The others stared at me for a minute, and then returned to their own conversation.

I ordered another beer. Ollie uncapped it and set it before me. He appeared to be the most intelligent and least unfriendly of the lot. “Why two cars?” I asked.

He mopped the bar, looked at me appraisingly, and started to say something, but Rupe beat him to it. The shiny black eyes swung around to me, and he asked, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Chatham,” I said shortly.

“I don’t mean that, mister. What have you got to do with this.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Why?”

“You seem to be pretty interested, for it to be none of your put-in.”

“I’m just studying the native customs,” I said. “Where I grew up, people accused of murder were tried in court, not in barrooms.”

“You’re new around here?”

“I’m even luckier than that,” I said. “I’m just passing through.”

“How come you’re riding a taxi? Just to pump Jake?”

I was suddenly fed up with him. “Shove it,” I said.

His eyes filled with quick malice and he made as if to get off the stool. The bartender glanced at him and he settled back. His friend, a much bigger man, studied me with dislike in his eyes, apparently trying to make up his mind whether to buy a piece of it or not. Nothing happened, and in a moment it was past.

I fished a dime from my pocket and went back to the telephone. The dark girl and the man in the cowboy hat had apparently been paying little attention to us. The girl glanced up now as I went past. I had an impression she was scarcely eighteen, but she looked as if she’d spent twice that long in a furious and dedicated flight from any form of innocence. Her left leg was stretched out under the edge of the table with her skirt hiked up, and the man was grinning slyly as he wrote something on her naked thigh with her lipstick. She met my eyes and shrugged.

I stepped into the booth, and the instant I closed the door I knew I’d found it. The fan came on with an uneven whirring sound caused by the faulty bearing. I thought swiftly. From the lunch-room in there he could even have seen her drive in when she returned from town; that was the reason he’d called almost immediately. But the maid had said he’d called twice before while she was out. Well, that meant those were from somewhere else and that he was moving round. The chances were a thousand to one against his being one of the three out there now.

I went through the motions of making a call, and as I left the booth I shot a glance at the literary cowboy. He could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and forty, with a smooth, chubby face like that of an overgrown baby, and the beginnings of a paunch. The shirt, I noted now, wasn’t blue, as I’d thought—at least, not all over. It was light gray in front, with pearl buttons, and flaps on the breast pockets, and was stained in two or three places in front as if he’d spilled food on it. His eyes were china-blue and made you think of a baby’s, apart from the quality of yokel shrewdness and sly humor you could see in them as he patted the dark girl on the leg and invited her to read whatever it was he’d written on it. He was probably known as a card.

I went back to my beer. From sheer force of habit I sized up Rupe and his friend, but they were as unlikely as the humorist.