Bridge to Trouble: Chapter IV
“You didn’t ask me to help, you told me I was helping,” I said with some asperity. “What else can I do, when you tell me my home is crawling with bandits?"
Bridge to Trouble is a romantic-suspense novella set in 1920s Montana.
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Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so?
I told me so, dilly dilly, I told me so.
- Lavender’s Blue -My sleep that night was undisturbed—such of it as there was, anyway. I lay awake for a good while with one ear turned toward my open windows listening for an automobile motor and trying to puzzle out the meaning of the tracks I had followed. But I fell asleep at last, and woke at a normal hour next morning.
After breakfast I walked down across the bridge again, as if I thought perhaps the tracks would yield something new from another viewing. I had only just stepped off the planking on the far side when I heard a noise dimly over the rush of the stream—a distant sound fading, flaring again, reverberating up through the woods. The instant I realized it was a motor I dashed forward and flung myself into a thicket of young pine off to the side of the road. Inwardly I burned to plant myself in the road and confront the motorist as bluntly as I had Keith Phillips, but the thought of that deliberately loosened boulder bounding down the mountainside spoke to my common sense. Getting a good look first at the man who had done that seemed the better part of valor.
For a moment the grumble of the motor grew steadily nearer, and then suddenly checked and throttled back, dwindling down to an idling that I could just barely hear. When it had stayed like that for a moment I realized the car had stopped somewhere further down the road. I turned and ducked deeper into the trees, knowing that the road switched back below me just a few dozen yards further down, and if I climbed straight downhill I could get a good view of it from above without being seen.
I went carefully, not wanting to give myself away by the least rustle. When the young trees began to give way to bushes less than shoulder height I dropped to a crouch, scrambling sideways with one hand to the ground. Ahead of me a silver-trunked alder leaned out from the hillside above a younger thicket, and I slipped in behind it, and reached out to part the light branches in front of me with one hand. As I had calculated, I had a perfect vantage-point over the road some fifteen or twenty steep yards beneath, and the auto was stopped just where I could see it through a lacy screen of pine branches—a plain, dusty black Ford with the top down, the man at the wheel its only occupant. What was more interesting, Sonny Barton was standing beside it, leaning on the driver’s door as they talked. He must have been expecting the car and been waiting down the road to intercept it. I was too far away to see the man in the car distinctly, but the style of his hat did not spell Montana. The distance and the mutter of the motor kept me from hearing their voices, but I thought from an occasional impatient gesture of hand or head that they were not agreeing too well.
The parley lasted a good five minutes or longer. Then finally Sonny moved away from the car, looking back to make some final adjuration to the driver with a motion of his hand, and started up the road to the Pont. I saw the man in the car sit back and look at his watch, and I realized that whatever they had agreed upon must depend on my whereabouts, which Sonny must be off to establish. I twisted around on the balls of my feet and began to climb as quickly as I could. All I needed was to see which way Sonny went after he crossed the bridge, and I could easily outgeneral him.
When he set foot on the bridge, I was lurking in a thicket not ten feet behind him. Once across, he turned left and took the shortcut to the barn—a narrow twisting footpath that climbed up like a staircase through the pines on the west side of the house cliff. That was enough for me. As soon as Sonny disappeared into the trees I burst from my covert, ran light-foot across the bridge and up to the house, where for all he knew I had been all along.
Almost exactly fifteen minutes later, I heard the resonating echo of the automobile motor laboring up the final stretch of road and across the bridge. By the time it had bumped up the sweep of the drive and came to a creaking stop at the back door, I’d decided to play along. I was curious as well as annoyed, and I might as well find out as much as I could before I took action.
The man who had just disembarked from the Ford as I stepped out the back door was an unremarkable-looking person, on the shorter side, clad in a plain brown tweed suit that said little about its owner or its tailor. I resisted the urge to look at his shoes. “Miss—Pierpont, I think?” he said, doffing his hat and extending his hand. “My name is Mills.”
