Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (21 page)

“We’d better get there soon, or else camp for the night under a cactus,” Phyllis remarked. “Because we can’t run this steeplechase in the dark.”

“I have a pocket flashlight,” Miss Withers told her. She put down the dog and fumbled at her handbag. Then she gasped. The catch was open, and the bag hung wide.

Hastily she fumbled in the depths. There was her purse—there the flashlight. But something more important than these was missing.

“Good heavens!” she said.

Phyllis stopped short. “What’s wrong? Lose anything?”

Miss Withers hesitated and then shook her head. “Luckily, no,” she said. “I thought for a minute …”

She looked back, but the prospect of a search over that impossible trail was out of the question. “Let’s hurry on,” she said.

They hurried on, through the thickening darkness and the howling gale. The feeble glow of the flashlight served only to keep them from plunging off precipitous cliffs into the sea and to warn them when cactus barred the way. On and on they toiled, with Miss Withers frantically trying to remember where it was that she had had cause to open her bag.

She had taken out her handkerchief in the cave, she remembered that. Just after they had seen the spider … was it there?

They were descending a rocky ledge into the depths of another of the interminable canyons, and Phyllis was leading the way.

Miss Withers was jarred out of her thoughts by a shrill scream from the girl. She ran forward with the light to see Phyllis leaning against the rocky wall, her handkerchief at her mouth.

“I saw it—in there!” She was pointing toward a little sheltered shelf under the canyon wall. Mister Jones leaped down from Miss Withers’s arms with a tornado of barking, and something clattered away into the night.

“I saw it, I tell you!” insisted Phyllis. “Its face wasn’t a foot from mine. I tell you it was the devil out of hell—horns and a horrible ghostly gray face. …”

Miss Withers nodded. “You can rest assured of one thing,” she said gently. “Old Nick wouldn’t run from this yapping dog of yours.” She sniffed. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, you were frightened by a very rank old billy goat. I’ve heard that they run wild here.”

Above the howl of the storm they could hear the diminishing clatter of frightened hooves. Mister Jones returned, muddy and discouraged, from the chase.

“What’s good enough for a goat ought to be good enough for us,” Miss Withers pointed out. “It’s dry in here, and the wind doesn’t strike it. I’m too tired to take another step.”

The two women huddled beneath the curve of the rock, with Mister Jones between them. Wet, miserable, they crouched as prehistoric savages would have crouched under similar circumstances. Not being prehistoric savages, they had a good deal to say about the whole situation.

Miss Withers could stay bottled up no longer. “I did lose something back there,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to say anything about it, but perhaps you can tell me where you saw me open my handbag. It was open during most of our hike.”

“What did you lose?” Phyllis’s voice was strained.

“I don’t know, exactly,” said Miss Withers. “I know it was important. It was a blue envelope, but I don’t know what was in it.”

There was a long pause. Then: “I do,” said Phyllis La Fond.

“You
what?”
gasped Miss Withers.

Phyllis nodded. “I know what was in it,” she repeated. “Thirty of the biggest bills I’ve ever seen in all my life—fifteen thousand dollars!”

M
UDDY WATER DROPPED DOWN THE
back of Miss Withers’s neck, like some ancient oriental torture, but that lady paid no attention to it. She was staring in wonderment at the girl beside her. For once in her life, the schoolteacher was at a loss for words.

“How do you know?” she finally managed to ask, weakly.

“I know because I opened it,” Phyllis told her calmly. She handed over a damp blue rectangle. Miss Withers took it, glanced at the sheaf of bright new currency, and replaced it in her handbag, which she closed with a snap.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t mention it to you,” said Phyllis. “It wasn’t because I was sore at you and wanted to make you worry. I picked the envelope up at the cave where you dropped it, and I’ve been trying to decide ever since whether to give it back or keep it. You see—I could use the fifteen thousand.”

Miss Withers nodded slowly. “I see your point of view. Finders are keepers—isn’t that the idea?”

“And losers are weepers,” Phyllis concluded. “When I opened the envelope and saw all that money, I made up my mind to cling to it. And then I don’t know what got into me—I went softie, I guess.”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t apologize for an honorable action,” Miss Withers chided her gently.

