to get her started on Cliffords again, and offered her one. We leaned toward each other as I held the lighter. She was quite pretty, I thought, the way she was now with that warm friendliness in her eyes.

Then her face froze up as suddenly as if I’d hit her. She was looking over my shoulder. I turned just as Nunn pulled open the screen and stepped inside. He must move like a cat, I thought; neither of us had heard him come up on the porch.

I nodded, lit my own cigarette, and snapped off the lighter. “How’s fishing?” I asked, wondering why he was back this time of day. I hadn’t even heard the boat come into the inlet.

He stared at me. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “So-so. And how’s it been with you? You catching a lot of fish?”

“I had a little luck at first, but it died out.”

“Maybe you just give up too easy. Or do you?”

She had said nothing at all, and I was conscious of the tension in the room. There was ugly feeling about it, as if it could blow up if anybody made a bad move.

He stared bleakly at the two of us and then at the coffee cups. “I wonder if I could trouble you to go get that box of shear-pins?” he said to her. “That is, if you think you could spare the time.”

She got up from the stool without a word and disappeared through the doorway behind the counter. The silence she left behind her would have been awkward if it had been two other people. We cared so little for each other it didn’t seem to matter.

“You people do a fine job of overhauling motors,” he said.

I stared at him coldly. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Sheared a pin.”

“I gathered that,” I said. “But just what do you think those pins are in there for?”

“Forget it, forget it,” he growled. “You got your money, what do you care?”

“If the pin didn’t go you’d tear up the propeller when you hit something, or bend the shaft.”

He struck a match on his thumbnail and lit a cigarette. “Yeah? They’re supposed to have a friction clutch that’ll slip.”

“The new ones do,” I said. “Not the old models.”

“Sure. Sure. I knew you’d have all the answers. I’ve had nothing but trouble with those motors since I bought ’em.”

I finished the coffee, put a dime on the counter, and stood up. “Try taking care of them,” I said. “It helps.”

I started for the door. He moved aside grudgingly. You could see he was looking for trouble, but he wanted me out of here even more. It was all right with me; I had other things to do myself.

“You don’t want anything else?” he said.

I stopped and turned, looking into the bleak hatchet face from a distance of about two feet. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“I just wanted to be sure. That’s all right, ain’t it?”

“I guess so,” I said.

I went on out and crossed the sun-drenched clearing to my cabin. The argument about the motors was a phony. He probably hadn’t even sheared a pin, or if he had he’d done it on purpose for an excuse to sneak back. He was spying on her. Or on me.

I wondered why. Did it have something to do with the thing that’d brought me out here? Or did he simply believe she was the thing? It might figure that way, to a mind like Nunn’s, and the way he’d acted all along seemed to bear it out.

Well, if he wasn’t sure he was keeping her at home, that was his hard luck, not mine. I had other things to think about, such as the fact that while this whole thing might have appeared to be mildly goofy to begin with it was now completely insane.

You had all these pieces of evidence. They interlocked. You put them all together, and you had the answer. So what was it?

One of the great police organizations of the world was shaking down North America trying to find the loot from a bank robbery, while some dreamy birdbrain in his second childhood was serenely buying comic books with it.

Move over, Cliffords, I thought. I’ll bring up an armful and we’ll trade. Dibs on Superman.

Six

I cut the motor and came to rest beneath dense overhanging foliage along the bank. It was a little after one p.m. I had come over