don’t have any idea where he lives up there, do you?” I went on.
“Nope.” He shook his head. “Except that it’s pretty far up, I reckon.”
I bought a couple of sandwiches from him for lunch and went back across the road. The man with the boats recognized me from yesterday and looked in surprise at the gun and the deputy’s badge. “Going to try ‘em again today?” he asked. “No,” I said. “This is just business. I’m looking for a man who may be living up the lake.”
I rented a boat and motor and shoved off. “I’ll be back sometime this afternoon,” I called out as I pushed away from the dock.
It was a little after eleven. I had nine hours between now and the time I was supposed to met Dinah out there on the road. Handling the boat almost automatically on the broad areas of the lower lake, I tried to think it all out logically to see if I had taken everything into consideration. It was necessary, first, that I go all the way to the cabin. This was principally to make sure that there was no one fishing near it. It would be bad if some fisherman testified later that he had been just below the place all day and had never seen me go past, for it had to appear that I had gone to the cabin, taken Shevlin into custody, and started out with him.
There were a few boats on the lower part of the lake. I passed three or four before I got up as far as the slough where I had always launched my own, some five miles up from the store. After I passed that point I began to tighten up and worry. I could feel the tenseness growing inside me as each mile slipped back in the wake of the boat, and I stared with apprehensive eyes as I rounded every bend in the channel. Of course, if I met anyone fishing, the only thing I could do about it would be to remain above him until I was sure he had gone back down the lake. Obviously, I couldn’t have someone see me come back down alone. And if someone testified that he had been fishing fifteen miles or more up the lake all day and had seen me go up, but never come back, it would lead to the conclusion that Shevlin had probably resisted arrest and killed me up near his cabin, which I didn’t want at all. That would lead to a concentration of the later search for my body around the cabin itself, where Shevlin was buried in the lake. If they started dragging the lake around there, they might find him. Buford, after all, had to make some pretense of trying to solve the mystery. And, too, the newspapers would be full of it, with dozens of conjectures as to what had happened, and the swamp would be full of volunteer searchers for a long time. If, on the other hand, no one saw me go up or come down, the searchers would have no idea at all in which part of the thousands of acres of sloughs and channels and marsh Shevlin had disposed of my body. And since there would be no evidence of a struggle around the cabin, the theory would be that I had started out with him, got careless, and let him jump me somewhere below, after which he disposed of my body in some out-of-the-way backwater, went back for his wife after it was dark, and then escaped. That was the way I wanted it.
Another thing I had to do was to be sure I knew where to turn off to the east to get into the slough that led far across the bottom toward the road and the small stream where I would meet Dinah. I had been up it once, years ago, and thought I knew where it came out into the channel of the lake, but I wouldn’t be able to waste much time looking for it. As I went up I kept a sharp watch, trying to remember what had distinguished it from the dozens of other inlets and sloughs leading off on that side. As I recalled, it was a little larger than the others, and where it came out into the lake the point of land between it and the lake itself had a narrow shelf of sandy beach instead of the