We shook hands. He inquired, “Is Mrs. Pierpont at home?”
You know she’s not, you polite fraud. “No, I’m afraid she isn’t. She’s away at present, visiting family. Can I help you, Mr. Mills?”
“Well—perhaps,” said Mills, with a slight hesitating pause and an appraising look at me which was somewhat diverting, knowing as I did that it was a performance for my benefit. “Miss Pierpont, I’m a representative of a firm—a company—a mining company, to be frank. I’ve been sent up here to investigate the possibility of significant gold deposits in the region of Mount St. Orleans, and my company would like permission to conduct a survey of those possibilities on Pierpont land.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Mr. Mills, I’m afraid you’ve been sent up here on a wild-goose chase. There used to be a lot of gold mining around here, but the veins in the Pierpont mines tapered off to nothing before I was born—almost twenty years ago. I doubt there’s any ore left that’s worth the expense of getting at, if there’s any at all.”
“The, er, old Pierpont mines were not what I meant,” said Mills. He rubbed the back of his head. “I see I’m going to have to be more frank. Your family cut a good deal of timber for Government contracts during the war, correct?”
I nodded, all at sea.
“Well, it seems that a man who worked on one of your lumber crews did some prospecting around and panning in the streams up here on the mountain in his spare time, just for amusement—but found traces of gold that indicated quite rich placer deposits somewhere nearby. He said nothing about his discovery at the time. Very shortly afterwards he was drafted into the army, and I’m sorry to say he lost his life on the Western Front, but before that he told another man in his unit about the gold he had found in Montana. This other man after the war approached our company with his knowledge, in hopes of securing a position with us and a share in the proceeds should we succeed in developing the lumberman’s find—in cooperation with the owner of the land, of course.”
“But Mr. Mills, that’s absurd! I know my father prospected all over Mount St. Orleans when he first came up here in the eighties; he knew practically every foot of the ground. If there had been signs of gold that promising in our streams he surely would have known about it.”
“Maybe he did know about it,” said Mills. “Have you never been aware, Miss Pierpont, that some local gossips credit the Pont with having an extra, unknown source of income, unaccounted for by your father’s dealings in timber and sheep?”
My mouth fell partly open. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” I said. “Mr. Mills—what exactly are you implying?”
Mills gave a very slight shrug and smile, spreading his hands apart a little. “Perhaps your father did make an additional discovery of gold on his land. One he did not choose to talk about.”
“Without ever telling my mother or me?” I retorted with deep skepticism.
Mills smiled again, a patronizing smile that irked me more than anything else he had said. “What man tells everything to his wife?” he said. “But that’s not to the point. If the gold is there, the Pacifico-Northwestern Mining Company is deeply desirous of reaching an agreement to develop it. That’s why I’m here.”
“Well—really,” I said, feeling a little out of my depth, “I don’t see how I can help you just now. I can’t make decisions of that kind—my mother—”
“Yes. Of course.” Mills seemed just a touch taken aback. “When will Mrs. Pierpont be home?”
“Soon,” I said non-commitally, “but honestly, I think you may be wasting your time if you wait to see her. I’m pretty sure Mother will be able to tell you that any rumor you heard was just a mistake.”
“Well, that’s a risk I’ll have to take. The most important thing is, I want to request your promise not to allow any other firm to make a survey until I’ve had a chance to see Mrs. Pierpont. We’re not entirely sure, you see, that the man who approached us with the story the lumberman told him didn’t go to any other firms first. He swears he didn’t—but if another company put him off with a pretense of not being interested, but meaning to look into the matter themselves—well, you can see what might happen. But since the Pacifico-Northwestern was first to approach you, I think we can reasonably ask for the first opportunity to negotiate?”
“Well…naturally I can’t promise for Mother…” I gave it the air of one haggling carefully over a bargain, for Mills seemed to like that—“but I certainly don’t mean to let anybody look for gold here before she gets back. And honestly, Mr. Mills, I don’t think anybody else is going to ask.”
