She took me into her living room, backed away from me, revolved, and asked me how I liked the new dress. I said I liked it. She explained that the color was rose beige and that the dinguses on the side were something or other, winding up:

“And you really think I look good in it?”

“You always look good,” I said. “Lew Yard and Pete the Finn went calling on old Elihu this afternoon.”

She made a face at me and said:

“You don’t give a damn about my dress. What did they do there?”

“A pow-wow, I suppose.”

She looked at me through her lashes and asked:

“Don’t you really know where Max is?”

Then I did. There was no use admitting I hadn’t known all along. I said:

“At Willsson’s, probably, but I haven’t been interested enough to make sure.”

“That’s goofy of you. He’s got reasons for not liking you and me. Take mama’s advice and nail him quick, if you like living and like having mama live too.”

I laughed and said:

“You don’t know the worst of it. Max didn’t kill Noonan’s brother. Tim didn’t say Max. He tried to say MacSwain, and died before he could finish.”

She grabbed my shoulders and tried to shake my hundred and ninety pounds. She was almost strong enough to do it.

“God damn you!” Her breath was hot in my face. Her face was white as her teeth. Rouge stood out sharply like red labels pasted on her mouth and cheeks. “If you’ve framed him and made me frame him, you’ve got to kill him—now.”

I don’t like being manhandled, even by young women who look like something out of mythology when they’re steamed up. I took her hands off my shoulders, and said:

“Stop bellyaching. You’re still alive.”

“Yes, still. But I know Max better than you do. I know how much chance anybody that frames him has got of staying alive long. It would be bad enough if we had got him right, but—”

“Don’t make so much fuss over it. I’ve framed my millions and nothing’s happened to me. Get your hat and coat and we’ll feed. You’ll feel better then.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going out. Not with that—”

“Stop it, sister. If he’s that dangerous he’s just as likely to get you here as anywhere. So what difference does it make?”

“It makes a—You know what you’re going to do? You’re going to stay here until Max is put out of the way. It’s your fault and you’ve got to look out for me. I haven’t even got Dan. He’s in the hospital.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got work to do. You’re all burnt up over nothing. Max has probably forgotten all about you by now. Get your hat and coat. I’m starving.”

She put her face close to mine again, and her eyes looked as if they had found something horrible in mine.

“Oh, you’re rotten!” she said. “You don’t give a damn what happens to me. You’re using me as you use the others—that dynamite you wanted. I trusted you.”

“You’re dynamite, all right, but the rest of it’s kind of foolish. You look a lot better when you’re happy. Your features are heavy. Anger makes them downright brutal. I’m starving, sister.”

“You’ll eat here,” she said. “You’re not going to get me out after dark.”

She meant it. She swapped the rose beige dress for an apron, and took inventory of the ice box. There were potatoes, lettuce, canned soup and half a fruit cake. I went out and got a couple of steaks, rolls, asparagus, and tomatoes.

When I came back she was mixing gin, vermouth and orange bitters in a quart shaker, not leaving a lot of space for them to move around in.

“Did you see anything?” she asked.

I sneered at her in a friendly way. We carried the cocktails into the dining room and played bottoms-up while the meal cooked. The drinks cheered her a lot. By the time we sat down to the food she had almost forgotten her fright. She wasn’t a very good cook, but we ate as if she were.

We put a couple of gin-gingerales in on top the dinner.

She decided she wanted to go places and do things. No lousy little runt could keep her cooped up, because she had been as square with him as anybody could be until he got nasty over nothing, and if he didn’t like what she did he could go climb trees or jump in lakes, and we’d go out to the Silver Arrow where she had meant to take me, because she had promised Reno she’d show up at his party, and by God she would, and anybody who thought she wouldn’t was crazy as a pet cuckoo, and what did I think of that?

“Who’s Reno?” I asked while she tied herself tighter in the apron by pulling the strings the wrong way.

“Reno Starkey. You’ll like him. He’s a right guy. I promised him I’d show at his celebration and that’s just what I’ll do.”

“What’s he celebrating?”

“What the hell’s the matter with this lousy apron? He was sprung this afternoon.”

“Turn around and I’ll unwind you. What was he in for? Stand still.”

“Blowing a safe six or seven months ago—Turlock’s, the jeweler. Reno, Put Collings, Blackie Whalen, Hank O’Marra, and a little lame guy called Step-and-a-Half. They had plenty of cover—Lew Yard—but the jewelers’ association dicks tied the job to them last week. So Noonan had to go through the motions. It doesn’t mean anything. They got out on bail at five o’clock this afternoon, and that’s the last anybody will ever hear about it. Reno’s used to it. He was already out on bail for three other capers. Suppose you mix another little drink while I’m inserting myself in the dress.”

