveling again. “How do I know you’ll try to do anything?”

I risked a little truth on him:

“You said you had a hunch what I’m up to here in Poisonville. Then you ought to know that it’s my play to keep Noonan and Whisper split. Letting Noonan think Whisper killed Tim will keep them split. But if you don’t want to play with me, come on, we’ll play with Noonan.”

“You mean you won’t tell him?” he asked eagerly. “You promise?”

“I promise you nothing,” I said. “Why should I? I’ve got you with your pants down. Talk to me or Noonan. And make up your mind quick. I’m not going to stand here all night.”

He made up his mind to talk to me.

“I don’t know how much you know, but it was like you said, my wife fell for Tim. That’s what put me on the tramp. You can ask anybody if I wasn’t a good guy before that. I was this way: what she wanted I wanted her to have. Mostly what she wanted was tough on me. But I couldn’t be any other way. We’d have been a damned sight better off if I could. So I let her move out and put in divorce papers, so she could marry him, thinking he meant to.

“Pretty soon I begin to hear he’s chasing this Myrtle Jennison. I couldn’t go that. I’d given him his chance with Helen, fair and square. Now he was giving her the air for this Myrtle. I wasn’t going to stand for that. Helen wasn’t no hanky-panky. It was accidental, though, running into him at the Lake that night. When I saw him go down to them summer houses I went after him. That looked like a good quiet place to have it out.

“I guess we’d both had a little something to drink. Anyway, we had it hot and heavy. When it got too hot for him, he pulled the gun. He was yellow. I grabbed it, and in the tussle it went off. I swear to God I didn’t shoot him except like that. It went off while the both of us had our hands on it. I beat it back in some bushes. But when I got in the bushes I could hear him moaning and talking. There was people coming—a girl running down from the hotel, that Myrtle Jennison.

“I wanted to go back and hear what Tim was saying, so I’d know where I stood, but I was leery of being the first one there. So I had to wait till the girl got to him, listening all the time to his squawking, but too far away to make it out. When she got to him, I ran over and got there just as he died trying to say my name.

“I didn’t think about that being Whisper’s name till she propositioned me with the suicide letter, the two hundred, and the rock. I’d just been stalling around, pretending to get the job lined up—being on the force then—and trying to find out where I stood. Then she makes the play and I know I’m sitting pretty. And that’s the way it went till you started digging it up again.”

He slopped his feet up and down in the mud and added:

“Next week my wife got killed—an accident. Uh-huh, an accident. She drove the Ford square in front of No. 6 where it comes down the long grade from Tanner and stopped it there.”

“Is Mock Lake in this county?” I asked.

“No, Boulder County.”

“That’s out of Noonan’s territory. Suppose I take you over there and hand you to the sheriff?”

“No. He’s Senator Keefer’s son-in-law—Tom Cook. I might as well be here. Noonan could get to me through Keefer.”

“If it happened the way you say, you’ve got at least an even chance of beating the rap in court.”

“They won’t give me a chance. I’d have stood it if there’d been a chance in the world of getting an even break—but not with them.”

“We’re going back to the Hall,” I said. “Keep your mouth shut.”

∴

Noonan was waddling up and down the floor, cursing the half a dozen bulls who stood around wishing they were somewhere else.

“Here’s something I found roaming around,” I said, pushing MacSwain forward.

Noonan knocked the ex-detective down, kicked him, and told one of the coppers to take him away.

Somebody called Noonan on the phone. I slipped out without saying, “Good-night,” and walked back to the hotel.

Off to the north some guns popped.

A group of three men passed me, shifty-eyed, walking pigeon-toed.

A little farther along, another man moved all the way over to the curb to give me plenty of room to pass. I didn’t know him and didn’t suppose he knew me.

A lone shot sounded not far away.

As I reached the hotel, a battered black touring car went down the street, hitting fifty at least, crammed to the curtains with men.

I grinned after it. Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn’t keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.