“That’s good enough for me,” declared Mills, putting his hat back on. “Thanks very much, Miss Pierpont. I don’t think you’ll regret being fair and square with the Pacifico-Northwestern Mining Company.”
“I hope not!” I said with a rather unexpected laugh, as there didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
Mills, smiling in slightly puzzled fashion, doffed his hat with something between a bow and a nod and then turned back toward his car. I wandered over toward the pergola at the side of the house and watched as he cranked the engine, got in and backed the car around. He doffed his hat and nodded and smiled again before he let off the brake and drove off down the hill, and I returned a perfunctory smile and lifted hand of farewell. Then, when he had disappeared from view, I went in and sat on a bench under the leafy shade of the pergola, my hands flat on either side of me, and tried to think.
Gold?
Could there really be some truth to what Mills had just told me?
His story in general sounded fishy to me. But one thing I knew: there was something on the Pont which he was so determined to keep others away from that he had pushed a boulder down the mountainside at someone who had inadvertently gotten too close. Something on the Pont was important enough that he had a clandestine contact here in Sonny Barton. Would plain, honest Ted Weems have been quite so amenable to the interests of the Pacifico-Northwestern Mining Company? That apparently spur-of-the-moment exchange of jobs in the Baldwinsville pool hall began to take on some interesting new angles.
Was there anything but gold that was worth playing such a deep game? And wouldn’t they have to have a pretty good idea there was something here to play for?
If it was true…it must mean that my father, whom I’d thought I knew, had effortlessly kept the secret from us all those years. I’d thought there was no part of him that was not open to Mother and me. Was it selfishness that made a man keep a secret like that, or had he thought we couldn’t be trusted with it?
On the other hand, taking Mills’ word about anything seemed doubtful. And, having heard what he had to say, what exactly was I supposed to do now?
In the end I reverted to type. I packed a lunch, saddled Esmerelda, and went out to spend the day on the mountainside trying to forget about it.
I wanted to stay away from Sonny Barton, I reasoned with myself, until I had figured out what line to take with him regarding Mills’ visit. It would look odd if I never mentioned it at all, but I had to plan exactly what I’d say. But once up on the mountain I didn’t think much about Sonny at all. My mind kept circling back to the vexing question of whether my father really had kept a lifetime’s supply of gold secret from us. To have never even told Mother—when I had always believed them to be as close in heart and soul as a husband and wife could be—or did Mother know?
That would be a whole different state of affairs to come to terms with: slightly less unsettling, but humbling to find I’d been kept in ignorance where I assumed I was in my parents’ confidence. I’d always assumed, I suppose—being an only child and so much among adults gave me the feeling that I was more one of them than I really was.
But…suppose Mother didn’t know…?
Altogether it was as unprofitable a few hours as any hours spent in fruitless conjecture and worry can be, and when I finally swung into the saddle and turned Esmerelda down toward home, I was wearied but no wiser. I took a shortcut down over a ridge into the easternmost of the Pont’s little winding valleys, where another small creek chattered pleasantly over its flat pebbly bed in a sunny open defile between the shallow wooded hills. As we emerged from the aspens at the top of the ridge Esmerelda’s ears flicked forward suddenly, and I saw the reason only a second later than she did. I saw a buckskin horse down by the creek, and Keith Phillips kneeling on the bank with his back to me, leaning over with his hands in the water as if he was sifting the sands of the shallows through his fingers.
Or panning for gold?
Some people may see red; I saw white-hot. He had fooled me a hundred times more neatly than Sonny Barton had even tried to do, and he had done it with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. Innocent camper, my foot—and now with the nerve to come up here and spy out the streams for himself as soon as he thought my back was turned. I startled Esmerelda forward with a switch of the reins and we slithered half-sideways down the hill, the mare snorting her disapproval. Keith Phillips lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder as I reached the level grass by the creek, and got to his feet and turned to meet me as I kicked my feet from the stirrups and dropped to the ground beside my horse.