∴

The Silver Arrow was half-way between Personville and Mock Lake.

“It’s not a bad dump,” Dinah told me as her little Marmon carried us toward it. “Polly De Voto is a good scout and anything she sells you is good, except maybe the Bourbon. That always tastes a little bit like it had been drained off a corpse. You’ll like her. You can get away with anything out here so long as you don’t get noisy. She won’t stand for noise. There it is. See the red and blue lights through the trees?”

We rode out of the woods into full view of the roadhouse, a very electric-lighted imitation castle set close to the road.

“What do you mean she won’t stand for noise?” I asked, listening to the chorus of pistols singing Bang-bang-bang.

“Something up,” the girl muttered, stopping the car.

Two men dragging a woman between them ran out of the roadhouse’s front door, ran away into the darkness. A man sprinted out a side door, away. The guns sang on. I didn’t see any flashes.

Another man broke out and vanished around the back.

A man leaned far out a front second-story window, a black gun in his hand.

Dinah blew her breath out sharply.

From a hedge by the road, a flash of orange pointed briefly up at the man in the window. His gun flashed downward. He leaned farther out. No second flash came from the hedge.

The man in the window put a leg over the sill, bent, hung by his hands, dropped.

Our car jerked forward. Dinah’s lower lip was between her teeth.

The man who had dropped from the window was gathering himself up on hands and knees.

Dinah put her face in front of mine and screamed:

“Reno!”

The man jumped up, his face to us. He made the road in three leaps, as we got to him.

Dinah had the little Marmon wide open before Reno’s feet were on the running board beside me. I wrapped my arms around him, and damned near dislocated them holding him on. He made it as tough as he could for me by leaning out to try for a shot at the guns that were tossing lead all around us.

Then it was all over. We were out of range, sight and sound of the Silver Arrow, speeding away from Personville.

Reno turned around and did his own holding on. I took my arms in and found that all the joints still worked. Dinah was busy with the car.

Reno said:

“Thanks, kid. I needed pulling out.”

“That’s all right,” she told him. “So that’s the kind of parties you throw?”

“We had guests that wasn’t invited. You know the Tanner Road?”

“Yes.”

“Take it. It’ll put us over to Mountain Boulevard, and we can get back to town that-a-way.”

The girl nodded, slowed up a little, and asked:

“Who were the uninvited guests?”

“Some plugs that don’t know enough to leave me alone.”

“Do I know them?” she asked, too casually, as she turned the car into a narrower and rougher road.

“Let it alone, kid,” Reno said. “Better get as much out of the heap as it’s got.”

She prodded another fifteen miles an hour out of the Marmon. She had plenty to do now holding the car to the road, and Reno had plenty holding himself to the car. Neither of them made any more conversation until the road brought us into one that had more and better paving.

Then he asked:

“So you paid Whisper off?”

“Um-hmm.”

“They’re saying you turned rat on him.”

“They would. What do you think?”

“Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me.”

He looked at me while he said it. He was a man of thirty-four or -five, fairly tall, broad and heavy without fat. His eyes were large, brown, dull, and set far apart in a long, slightly sallow horse face. It was a humorless face, stolid, but somehow not unpleasant. I looked at him and said nothing.

The girl said: “If that’s the way you feel about it, you can—”

“Look out,” Reno grunted.

We had swung around a curve. A long black car was straight across the road ahead of us—a barricade.

Bullets flew around us. Reno and I threw bullets around while the girl made a polo pony of the little Marmon.

She shoved it over to the left of the road, let the left wheels ride the bank high, crossed the road again with Reno’s and my weight on the inside, got the right bank under the left wheels just as our side of the car began to lift in spite of our weight, slid us down in the road with our backs to the enemy, and took us out of the neighborhood by the time we had emptied our guns.

A lot of people had done a lot of shooting, but so far as we could tell nobody’s bullets had hurt anybody.

Reno, holding to the door with his elbows while he pushed another clip into his automatic, said:

“Nice work, kid. You handle the bus like you meant it.”

Dinah asked: “Where now?”

“Far away first. Just follow the road. We’ll have to figure it out. Looks like they got the burg closed up on us. Keep your dog on it.”

We put ten or twelve more miles between Personville and us. We passed a few cars, saw nothing to show we were being chased. A short bridge rumbled under us. Reno said:

“Take the right turn at the top of the hill.”

We took it, into a dirt road that wound between trees down the side of a rock-ridged hill. Ten miles an hour was fast going here. After five minutes of creeping along Reno ordered a halt. We heard nothing, saw nothing, during the half-hour we sat in darkness. Then Reno said:

“There’s an empty shack a mile down the way. We’ll camp there, huh? There’s no sense trying to crash the city line again tonight.”