The wind was dying down, as if its sole purpose had been to whisk this ill-assorted pair into that lonely niche in the rocks. Phyllis found a crumpled package of cigarettes somewhere about her person and managed to light one. Miss Withers pondered the meaning of this latest development. So instead of securities, as the desk clerk at the hotel had suggested, the blue envelope contained a small fortune in currency!

Fifteen thousand dollars—this was the second time that such an amount of money had entered the case. What was it that Oscar Piper had wired her from his office at Police Headquarters in New York? Something about certain parties offering to spend fifteen “grand” if Forrest was unable to testify before the Brandstatter Committee. Well, Forrest was forever prevented from giving the testimony which would reveal graft among the public officials who had made him a cat’s-paw … and here was fifteen thousand dollars, as if waiting for a claimant.

Miss Withers was fond of putting two and two together and making considerably more than four out of it.

“I think,” she told Phyllis, “that you’ve done not only the honest thing, but also the wise thing in handing back that blue envelope. Because unless I miss my guess, it contains money that is tainted. You didn’t notice anything wrong with it, did you?”

“Me? Of course not. They were all new five-hundred-dollar bills.”

“There is blood on them,” said Hildegarde Withers.

Her attention was suddenly brought back to earth by Mister Jones. The little dog was wriggling in her arms, sniffing and barking with a black button of a nose pointed across the canyon.

“He must smell another goat,” suggested Phyllis. But Miss Withers shook her head.

“Listen,” she said. “And tell me if I’ve gone completely out of my head, or if you hear a radio somewhere. I’ve read of seeing mirages, but never of hearing them.”

Phyllis listened. Somewhere in the distance, faint but distinct, she could hear a jazz singer appropriately intoning “Chloë.”

“It’s a search party!” she said excitedly.

“I never heard of a search party with a portable phonograph for entertainment,” Miss Withers told her. “Look at Mister Jones—he wants to push on across the canyon. We’ve failed as pathfinders, let’s follow him.”

They plunged down the canyon slope and came upon a winding path which led up the other side. Here, strangely enough, was a grove of twisted eucalyptus trees—and beyond them, not half a mile away, the twinkling lights of what Miss Withers instantly recognized to be the settlement at the Isthmus!

They stopped short and looked at each other, wordlessly. The wind had gone down completely now, and though the sky was still overcast above them, far out at sea the last pale light of a sunset was showing through a break in the curtain.

Acting on an impulse which neither understood, the two women shook hands. “I’ll make a bargain with you,” Miss Withers suggested. “If you’ll forget about the fiasco with the gun, I’ll forget about the blue-envelope business.”

“It’s a go,” said Phyllis. And then, arm in arm, the girl who had had too many men and the woman who had not had any hurried gratefully back toward civilization, at the muddy heels of an excited little black and white dog.

Theirs was a reception profoundly satisfying as they stumbled up the steps of Madame O’Grady’s Come-On-Inn, the Isthmus boarding house.

That good and buxom lady took them at once to her motherly bosom. “Mither of God, it’s the lost ladies!” She wrapped them in hot blankets and conversation, plied them with steaming food and drink, and set them before a roaring fireplace to dry. From the lighted dining room, inquisitive faces showed that their welcome did not depend upon their being the only guests. Kay and Marvin Deving brought their coffee cups companionably before the fireplace and plied them with questions. The newlyweds explained that the storm had delayed the return of the Sunday excursion, owing to the danger of crossing mountain slopes already loosened by the morning’s quake, and that the entire party had decided to remain all night. T. Girard Tompkins, who confessed that he had come along only because he understood that Phyllis planned to be a member of the party, showed a new animation at her unexpected arrival.

His paunch jogged up and down as he trotted about with hot-water bottles, lights for Phyllis’s cigarettes, and a square bottle from which he poured liquid fire into their coffee and into Mister Jones’s dish of raw eggs and milk. Under Miss Withers’s stern eye he nobly abstained from taking any himself, and tonight there was no mention of his favorite tune.