“Well,” I said, “trespassing again? What happened this time—did your horse run away with you—right up onto the Pont? Or did you get some sand in your compass? No, don’t bother inventing a better one. I know what you’re doing here and don’t try to deny it.”
Keith Phillips’ eyebrows were up about as high as it’s possible for eyebrows to go. “Do you always drop down on people this way?”
“When they’re underhanded and dishonest I certainly do.”
“Now wait, just wait! If you’re going to use language like that, it’s no joke. What is it I’m supposed to have done?”
“Don’t waste time pretending! I know you’re after the gold.”
“Gold!” he repeated, staring in what looked like genuine surprise.
“I suppose one of those other companies sent you up here? Yes, I saw you panning in the stream just now.”
“No, I wasn’t,” said Keith, wiping his half-dried hands on his trousers. “I stopped here to water my horse. While I was at it I got down to look at the stones in the bed of the stream—geology used to be a sort of hobby of mine. Not in a very educated way, but I was just curious to see what kind of specimens of rock I could recognize here.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
Keith’s mouth twisted in a way that looked suspiciously like an attempt not to betray humor. “Well—no. I think you’re considerably more demanding than that. But I’m not going to make up a better one because this one happens to be true. I don’t know a thing about whatever gold you mean, and that’s not why I came up here.”
“Then why did the other prospector roll a rock down at you?”
“Other prospector?”
“Surveyor, wildcatter, whatever you call them. The man with the automobile.”
“O-h-h-h…him,” said Keith slowly, as if enlightened. “That’s interesting. That is interesting. Is that what he called himself?”
“A representative from a mining company, yes. And he seemed particularly anxious to keep people from any other companies away from the Pont.”
“Hmmm,” said Keith. He put up a hand and brushed his thick light hair back from his forehead. “If I were you, I wouldn’t believe everything I was told in that department.”
I exploded at him. “You have the nerve to say that to me?”
“Well, you’re right, I guess I needn’t have bothered,” said Keith with a grin. “But as I’ve been trying to tell you, I am actually telling the truth. Though you haven’t let me get around yet to explaining why I came back. I came up here because I was concerned about you.”
I put my head on one side sarcastically. “You’re going to have to do much better than that, Mr. Phillips. I’m too old for that line.”
“I’m sure you’re well able to take care of yourself, Miss Pierpont,” said Keith with a slight bow, “but—it is Miss Pierpont, isn’t it?—but if there’s something going on around you that you don’t even know about, it puts you at kind of a disadvantage, doesn’t it?”
“But I do know about it.”
“You don’t know that the ‘prospector,’ if that’s what he is, that you talked to is squatting in an abandoned barn in that ghost town down the mountain.”
I was silent for a few seconds. “How did you find that out?”
“I took my time going down the mountain yesterday,” said Keith, “and spent part of the afternoon prowling around near the old town, looking down some of the abandoned mine shafts on the hill and such. When it was getting dark I made camp a little ways outside the town, preferring open air to chancing one of those sagging roofs, but I hadn’t started a fire yet. I guess that’s why he didn’t see me. I heard an auto coming up the road from the direction of Baldwinsville, and after a minute I saw its headlights come into view below the town and then go winking in between the buildings. I expected it to go right through and on up the mountain road, but about halfway through the lights swung off to the side and then cut partly off, though I could still see a sort of glow. Then the lights and the motor went off altogether, and a minute later I heard a sound like a door being shut. It was still only around dusk, so I could make out the shape of an old barn set back a little from the main street right around where the car had disappeared. It sounded like he’d pulled inside and closed the door behind him.