Dinah said she would prefer anything to being shot at again. I said it was all right with me, though I would rather have tried to find some path back to the city.

We followed the dirt track cautiously until our headlights settled on a small clapboard building that badly needed the paint it had never got.

“Is this it?” Dinah asked Reno.

“Uh-huh. Stay here till I look it over.”

He left us, appearing soon in the beam of our lights at the shack door. He fumbled with keys at the padlock, got it off, opened the door, and went in. Presently he came to the door and called:

“All right. Come in and make yourselves to home.”

Dinah cut off the engine and got out of the car.

“Is there a flashlight in the car?” I asked.

She said, “Yes,” gave it to me, yawned, “My God, I’m tired. I hope there’s something to drink in the hole.”

I told her I had a flask of Scotch. The news cheered her up.

The shack was a one-room affair that held an army cot covered with brown blankets, a deal table with a deck of cards and some gummy poker chips on it, a brown iron stove, four chairs, an oil lamp, dishes, pots, pans and buckets, three shelves with canned food on them, a pile of firewood and a wheelbarrow.

Reno was lighting the lamp when we came in. He said:

“Not so tough. I’ll hide the heap and then we’ll be all set till daylight.”

Dinah went over to the cot, turned back the covers, and reported:

“Maybe there’s things in it, but anyway it’s not alive with them. Now let’s have that drink.”

I unscrewed the flask and passed it to her while Reno went out to hide the car. When she had finished, I took a shot.

The purr of the Marmon’s engine got fainter. I opened the door and looked out. Downhill, through trees and bushes, I could see broken chunks of white light going away. When I lost them for good I returned indoors and asked the girl:

“Have you ever had to walk home before?”

“What?”

“Reno’s gone with the car.”

“The lousy tramp! Thank God he left us where there’s a bed, anyway.”

“That’ll get you nothing.”

“No?”

“No. Reno had a key to this dump. Ten to one the birds after him know about it. That’s why he ditched us here. We’re supposed to argue with them, hold them off his trail a while.”

She got up wearily from the cot, cursed Reno, me, all men from Adam on, and said disagreeably:

“You know everything. What do we do next?”

“We find a comfortable spot in the great open spaces, not too far away, and wait to see what happens.”

“I’m going to take the blankets.”

“Maybe one won’t be missed, but you’ll tip our mitts if you take more than that.”

“Damn your mitts,” she grumbled, but she took only one blanket.

I blew out the lamp, padlocked the door behind us, and with the help of the flashlight picked a way through the undergrowth.

On the hillside above we found a little hollow from which road and shack could be not too dimly seen through foliage thick enough to hide us unless we showed a light.

I spread the blanket there and we settled down.

The girl leaned against me and complained that the ground was damp, that she was cold in spite of her fur coat, that she had a cramp in her leg, and that she wanted a cigarette.

I gave her another drink from the flask. That bought me ten minutes of peace.

Then she said:

“I’m catching cold. By the time anybody comes, if they ever do, I’ll be sneezing and coughing loud enough to be heard in the city.”

“Just once,” I told her. “Then you’ll be all strangled.”

“There’s a mouse or something crawling under the blanket.”

“Probably only a snake.”

“Are you married?”

“Don’t start that.”

“Then you are?”

“No.”

“I’ll bet your wife’s glad of it.”

I was trying to find a suitable come-back to that wisecrack when a distant light gleamed up the road. It disappeared as I sh-sh’d the girl.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A light. It’s gone now. Our visitors have left their car and are finishing the trip afoot.”

A lot of time went by. The girl shivered with her cheek warm against mine. We heard footsteps, saw dark figures moving on the road and around the shack, without being sure whether we did or didn’t.

A flashlight ended our doubt by putting a bright circle on the shack’s door. A heavy voice said:

“We’ll let the broad come out.”

There was a half-minute of silence while they waited for a reply from indoors. Then the same heavy voice asked: “Coming?” Then more silence.

Gun-fire, a familiar sound tonight, broke the silence. Something hammered boards.

“Come on,” I whispered to the girl. “We’ll have a try at their car while they’re making a racket.”

“Let them alone,” she said, pulling my arm down as I started up. “I’ve had enough of it for one night. We’re all right here.”

“Come on,” I insisted.

She said, “I won’t,” and she wouldn’t, and presently, while we argued, it was too late. The boys below had kicked in the door, found the hut empty, and were bellowing for their car.

It came, took eight men aboard, and followed Reno’s track downhill.

“We might as well move in again,” I said. “It’s not likely they’ll be back this way tonight.”

“I hope to God there’s some Scotch left in that flask,” she said as I helped her stand up.