a mile, I thought, since entering the mouth of the winding waterway up which Cliffords had gone with his boat, and I could as well be lost in some remote back country of the Amazon drainage. No sound broke the stillness of midday. The channel, about a hundred yards wide at this point, materialized out of the timber a quarter of a mile behind me and disappeared around another bend just ahead.

I opened the tackle box and unfolded the large map of the county. Here was the channel I was on; it was the easternmost arm of the lake, next to the highway and roughly paralleling it at a distance varying from two to three miles. I was about—say, at this point on it. Now. There was the access road coming in from the highway. It turned off the road a mile or so south of that tricky S-bend.

I sat still for a moment, frowning thoughtfully at the map without actually seeing it. What the devil was it? I shrugged, and lit a cigarette. It didn’t matter. Now, here. The dirt road, merely a thin line on the map, dead-ended on this channel. I glanced at the scale at the bottom of the map and estimated the distance. Say another four miles. And beyond it somewhere was the shack Cliffords lived in. She’d said a mile or two; I wondered if she had ever been up there herself.

I put the map back in the box and took the ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. It was an old one, creased and limp from the thousands of hands it had been through and like any one of a million others except for that narrow stain along the edge at one end. I compared it with the twenty. The stain was exactly the same color, a reddish shade of brown, and it was on only that one place. Why never anywhere else? There was one very good answer to that, I thought, and the picture it brought to mind made my skin prickle with excitement. Wherever it had been to pick up that discoloration, there had been a lot of it, stacked in bundles so that only this edge was exposed to the contaminating agent. You didn’t need a doctorate in physics to realize that a mere handful of banknotes, thrown loosely into a box or something, seldom stood on end of their own volition or stuck straight out from the side with no support. I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain; it smudged slightly and a faint trace of it came off. It was the same stuff.

Then I snorted. Precise chemical analysis by the Godwin laboratories. Millions of compounds were water soluble, and the minute dried crystals of practically any substance could be dispersed and spread with water. I was chasing moonbeams, and when I caught a sackful I’d build an arc light.

Cliffords was absurd. This entire thing was absurd. It almost had to be Haig, or Haig’s ill-gotten swag, that they were seeking, because he was the biggest crime story, and the most baffling one, of the past decade, and because they had shown me his picture. So where was the connection between that coldly violent killer and this harmless old pixie getting his kicks out of space ships and Peter Rabbit? Why, of course, I thought sarcastically; you could see the tie-in almost immediately. Cliffords had at one time been an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and Haig was born in California. Fool-proof, wasn’t it? And to narrow it down even further, they each had one left hand. Or at least, I supposed they did, or had.

Look at it, I thought. Cliffords was already living up here alone in this isolated backwater before Haig had even begun his fantastic career. I’d established that. Haig would be twenty-eight now; Cliffords was forty-five, or around there. There could be no family relationship, or even nodding acquaintance, between the two; anybody Haig had even borrowed a match from in the past ten years had been run down and checked out by the F.B.I.

So what did you have? You had nothing.

No-o. Not quite. No matter how fantastic it was, you still had the almost dead certainty that this derailed leprechaun was spending Haig’s money.

I cranked the motor.

Around each bend the next reach lay glaring and empty under the sun, as devoid of any signs of life or human habitation as the last. After about thirty minutes I began watching