“Well, that was mildly interesting. So I snuck down the hill and sloped around the back of the barn to see what I could see. I found somebody had tacked gunnysacks or something over the windows, but of course there were plenty of cracks between the boards in those old walls and some light showed through them. I found a good crack and put my eye to it, and saw this man in the brown suit taking some crates of stuff out of the tonneau of the car. It looked like mostly canned goods, and a big bundle of newspapers sticking up out of one of them. He took a sheaf of yellow papers that looked like telegraph blanks out of his coat and put them somewhere in the front of the car. Then he lit a cigarette and pulled up a crate to sit on, and took out some food and starting hunting for a can opener, so I came away. I wasn’t interested enough to watch him eat his supper. But I was interested enough to hang around. I moved my camp further off where he wouldn’t spot me come daylight, and this morning I found a spot up on the hillside and kept an eye on the barn with my field glasses till I saw him open the door and drive the car out. He went up the mountain road—I suppose that’s when he came to see you.”
“Yes.”
“I saw him come back down,” said Keith. “I got off the road into the woods and didn’t let him see me. Anyway, I’d no idea who the man was, and the way he was skulking around in that ghost town didn’t seem quite on the up-and-up; and I didn’t know if you were by yourself up here. So I thought I’d come up and see you just to make sure you were all right, and at least see that you knew the man in the auto was hanging around. There was nobody at the house, so I came on across the meadow and up here looking for you.”
Something about that last sentence struck me. “You mean—when you came by it, there was nobody anywhere around the house or barn at all?”
“Nobody. I even gave a holler by the barn to see if anyone would—Should there have been?”
“A man working for us, that’s all.” I stood for a moment with folded arms, frowning in thought. “I don’t know that there’s anything so strange about Mills camping out in Pierpont. If he didn’t want anybody to know what his company was up to—”
“He could’ve just stayed in Baldwinsville and passed himself off as a tourist, or a traveling artist or photographer or something, with a lot less trouble. Does it really sound like something a man working for a big firm would do?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I know mining companies can be pretty cutthroat about getting their hands on good ore—big ones especially.”
“You mean when you talked to him, he struck you as genuine?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You see, I already knew he was—but listen, why should I talk to you about this? How do I know you’re not working for another company, and you’re telling me all this about the barn and the canned goods to make the Pacifico-Northwestern man look shady?”
Keith looked perplexed for a second as if he had forgotten how our conversation had begun, and then his face cleared easily. “Oh, if that’s all that’s bothering you. On my honor, I do not have and never have had art nor part, act nor thought in any mining company at all. Satisfy you?”
“I guess it’ll have to,” I said letting my arms fall unfolded with a wry smile. “Just remember, if you are lying, not one speck of gold, dust, nugget, or molten, do you and yours get.”
“Fair enough,” said Keith with a broad grin.
I told him about my conversation with Mills—adding, for Keith was understandably curious about this, how I knew it was Mills who had rolled the boulder down at him in the woods. Without having meant to I told him all about Sonny Barton as well—I had to explain how I had seen him in conference with Mills, and that led to the rest.
By the time I finished, we had sat down on a couple of flat stones by the side of the creek, and our horses were browsing side by side in the level grass a few yards away. The warm midday sun sparkled blindingly on the rippling surface of the creek, and on the opposite bank, gnats danced in a cloud above a shallow calm elbow of water, and bees and a lone butterfly circled a chokecherry bush that overhung the bank.
“Here’s what sounds fishy to me,” said Keith Phillips. “Of course you can’t do anything about mining rights without your mother, right?”
“Right—”
“And Mills didn’t ask you to write or wire her asking her about it, or to get in touch with her in any way.”
“No,” I said slowly, “he didn’t.”
“Then why approach you at all? All that stuff about getting you to promise not to let anybody else get in ahead of them—if another company was really in earnest, they could just as easily track down Mrs. Pierpont and get to her first by wire or in person or whatever. And you said Mills already knew she was away. So why come up here to see you, except to ask you to send for her?”
“All right. I’m beginning to believe you. But what then? What did he really want?”
“It sounds to me like they needed to have a reason to explain Mills skulking around the Pont. You’d heard the car, and you already had your doubts about Sonny. So they cooked up this gold mining story to allay any suspicions you might have.”
“And if that’s the case—what are they covering up for? You sound like you’ve got some idea about that.”
