he wants me to guide him. Any questions?”

He dropped the receiver on the hook. “Party line,” he said.

The country was filling up with people he didn’t like. He’d have to put on another shift, at tins rate, to be satisfactorily nasty to all of them.

She finished the hamburger and put it in front of me. “No coffee. You want a coke?”

“All right,” I said.

She opened one and put it on the counter, and then turned and went back through the doorway without a word. He leaned on the other side of the counter while I ate. He didn’t say anything. It was all right with me. I was caught up on his conversation.

When I had finished I stood up and took the wallet from my pocket. “How much?”

He shook his head. “Just settle up for the whole thing when you leave.”

“Might as well keep it straight as we go,” I protested. I had to get a look at that cash drawer tonight.

He shrugged. “Okay. That’ll be—let’s see—forty-five cents.”

I took out a five. He lifted a cigar box from a shelf under the counter, set it on top, and lifted the lid. There were four or five bills in it, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. He glanced at the five in my hand and shook his head.

“You got anything smaller?”

“I’ll see,” I said. I brought out a single. “Better give me a packet of cigarettes while you’re at it.”

He turned to get them off the back shelf. I shot a hand into the cigar box and spread the bills out. There were two fives and several singles, plus some silver.

There was no twenty, new or otherwise.

He gave me my change. I went out, drove the car up alongside the end cabin, and carried my gear in. It took me only a few minutes to unroll my bedding on the lumpy old mattress. I switched off the battery-operated camp lantern and lay down. Mosquitoes whined thinly around my ears in the dark as I lay there smoking a cigarette. Frogs kept up their chorus along the shore and I heard a feeding bass splash somewhere out in the lake.

Money? Out here? I must be crazy.

But where had those two twenties come from? Right here, hadn’t they? I’d seen them myself; there was no doubt of it whatever. Then I cursed softly and crushed out the cigarette. The whole thing was utterly absurd. Was I seriously expecting to find some connection between this mean and primitive little backwoods camp and the mystery of the slightly fantastic Bill Haig?

Four

They’d have called him Mad-dog Haig except that his first name was William. Wild Bill was inevitable then, but inaccurate, at least by connotation. The suggestive flamboyance of it as applied to race drivers and stunt men was no more descriptive of Haig than it would have been of the cold and vicious deadliness of a cobra. He was an atavism. He belonged back with the Machine-gun Kellys, the Pretty Boy Floyds, and the Dillingers of the thirties. He was the embodiment of violence. The odd part of it, though, was that until the time he flamed across the front pages two years ago at the age of twenty-six his only criminal record was that of a petty hoodlum arrested and convicted once for stealing cars. Apparently he had simply gone berserk, but berserk with a paradoxically calculated violence that was aimed at one thing: knocking off banks, and big ones.

In that brief period of six months beginning in August 1953 he and his gang had robbed three big-city banks by direct and brutal assault. Firepower and blind luck had got him out of all three of them, but it had been gory and not even very profitable until the last one he hit. He seemed to know nothing about banks and their protective devices, and to care even less. Planning apparently had no place in his modus operandi; he simply went in and then shot his way out. The first one, in St. Louis, had resulted in the death of a teller and a bank guard, and had netted him less than nine thousand dollars. The second one was in suburban Detroit. It gained him eighty thousand dollars for a few short minutes until the gang member carrying the majority of the loot was shot down in the street outside the bank in a gun battle with police. Haig and the other two escaped with something like fifteen thousand dollars, leaving behind them