The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,16

and sat silently smoking a cigarette while I rated the chronometer with a time signal from WWV.

“I gather you’ve cruised quite a bit,” I said tentatively.

“I used to,” he replied.

“In the Caribbean, and West Indies?”

“No. I’ve never been down here before.”

“My normal stamping ground is the Bahamas,” I went on. “That’s wonderful country.”

“Yes. I understand it is.” The words were uttered with the same grave courtesy, but from the fact that he said nothing further it was obvious he didn’t wish to pursue the discussion.

Okay, I thought, a little hacked about it; you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I didn’t like being placed in the position of a gossipy old woman who had to be rebuffed for prying. A moment later, however, I thought better of it and decided I was being unfair. A man who was down on his luck at fifty could quite justifiably not wish to discuss his life story with strangers. Baxter, for all his aloofness, struck me as a man you could like.

Keefer returned about an hour later. I introduced them. Baxter was polite and reserved. Keefer, cocky with the beer he’d drunk and full of the merchant seaman’s conviction that anybody who normally lived ashore was a farmer, was inclined to be condescending. I said nothing. Blackie was probably in for a few surprises; I had a hunch that Baxter was a better sailor than he ever would be. We all turned in shortly after ten. When I awoke just at dawn, Baxter was already up and dressed. He was standing beside his bunk, just visible past the edge of the curtain, using the side of his suitcase as a desk while he wrote something on a pad of airmail stationery.

“Why don’t you use the chart table?” I asked.

He looked around. “Oh. This is all right. I didn’t want to wake you.”

* * *

I threw the third cigarette over the side, and stood up and stretched. There was nothing in any of that except the fact that Baxter’s flannels and tweeds were a little out of place in Panama. But maybe he merely hadn’t wanted to spend money for tropical clothes, especially if the job had looked none too permanent.

It was dusk now, and the glow over the city was hot against the sky. I snapped the padlock on the hatch, and walked up to the gate. Johns looked up from his magazine. “Goin’ out for supper?”

“Yes. What’s a good air-conditioned restaurant that has a bar?”

“Try the Golden Pheasant, on Third and San Benito. You want me to call you a cab?”

I shook my head. “Thanks. I’ll walk over and catch the bus.”

I crossed the railroad tracks in the gathering darkness and entered the street. The bus stop was one block up and two blocks to the right. It was a district of large warehouses and heavy industry, the streets deserted now and poorly lighted. I turned right at the corner and was halfway up the next block, before a shadowy junkyard piled high with wrecked automobiles, when a car turned into the street behind me, splashing me for an instant with its lights. It swerved to the curb and stopped. “Hey, you,” a voice growled.

I turned, and looked into the shadowy muzzle of an automatic projecting from the front window. Above it was an impression of a hat brim and a brutal outcropping or jaw. “Get in,” the voice commanded.

The street was deserted for blocks in each direction. Behind me was the high, impassable fence of the junkyard. I looked at the miles of utter nothing between me and the corner. “All right. The wallet’s in my hip pocket—”

“We don’t want your wallet. I said get in!” The muzzle of the gun moved almost imperceptibly, and the rear door opened. I stepped toward it. As I leaned down, hands reached out of the darkness inside and yanked. I fell inward. Something slashed down on my left shoulder. My arm went numb to the fingertips. I tried to get up. Light exploded just back of my eyes.

* * *

My head was filled with a running groundswell of pain. It rose and fell, and rose again, pressing against my skull in hot waves of orange, and when I opened my eyes the orange gave way to a searing white that made me shudder and close them again. Muscles tightened spasmodically across my abdomen as nausea uncoiled inside me. I was conscious of a retching sound and of the sensation of strangling.

“Prop