Keith didn’t answer for a minute. He was sitting with his feet apart and his elbows on his knees, passing a smooth stone from the stream back and forth from the palm of one hand to the other. At last he said, “I’ve got one idea. It may sound crazy, but it’s making more and more sense to me as I think about it.” He looked at me. “You’ve heard about the Conover kidnapping, haven’t you?”
I had to think for a minute. Then it came back to me. Sometime in the last week I had seen the name Conover blazoned across newspaper headlines which hadn’t made a deep impression on me at the time. I could recall a few of the basic facts: Riley Conover, the nineteen-year-old son of a Seattle millionaire, had been abducted by masked bandits while on a motor tour of Yellowstone with friends. An extortionate ransom had been demanded by letter, a frantic search was being carried out by private detectives and the authorities, but so far the kidnappers and their victim had seemingly vanished into thin air.
“You think they’re hiding here, on the Pont?”
“Think about it for a minute,” said Keith Phillips. He dropped the stone he had been juggling and picked up a twig, and sketched a rough diagram of the Montana-Wyoming border in a patch of dirt near his feet. “Here’s Yellowstone—and here’s us. From what I read in the papers last week, the bandits made off with young Conover and the touring-car the party had been traveling in, and left the rest of them afoot in the park. It was hours before they managed to get to a telegraph and give the alarm, and more before the park rangers found the car abandoned in the outskirts of the park. So the kidnappers had a big start, and no one has any clue what they traveled by once they ditched the Conover car—horses, another car, whatever. They could have covered a lot of ground to the north before anyone even knew to be watching out for them.
“You said this what’s-his-name—Barton—was a local boy, right? Well, suppose he was part of the gang that planned it. He’d have known all about Pont du Claire and how isolated it is, and probably that the family was going to be away for a few months. All he had to do was contrive to change places with the one man who was here, and they had a perfect hiding-place all to themselves for weeks, as they thought.”
I only half heard the end of this sentence. “Orleans,” I said.
“What?”
“I just remembered something else about Mills. When he mentioned the mountain, he gave it the French pronunciation—Or-ley-on, you know, just like we always do. Strangers who come up here for the first time almost always pronounce it Or-lins, like the city, like you did. I’m willing to bet that whoever Mills is, he heard of the mountain first from Sonny instead of reading it off a map.”
“I’ll bet you’re right. I wonder how he got in with the rest of them—Sonny, I mean.”
“He did say he was in the army. He could have crossed paths with all sorts of people there.”
“In any case,” said Keith, “it would explain why Sonny was so rattled when you turned up unexpectedly—and why they felt they needed a good story to explain Mills being around. I think he’s their contact man—maybe not the one trying to negotiate the ransom, but he’s keeping in touch with somebody in a city by wire, and carrying word of how things are going to the rest up here. There must be more of them, you know. The newspaper story said four masked men.”
“If it’s true,” I said slowly; “I’m not saying that it is yet…but if it is true…then I know where they’re keeping him.”
Keith slid half around on his rock to face me, his eyes alight in his lean mobile face. “Where? How?”
“Yesterday morning when I got in from a ride, I happened to mention to Sonny that I’d stopped at the sheep camp, and he looked so startled for a second that I thought it was a little odd. I thought maybe he’d been ragging our sheepherder and didn’t want me to know. But now I remember, there’s that old cabin way up at the head of this very creek that our herders used to use when they had the sheep in this valley, and we call it ‘the sheep camp.’ I only meant I’d been by our herder’s wagon, but Sonny thought I’d stopped at the cabin. If there’s really someone there, no wonder he was rattled.”
“That’s it. That’s got to be it. I know I’m right now.”
I gave myself a little shake, trying to crawl back into reality. “Look—it’s all very well to talk about it and put all these guesses together, but that’s what they are, just guesses.”
“I know. That’s why we need to find out for sure.”
“We?” I said tartly.
“Well, I won’t help if you don’t want me to,” said Keith, looking so innocent I longed to shake him, “but I can’t help thinking it’s a job for more than one person.”
