erratic, too potty and unpredictable to be trusted with a thing like this. One slip would blow it up. He might talk, start bragging, or begin playing the girlie circuit in the sawmill towns around here. He was only forty-six, and with unlimited funds at his disposal he might decide to ditch the comic books for grown-up toys, just had to beat him to it, by finding it. Sure, that was all. But how?

* * *

It was four in the afternoon. I stood in dense timber a half mile behind his cabin and wearily fit a cigarette. Since seven this morning I’d been back here, searching, walking, crisscrossing, studying the terrain, and gradually having it brought home to me just what I was up against. Sweat drenched my clothes; the air was stifling, and all about me was the silence of the big woods. I sat down on a log and took the folded map from my pocket. It was roughly two miles this way; call it ten to twelve north and south. And that was only on this side of the first arm of the lake. Add in the country on the other side and the trackless maze of islands and swamp cut by the twisting channels of the waterways, and what did you have? At least fifty square miles of wilderness. It could be anywhere; he didn’t have to hide it under his pillow. And just how sure could you be that he hadn’t sunk it in a watertight container in the lake itself, somewhere in those God-only-knew how many thousands of acres of isolated inlets and sloughs and weedbeds?

Well, one way to locate it was to keep watch on him until he went to it himself; he would sooner or later. So? Just move out here? It could be weeks, or months. I was married; I was supposed to be running a business. If I could get out here once a week without arousing suspicion I’d be lucky.

There was always the third method, of course, but I shrugged it off impatiently. You could either do that sort of thing, or you couldn’t, and there was no point in considering something you wouldn’t have the guts to carry out. I wasn’t trying to take a bow; there was no moral issue involved. It was merely an appraisal. You had to be sick in the head so you enjoyed it, or you had to be completely without imagination, or fanatic. I failed on all three counts.

So there was nothing to do but go on looking. I did. A little before sunset I gave it up for the present and went back to where I’d hidden the boat. Nunn was on the float when I got to camp.

“Well, where’s all the fish?” he asked.

“Still up there,” I said. I unclamped the motor.

“Didn’t you get nothing at all?”

“A few,” I said indifferently. ”Was I supposed to kill them?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “I’m not a big-time sport.”

“Well, cheer up,” I said. “It takes all kinds.” I was getting little sick of him.

I packed my gear in the station wagon and settled with him for the cabin and boat. There was no pressing invitation to hurry back and sample his overflowing hospitality again, which was fine because when I did come back it would be in through that road to the upper lake and I wouldn’t be bringing a brass band. I didn’t see her until I was turning the station wagon to leave. She was standing behind the screen door looking out. I thought I saw her hand move, as if she had waved good-bye. I waved, and went on.

It was dark before I got out of the bottom. I went back the same way I’d come, northward on State 41. When I slowed for the S-bend I saw the white crosses again in my headlights and tried once more to put a finger on the thing that kept nagging me about the place. Wasn’t it something about the last accident? I knew the people involved—or rather Barbara Renfrew did. That was it. They were friends of her grandfather’s, a couple around sixty years of age who’d lived on a farm just north of Wardlow. Their car had gone off the road one night in a heavy rain and they were killed instantly when it crashed into the trees out there. Barbara had taken time off to go to the funeral, but that wasn’t all of it. It was something she’d