Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

“What... what in the name... what you trying to do?”

“You got hurt, Uncle Quin.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “You stay still.”

“How’d I get hurt?”

“I don’t know. Now keep still. Mr. Jackson will be back in a minute... here he is now—”

The door opened. Jackson had a pitcher of water in his hand, and entering behind him was a well-fed short man with a deadpan for a face — a deadpan well known to the habitués of The Haven, since he was the assistant manager.

Quinby Pellett, struggling to sit up with one hand against the wall, demanded, “What is this? What the hell happened?”

“Oh, you woke up.” Jackson looked at him sharply. “You’d better take it easy, Quin, you may have a cracked skull. I’ve sent for a doctor and a cop. They’re phoning next door.”

“Cop? Hey, what...” Pellett put his hand to his head, took it away, and looked at the blood on his fingers. “How bad am I hurt?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think bad. You got conked and you fell downstairs.”

“Who conked me, you?”

“No. I was in my office with Delia when it happened. What would I want to conk you for, practice?”

“I don’t know.” Pellett slowly moved his head and eyes. “Oh, Delia. You here. Didn’t you say you were coming here? Sure you did.”

“You should keep quiet till the doctor gets here, Uncle.”

“Sure you did. So did I.” He turned his head again. “Wasn’t I coming to see you?”

Jackson nodded. “I guess you were. You were supposed to. How far did you get, the head of the stairs?”

“Yes. I did. I was going upstairs and I got nearly to the top — hey!”

“What’s the matter?”

“That’s where I got hit, at the top of the stairs!”

“So I suspected. Who hit you?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“Didn’t you see anyone or hear anything?”

“He ought to be quiet until the doctor comes,” Delia put in firmly.

The door popped open and a man in the uniform of a police sergeant entered, briskly. He nodded to Delia and the others and looked down at the man sitting on the floor with a grin.

“What’s the matter, Quin?” he demanded. “Doing a little research on the law of gravity?”

Twenty minutes later, upstairs in Jackson’s office, the police sergeant finished asking Delia a few questions, getting corroboration of Jackson’s story. The doctor had disfigured her uncle’s head with a bandage and stated that apparently there was no serious damage, and her uncle had insisted that he felt well enough to remain there for the business he had come to see Jackson about, so Delia departed.

She got into the car and made her way through the traffic, heading south and continuing beyond the city limits into the valley. The attack on her uncle and the sight of him lying on the floor unconscious with blood on his head had started her nerves quivering and upset the order of her thoughts, so she was into the country before she remembered to look for her bag. She glanced at the seat beside her. The bag wasn’t there.

The car swerved and nearly slid into the ditch. She jerked it back into the road, then slowed down, steered to a wide spot in the roadside and stopped. A search behind the seat, under it, between the seat and the door, on the floor, yielded nothing. The bag was gone!

She sat behind the steering wheel, with her teeth clenched, concentrating. She was absolutely sure that she had left the bag there when she parked the car to go to Jackson’s office. Some passerby had snitched it. She was an incompetent little fool and always had been and always would be.

That gun was her father’s. She had meant, had utterly and with all her heart meant, to use that gun for the retaliation of the Brand family to the evil malignity which had murdered her father and driven her mother to suicide. She had so intended. Her teeth clenched harder. She had, she had!

What Ty Dillon had said. What Uncle Quin had said. About her getting a cramp in her trigger finger. They were dead wrong.

But she had left that bag, with that gun in it, on the seat of the car parked in the street and hadn’t gone back after it. Wasn’t anyone who would do that either a brainless fool or a cheap fraud?

And now what? Her father’s gun, her chosen weapon, was gone. Now what? It was to have been tonight. That had been irrevocably decided. Now what? Her jaw, aching from the clenching of her teeth, began to quiver. Now what? Her head fell forward to the steering wheel, her face against her crossed forearms, and she began to cry. She hadn’t cried since her mother’s death. She cried quietly, not convulsively, but every minute or so her shoulders heaved as her indignant lungs issued the ultimatum, oxygen or death. She might, in the despair and dolor of that moment there at the roadside, while passing cars decelerated for the prolongation of curious glances, have preferred death, but nature requires something stronger than a mere passing preference to enforce that decision.

When finally she straightened up, her face and forearms were wet. She disregarded them. She had not answered the question, now what, as to the ultimate retaliation she had designed, but she was going on, at least, with the immediate job. She released the brake and shifted the gear and the car shot forward.

Ten miles farther on she slowed down again and turned right into a graveled and well-kept drive. At the edge of the public domain it passed under an enormous stone arch across the top of which was chiseled: Cockatoo Ranch . The Cockatoo had been the name of the lunchroom in Cheyenne where Lemuel Sammis had found Evelina long ago and when, in his opulence, he had bought a thousand of the most desirable acres in this valley and built a mansion thereon, he had named it Cockatoo Ranch; some whispers said to remind his wife of her lowly origin, but that was not true. Lem Sammis was a man of enduring sentiment. It was true that he had shouldered aside many men on his march up the hill, had broken not a few and never put scruple on his payroll, but it was undeniable that he had sentiment.

Flowers were blooming, sprinklers were going, and the lawn was clipped and green. Delia left the car on the gravel a hundred feet from the mansion and started across. Three or four dogs came running at her. A woman with three chins who weighed two hundred pounds stopped trying to reach a lilac twig and yelled at the dogs. Delia went and shook hands with her.

It was Evelina. “I haven’t seen you for a coon’s age,” she declared, looking Delia over. “What you been crying about?”

“Nothing. I came to see Mr. Sammis.”

“First we’ll have some tea. If you’ve been crying you need it. Come over on the veranda. Oh, come on. One of the few things I like in all this damn business of putting on dog is this idea of afternoon tea. We’ll have some turkey sandwiches and potato salad.” She yelled at the top of her voice, “Pete!” and a Chinese appeared.

Delia, to her own surprise, ate. The sandwiches and salad were excellent. Lemuel Sammis himself came out of the house and joined them, accompanied by a tired-looking man whom Delia recognized as the State Commissioner of Public Works. The fact that Mrs. Sammis did a lot of talking seemed not to interfere with her eating. It began to appear to Delia that tea threatened to have a collision with dinner.

At length Sammis finished his third highball and arose. “You want to see me, Dellie? Come on in the house.”

Delia followed him. He was the only person who had ever called her Dellie besides her father. In a room with, among other things, an ornate desk, a wall lined with deluxe books, and four heads of bucks, mounted, as she knew, by her Uncle Quin, she sat and looked at him. He looked like Wyoming, with his lean old face, his tough oil-bereft skin, his watchful eyes withdrawn behind their wrinkled ramparts from the cruel and brilliant sun. He inserted a thumb and finger into the small pocket of his flannel trousers and pulled out a little cylinder, apparently of gold, which looked like a lipstick holder; removing the cap, he shook it over his palm and a quill toothpick fell out. As he used it, his teeth looked as white as a coyote’s.