was dead. If he were still alive the F.B.I, would have found him before this. But that only made the mystery worse. Why hadn’t his remains turned up? Even his dead body would be so hot it was practically radioactive. And that still left the utterly baffling question of how that money had wound up here—that is, those two twenty-dollar bills. Suppose somebody had come into possession of it through some set of circumstances as yet unknown; wouldn’t even a sub-human intelligence grasp the fact that there might be just a touch of the unusual about a suitcase full of money lying around that way and that he’d better be careful where he tried to spend it? So why two brand new and consecutively numbered bills of that denomination in a place where a twenty of any kind would attract attention?

But, wait. She’d said she had spent the night in town. Maybe she had got the money there. No. That didn’t fit. He’d told her to pick up the motors, so he must have given her the money with which to pay for them. That brought it right back here again. And there were only two possibilities.

Either the Nunns had that loot themselves, or somebody who did have it had spent part of it here. You almost had to eliminate Nunn; he’d been a peace officer and if he were trying to pass off hot money he’d do it where it wouldn’t leave such a clearly marked trail. He’d realize the dangers inherent in the whole thing.

I grinned in the darkness as it suddenly occurred to me that in all these suppositions and theories I had taken it for granted that anyone stumbling into the orbit of that missing bag of loot through no matter what set of unusual circumstances would automatically be another crook who’d try to cash in on it, instead of an honest man who’d merely call the nearest cop and turn it in. This calm assumption was clearly based on Godwin’s Law of Character Erosion, which states that the attrition of honesty varies inversely with the square of the distance and directly with the mass of the temptation.

I tried to think of some way of pumping her as to who had spent those two twenties. But no matter how obliquely I went at it I’d arouse suspicion. The circumstance of my showing up here for the first time within hours of her visit to the store might look a little odd in itself, without doing anything else to attract attention. It was a long time before I went to sleep.

The sound of a car driving into the clearing waked me just at dawn. I looked around the interior of the crude little cabin. It was roofed with corrugated sheet metal and its flooring was of splintery, unfinished pine planks. Aside from the bed the only furnishings were a sheet metal stove for heat during the duck season and a wooden packing box on which stood a pail of water and a wash-basin. I hurriedly washed my face, dressed in khaki fishing clothes, and went outside with a dixie cup of water to brush my teeth. It was one of those rare combinations of time and place that always made you a little sad at the thought of dying and never seeing its like again. There was an almost poised stillness about it, as if the day were waiting to explode. The surface of the narrow inlet, walled in by high-crowned and shadowy timber, was unbroken and dark, and little feathers of mist curled off it to hang suspended against the backdrop of the trees. Before me and a little to the right eight or ten skiffs were moored to a float that ran out from the shore like something lying on a mirror. Everything was wet with dew.

The man who had driven up in the car had apparently gone into the main building. I went over and entered. The lantern was burning again, its white light issuing from the doorway to blend with the gray tones of dawn. Jewel Nunn, in shorts and a man’s shirt, was frying eggs on the grill. She glanced up sullenly as she heard the screen door open, and I saw that her eyes were puffy and faintly red as if from sleeplessness or crying. Nunn himself was taking some spinning lures from the showcase. He nodded curtly. The other man, presumably the one who had called last night, was sitting