finally, he said, “And I thought I could get away with it.”

“All right,” I said. I was tired of wasting time. “You ready to show me where it is?”

He stood up. “Sure,” he said. “There’s three more thousand of it under the house, on a sill. Unless you found that, too.”

That was wonderful, I thought swiftly. Add that to nearly a thousand there on the table. It was going to work out beautifully.

“And the rest of it?” I asked.

“Buried in three syrup buckets, under a down tree. About a mile up the lake.”

“How much?” I asked. “Do you know?”

He nodded. “I added up the little bands. It took me a long time. There’s a hundred and thirteen thousand of it.”

And it was so ridiculously easy. All I’d had to do was ask for it.

“Umh-umh,” I said thoughtfully. “That checks out pretty well with the bank’s figures. Well, let’s get on with it.”

Eleven

We picked up that under the house. It had been almost directly over my head when I’d peered under that other time, but I’d been looking for something much larger. It was all in tens, five hundred dollars to the bundle, wrapped in waxed paper and lying flat on top of the sill. We brought it inside and he watched while I gathered up and counted what was on the kitchen table.

“Altogether, three thousand eight hundred and forty,” I announced.

He found a paper bag for it. I put it all inside, folded it over carefully, and sealed it with some cellophane tape he had. I wrote the sum on it, and then the notation, “Recovered in vicinity of cabin.” He watched intently, very much impressed with all this police routine.

“We’ll have to come back by here so you can pack the clothes you want to take to jail with you,” I said. “So there’s no use carrying this around. We’ll pick it up on the way back. Let’s see. . . .”

I pulled a stack of magazines and comic books away from the wall and shoved the money behind it.

“Should be safe there,” I said.

He nodded. “Sure. Nobody ever comes here.”

“You say it’s about a mile?” I asked.

“Pretty near, I reckon.”

“I don’t see any sense wearing this hot jacket up there.” I said. I slipped it off. Removing his .38 from the pocket, I shoved it in the waistband of my trousers. Then I removed the fake warrant from the inside breast pocket, and when I slid it into the right hip pocket of my trousers I eased out the leather key case that was already there, holding it concealed in my hand for an instant while I was folding the jacket. I let it drop just as I tossed the jacket across the bed and turned toward the door.

He called my attention to it. “Say, Mr. Ward, your keys fell out.”

“Oh.” I picked them up. “Thanks. Wouldn’t do to lose them. We d be stranded.”

“Your car’s down at the camp-ground, I reckon?”

“That’s right,” I said. I picked up the jacket again, dropped the keys in one of the pockets, and tossed it back on the bed. We went out. He picked up a short-handled shovel.

It was late afternoon now, and shadows were long across the clearing. We started out through the timber with Cliffords leading the way, going generally north but angling gradually way from the lake.

“Is Haig up this way, too?” I asked.

“No, sir.” He pointed off to the right. “Up there. Not too far from that road, and about a mile this side of the highway.”

“Well, we won’t bother with him today,” I said. “We’ll bring you out tomorrow or the next day and you can show us where. The local District Attorney wants to be represented, anyway, and there’s the coroner.”

“What could they tell now?” he asked, plodding purposefully ahead and not looking around. “I mean, it’s been a year and a half.”

“Probably not much,” I replied. “Of course, if you had shot him and the bullet struck a bone. . . . That would show up, naturally.”

“But I didn’t shoot him, Mr. Ward! I’m telling you the truth about the whole thing. I was out huntin’ squirrels and I seen all them birds circlin’ around. . . .”

“We’d assume it was that way,” I said. “Had they bothered him?”

“No. They was just beginning to light in the trees— “Then you could form a pretty good idea as to what did kill him?”

“Sure. He’d been in a bad wreck, and he’d bled to death. Anybody