I walked through the waiting-room and out into the ramp. It was a rest stop; the driver and most of the passengers got out. I went aboard and sat down about two-thirds of the way back. Easing the money from my pocket, I set it on the floor and pushed it under the seat ahead of me with my foot. Nobody was paying any attention to me. I sat there a few minutes longer and then made the startling discovery that I was out of cigarettes. I got off, went back through the waiting-room, and returned to the station wagon. I was sitting there smoking ten minutes later when the bus pulled out. The chances were very good it wouldn’t be discovered until the bus was serviced and cleaned at the end of the run, either in Kansas City or Chicago. A hundred and sixty-seven dollars with no identification attached packed the court rather heavily in favor of Godwin’s Ruling on Treasure-Trove, so it’d probably get back into circulation without disturbing the lost-and-found department. It couldn’t do any harm, and if it worked it would materially ease the F.B.I, pressure around here. I had to have time, and this was one way to buy it.

Cliffords was going to notice those twenties had disappeared, but it couldn’t be helped. I knew a little about that F.B.I, outfit and how it worked; they didn’t do anything half-way. Right now this whole countryside was alerted and they were poised and watching. Let just one more of those bills stick its head out and the game was over. There really wasn’t much Cliffords could do, anyway, except to move the tens to a new hiding place, which was all right with me. I wasn’t after them. And if he got worried enough to go back and reassure himself about the real cache, so much the better. So far I hadn’t come up with any plan at all for finding that, but having him beat a path to it would make it a lot easier.

I drove back to the lake. The same old futile merry-go-round started again in my mind, but I shut it off with irritation. It was utterly impossible to explain how Cliffords had got that money, but I no longer had to. I knew he had it. What else mattered? You didn’t deny the existence of something just because you couldn’t account for it, did you? You accepted Time, and invented clocks to measure it, without the faintest idea what it was, and you went right on living in spite of the fact that nobody had ever come with an explanation for Life.

The sheer magnitude and the excitement of it began to catch up with me now, for the first time. Up until a few hours ago it had been an intriguing puzzle, an abstract sort of thing whose fascination was inherent in the problem itself rather than any concrete expectation of gain. You didn’t really believe it; you couldn’t. In your heart what you actually believed was that the separate scraps of evidence added up to an answer that was incompatible with the whole, and you were interested in learning why. But now . . .

It was money—tangible, real, concrete. A fortune. A fantastic amount of money. There was no longer any doubt he had it because I had seen the clinching argument—those ten-dollar bills. The twenties could have been merely thrown away by Haig because they were identifiable and hot. But Cliffords had it all; he had it hidden somewhere in something that was rusting. All I had to do was find it. Nobody would ever know I’d got it. I had the intelligence and the will-power to destroy any part of it that was even conceivably identifiable and to refrain from making any display of wealth too suddenly. I’d go to Florida and go into the boat business in a small way, expanding gradually. Boats I knew, liked, and understood; the business was booming all over the country. I’d own a marina. . . . I stopped.

That was what I owned now, wasn’t it?

Hah!

I swung off State 41, headed for the camp, my mind furiously at work. The thing couldn’t take too long; at any time Cliffords could go back and dig up some more of it, and when he did there was a chance he’d wind up with another bunch that could be identified. It was only a miracle he’d got by with it this long. He was