Patton said soberly: “Somebody might get hurt taking him. That wouldn’t be right. If it’s anybody, it’s got to be me.”

Degarmo grinned. “You’re a nice boy, Patton,” he said. “Look, I’ll put the gun back under my arm and we’ll start from scratch. I’m good enough for that too.”

He tucked the gun under his arm. He stood with his arms hanging, his chin pushed forward a little, watching. Patton chewed softly, with his pale eyes on Degarmo’s vivid eyes.

“I’m sitting down,” he complained. “I ain’t as fast as you anyways. I just don’t like to look yellow.” He looked at me sadly. “Why the hell did you have to bring this up here? It ain’t any part of my troubles. Now look at the jam I’m in.” He sounded hurt and confused and rather feeble.

Degarmo put his head back a little and laughed. While he was still laughing, his right hand jumped for his gun again.

I didn’t see Patton move at all. The room throbbed with the roar of his frontier Colt.

Degarmo’s arm shot straight out to one side and the heavy Smith and Wesson was torn out of his hand and thudded against the knotty pine wall behind him. He shook his numbed right hand and looked down at it with wonder in his eyes.

Patton stood up slowly. He walked slowly across the room and kicked the revolver under a chair. He looked at Degarmo sadly. Degarmo was sucking a little blood off his knuckles.

“You give me a break,” Patton said sadly. “You hadn’t ought ever to give a man like me a break. I been a shooter more years than you been alive, son.”

Degarmo nodded to him and straightened his back and started for the door.

“Don’t do that,” Patton told him calmly.

Degarmo kept on going. He reached the door and pushed on the screen. He looked back at Patton and his face was very white now.

“I’m going out of here,” he said. “There’s only one way you can stop me. So long, fatty.”

Patton didn’t move a muscle.

Degarmo went out through the door. His feet made heavy sounds on the porch and then on the steps. I went to the front window and looked out. Patton still hadn’t moved. Degarmo came down off the steps and started across the top of the little dam.

“He’s crossing the dam,” I said. “Has Andy got a gun?”

“I don’t figure he’d use one if he had,” Patton said calmly. “He don’t know any reason why he should.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

Patton sighed. “He hadn’t ought to have given me a break like that,” he said. “Had me cold. I got to give it back to him. Kind of puny too. Won’t do him a lot of good.”

“He’s a killer,” I said.

“He ain’t that kind of killer,” Patton said. “You lock your car?”

I nodded. “Andy’s coming down to the other end of the dam,” I said. “Degarmo has stopped him. He’s speaking to him.”

“He’ll take Andy’s car maybe,” Patton said sadly.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said again. I looked back at Kingsley. He had his head in his hands and he was staring at the floor. I turned back to the window. Degarmo was out of sight beyond the rise. Andy was half way across the dam, coming slowly, looking back over his shoulder now and then. The sound of a starting car came distantly. Andy looked up at the cabin, then turned back and started to run back along the dam.

The sound of the motor died away. When it was quite gone, Patton said: “Well, I guess we better go back to the office and do some telephoning.”

Kingsley got up suddenly and went out to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a stiff drink and drank it standing. He waved a hand at it and walked heavily out of the room. I heard bed springs creak.

Patton and I went quietly out of the cabin.

FORTY-ONE

Patton had just finished putting his calls through to block the highways when a call came through from the sergeant in charge of the guard detail at Puma Lake dam. We went out and got into Patton’s car and Andy drove very fast along the lake road through the village and along the lake shore back to the big dam at the end. We were waved across the dam where the sergeant was waiting in a jeep beside the headquarters hut.

The sergeant waved his arm and started the jeep and we followed him a couple of hundred feet along the highway to where a few soldiers stood on the edge of the canyon looking down. Several cars had stopped there and a cluster of people was grouped near the soldiers. The sergeant got out of the jeep and Patton and Andy and I climbed out of the official car and went over by the sergeant.

“Guy didn’t stop for the sentry,” the sergeant said, and there was bitterness in his voice. “Damn near knocked him off the road. The sentry in the middle of the bridge had to jump fast to get missed. The one at this end had enough. He called the guy to halt. Guy kept going.”

The sergeant chewed his gum and looked down into the canyon.

“Orders are to shoot in a case like that,” he said. “The sentry shot.” He pointed down to the grooves in the shoulder at the edge of the drop. “This is where he went off.”

A hundred feet down in the canyon a small coupe was smashed against the side of a huge granite boulder. It was almost upside down, leaning a little. There were three men down there. They had moved the car enough to lift something out.

Something that had been a man.

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler was born in 1888 and published his first story in 1933 in the pulp magazine Black Mask. By the time he published his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), featuring, as did all his major works, the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe, it was clear that he had not only mastered a genre but had set a standard to which others could only aspire. Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best of twentieth-century literature. He died in 1959.

OTHER BOOKS BY

RAYMOND CHANDLER

AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE

The Big Sleep

The High Window

Farewell, My Lovely

The Little Sister

The Simple Art of Murder

Trouble Is My Business

The Long Goodbye

Playback

The Lady in the Lake (1943)

A couple of missing wives—one a rich man’s and one a poor man’s become the objects of Marlowe’s investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo and the other may be dead. Marlowe’s not sure he cares about either one, but he’s not paid to care.