axe there, and I could cut a sapling with a fork, and pad it at the top. I’ll bring a sheet, and some liniment.”
I frowned. “You re under arrest, on a serious charge. I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”
“I can t think of nothing else,” he said.
“You wouldn’t try to escape?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, all right,” I said doubtfully. “I guess you couldn’t get far, anyway, with no car.”
That was pretty crude, but in dealing with a low grade mentality subtlety could be dangerous. He might miss it.
“Well, you’d better hurry along,” I went on, before he could say anything. “It’ll be dark in another hour or two.”
“Sure,” he said. He went off through the timber in the direction we had come, walking quite fast now.
As soon as he was out of sight I grinned and got up. I sat on the log and lit a cigarette. The thing to do was give him plenty of time; it didn’t matter when I got out of here. He’d have to take to his feet after the car quit on him somewhere this side of the highway, and it would be most embarrassing for both of us if I refueled it and got out on the road before he’d managed to thumb a ride. He might even take time to pack a lot of his gear, in fact, since he’d know I couldn’t crawl back to the camp-ground before sometime tomorrow even if I knew the way. And even then I wouldn’t get out of the bottom until they sent a search party after me.
I smoked the cigarette all the way out to the end before I made any move to open the other two pails, extracting in full measure the joys of anticipation. There were too few moments like this in life, and when you’d used them up they were gone forever. I thought of what was inside the pails, and then appraised the craftsmanship of the operation itself. Not bad, I thought. Of course, I’d had a lot of luck at the beginning, but the solution of the problem itself, after it was posed, was a creditable bit of work. It was a minor masterpiece, if I did say so.
Come on, hammy, I thought; quit milking the curtain calls and get to work. Grinding out the cigarette, I knelt and took out my knife. In a moment I had all three of them open. It was like dreaming you owned Fort Knox and then waking up to find the deed and the keys in your hand. The other two were exactly like the first, crammed full of currency in every denomination from five to a hundred. I hurriedly slipped off my shirt, spread it on the ground, and began piling the money on it, not trying to count it but searching for that I was going to have to destroy. When I came to a package that had that crisp, new look about it I’d toss it to one side. In a few minutes I had it all sorted out. Of course, I’d have to go over it more carefully later on, but I should have most of it. There were four more sheafs of those new twenties, six tens, and two in the fifty-dollar denomination.
Just to be sure, I picked up each one individually and riffled through it to make certain the serial numbers ran consecutively. They all did. I performed a quick calculation, using the sums printed on the bands. The twelve packages added up to twelve thousand dollars, which was an odd coincidence, I reflected, since they varied individually between $500 and $2,500 depending on denomination. I looked at the little stack of it. Twelve thousand dollars! All right, hero, I thought, you said you could; let’s see you do it. Don’t stall around long enough to begin to wonder if maybe it wouldn’t be safe ten years from now. It’ll never be safe as long as you live, and the world’s not big enough to find a place you could spend it. There are people who buy it, sure. But then somebody knows. The way it is now, nobody does, or ever will. Keep it that way. Do it right.
Tossing all twelve of them over beside the hole, I began breaking the bands and crumpling bills into the bottom of it. When I had a neat pile of them I stuck the flame of the lighter against the corner of a fifty and shoved