you press the button.”

“Oh, you make me tired.”

“Take a rest, then. I’m going to Sumner Lake and I’ll be gone till Thursday.”

She stared coldly, facing me across the kitchen. “The Wheelers are coming tonight to play bridge. But that wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“Tell ‘em to stay home and start their own war,” I said. “Haven’t they got any initiative at all?”

She whirled and went out. She looked regal as hell. I finished the beer and went down the stairs to the basement. The instant I was alone everything else faded from my mind and the thousand fascinating aspects of the puzzle came swarming back at once. Did Mrs. Nunn know that money was hot? She couldn’t have. Then how had she got it? Why two of those bills? I irritably brushed all the questions aside. There were no answers to any of them, and I was merely wasting time. I began gathering up my camping and fishing paraphernalia—duffel bag with my fishing clothes and shaving gear in it, tackle box, fly-rod, mosquito dope, and bedding. I wouldn’t need cooking equipment or food; my information was the Nunn’s ran a lunch-room of sorts along with the three old cabins and the boat and motor rental business.

I carried it all out to the station wagon. It took two trips. As I was going through the living-room the second time she came down the stairs from the second floor. I paused, with both hands full, and said, “Well, see you Thursday. . . .” She stared, stony-eyed, and said nothing. I went on out to the car, threw the rest of the stuff in, and slammed out of the drive.

I turned left on Main, going north toward Sumner Lake. Javier lay to the south and east and this would be a roundabout way to get there, but when you start lying you have to be consistent. I stopped at a service station on the highway at the edge of town and had the gasoline tank filled and the oil checked. The man who ran it, Wendell Graham, was a fisherman himself and a frequent customer at the store.

“Lucky devil,” he said. “Sumner Lake, huh? I hear it’s been pretty good.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

Eight miles north of town I turned off the highway on to a secondary road going east. It was a little after six. I met few-cars. Twenty miles ahead the road connected with another north-south highway, State 41, after skirting the edge of the wild and heavily timbered country at the upper end of the lake. State 41 passed along the east side of Javier at a distance of two to three miles. There was an access road in from that side, but it ran through swampy bottom country and was passable only in dry weather.

There were a few more cars after I turned on to 41, though traffic wasn’t heavy. It was not one of the principal routes to the coast. Once as I topped a slight rise I could see the unbroken wildness of the bottom country to the west, though I could not see the lake itself. It was broken into channels and inlets this far up and they were out of sight in the timber. It was superb duck hunting country in winter, but the only way in then, aside from walking, was to leave your car at the camp on the south end and go up by boat. At the foot of the grade was the poorly banked S-curve that had killed five people in the past three years. I slowed automatically, even though the road was dry, idly noting the white crosses the Highway Department had put up on the shoulder where cars had gone off the road due to excessive speed or drunken driving. I frowned thoughtfully, trying to remember something that nibbled at the edge of my mind. Then I was past. It wasn’t important.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later I turned right again, leaving Highway 41 and taking to the country road that wound through the area to the south of the lake. The sun was gone now and warm summer dusk was thickening out through the timber. When my headlights sprayed against the three rural mailboxes and the old sign on my right I slowed and turned in through a cattle guard to a pair of dusty ruts going north across an old field long since abandoned to weeds and nettles. It hadn’t rained for a long time and the