“With three hundred and sixty days of sunshine in the year, you had to come wandering over thim hills on a day like this one,” Madame O’Grady complained as she fussed with the great eucalyptus logs in the fireplace. “’Tis a fine introduction to the loveliest spot on the loveliest island but wan in God’s universe.”

She militantly swept the hearth clean again and then put her hands on her wide hips. “Now wasn’t it like a pair of greenhorns to go gallivanting off and get lost—with poor Amos Britt coming in every half-hour or so to give orders to the search parties that’s combing the hills for ye.”

Miss Withers clattered the spoon in her saucer. “The chief—is he here?”

“He is and he ain’t,” admitted Madame O’Grady. “He’s drove over here four or five times to use my telephone, because it’s the only one at the Isthmus. But most of his time he’s been spending over to Mike Price’s place, a half a mile across the Neck. ’Tis there that the moving-picture folk are staying, though God Himself only knows why, with oleomargarine on the table instead of good butter. They say that it’s closer to where they’re making their moving picture, though I’m thinking that it’s only because Mike Price isn’t as particular about their heathenish goings on as some others. Women walking around half naked, and those noisy trucks roaring around at all hours of the day and night!”

Miss Withers edged in a question as to what the Madame might know of Chief Britt’s purpose.

“He’s looking for a cold, dead body, they do be saying,” she was told. “And he’s got better sense than to come looking for it here.”

Miss Withers rose, a little shakily, to her feet. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll step outdoors and get a breath of fresh air.”

Madame O’Grady shook her head blankly as the schoolteacher departed. “A dozen miles over the hills already today—and now she wants fresh air!” Phyllis called out “Wait!” and half rose in her chair.

But Miss Withers was already moving resolutely down the road toward the flickering cluster of lights which she knew to be Mike Price’s place. They seemed to be within a stone’s throw, but no matter how fast she walked, they kept tantalizingly the same distance away.

The road led along a silver beach, and Miss Withers could see, a short distance upon her right, another equally silvered strip of sand, and beyond it another expanse of rolling ocean. Truly, the tireless attempt of the sea to make two islands out of one was nearing its successful culmination here. Miss Withers paused to illumine a roadside sign with her flashlight.

“Fifteen cents admission to the ancient Pirate Ship
Ning Po
—have lunch where more than a thousand Human Beings were tortured to death!”

Miss Withers sniffed. “A happy thought,” she observed. As she turned away from the cheerful placard and the looming dark wreck which stood embedded in the sand beyond it, she heard the roar of a speeding automobile coming toward her. It rounded the curve and flashed by on two wheels, its lights momentarily blinding her.

All the same, for a moment she thought that she recognized the bulky man who sat behind the wheel. But it was too late to do anything about that, and she pushed on.

Weariness such as she had never imagined came over her, but she never faltered. The flickering lights of Mike Price’s place became a symbol in her mind, a goal which could not be, and must be, reached.

All the same, she was never to get there. She plodded past a little city of tents, where a campfire or two still lingered, and then came upon a long pier which stretched out over the water. The moon was now shining as clearly as if the sky had never been overcast at all, and by its light she could see the figure of a man sitting disconsolately upon a piling.

For a moment she thought that her quest was successful and that it was the chief, after all. “Hello!” she called.

Then she noticed that the solitary man was smoking a cigarette, a vice which Chief Britt considered effeminate. “I beg your pardon,” she said stiffly.

The man rose to his feet, and she saw that he was wearing riding boots. “Oh, it’s Mr. Tate!”

“Hello,” said the moving-picture director, unenthusiastically. “Yeah, it’s me. What’s left of me.”

Miss Withers approached somewhat gingerly. She was not one to believe all that she had read about movie directors, but then, you can never tell, as she often remarked.

“I don’t know what you want,” Tate told her bitterly. “But whatever it is, you’re too late.” He threw his cigarette viciously into the water and turned to her. “Listen, have you got any influence with this comedy constable of a Britt?”

“Possibly,” Miss Withers hedged. “Why?”

“Because the guy is nuts, that’s why. He’s plumb loco, or else he’s hired by some other outfit to put the skids under this picture I was trying to make.”

Miss Withers, never averse to securing information of any kind, asked what it was that the chief had done this time.