I swallowed the temptation to give this the answer I felt it deserved, and stuck to practicalities. “Why don’t you just go on down to Baldwinsville and wire the nearest U.S. marshal? With half the country stirred up over the kidnapping, they’ll be hot to follow up any lead they can get.”
“No time for that,” said Keith. He stood up. “Riley Conover was kidnapped over a week ago. If the gang starts to lose their nerve with waiting, or suspects anyone is getting too close to their hideout—which you’ve done by accident—they might just kill him out of hand before a marshal could get here.”
I was silent for a second. I had got to my feet too. “How do you know they haven’t already killed him?” I said. “I heard of a case like that last year. They didn’t want the risk of keeping them, but still thought they could get the ransom so long as the relations thought the person was alive.”
“But then why would your coming home spook them so much? If they didn’t have Riley Conover on their hands, they could have just cleared out in the auto the first night. But you’re right, I don’t know. That’s why I want to find out for sure, so we know what to do next.”
I let the “we” pass this time, barring a slightly sardonic glance. “All right. You want to have a look at the cabin? It’s not very far from—but wait, do you know Sonny Barton is probably up there this minute? That’s why there was nobody around the house when you stopped there. I can show you the cabin easy enough, but it’s going to be hard to do anything without Sonny spotting us, if he’s anxious about what I’m doing.”
“Send him down to town on an errand,” suggested Keith.
I shook my head. “He’d suspect.”
I looked at the horses for a minute, an idea forming in my mind. “I’ve got a better idea. I’ll keep him occupied for a couple of hours while you take a look at the cabin. I’ll pretend to swallow the gold story hook, line, and sinker, and ask him to show me where Mills thinks it is. If any of our guesses are right, he’ll jump at the chance to lead me as far away from the cabin as possible.”
Keith Phillips bit his lip, cutting off a response that looked to have been quick assent. “Look,” he said, “I know I asked you to help…but I don’t want to hustle you into anything really risky. Will you be all right, alone with him?”
“You didn’t ask me to help, you told me I was helping,” I said with some asperity. “What else can I do, when you tell me my home is crawling with bandits? But as far as Sonny goes, I’ll be fine. If he really is in on a kidnapping plot, what he desperately wants is to keep the peace. Having anything happen to me is the last thing they need. Besides, like you said, he’s a local boy. If any harm came to me and it could be remotely traced back to him, he’s as good as dead and he knows it. Other people in Baldwinsville know he’s been working up here.”
Keith held the corner of his lower lip between his teeth a few seconds longer in indecision, then let it go and gave a nod. “All right,” he said. “Go for it. How do I get to the cabin?”
“I’ll draw you a map. Have you got anything I can write with?”
Keith turned up a blunt stub of pencil in his saddlebag after a couple moments’ search, which suddenly seemed agonizingly long with the thought of what we might be racing against. On a piece of brown paper from the wrappings of my lunch I drew him a quick map of the Pont, scribbling in as much detail as I could of the terrain surrounding the old cabin. There was a fair view in front of it down an open meadow to a turn in the valley, I told him, so he’d have to stick to the wooded hillsides once past this point and get around the back of it if he hoped to get close enough for a good look.
With a little more argument, we worked out the details. Keith was to trail me back to the house at a distance to see for himself that I had Sonny safely diverted before starting for the cabin. He would meet me again at the house under cover of darkness that night to report his findings.
“If I don’t come at all,” said Keith, “well—you make as reasonable an excuse as you can for going down to Baldwinsville tomorrow and wire the U.S. marshal yourself. It’ll probably be too late to do anybody any good, but they might catch some of ’em.”
“I wish,” I said with sudden vehemence, “that these people had chosen anywhere else but the Pont, whoever they are. Well, let’s get going—the sooner to get them all off of it.”
“I have a shrewd suspicion that I’m included in that number too,” said Keith Phillips dryly. “All right, I’m going. I hope we’ll have the dubious pleasure of meeting again!”
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