Frank Gruber - The Talking Clock

Johnny yawned at Sam Cragg across the Kid’s sleeping form. “When he talks about bums, does he mean us, Sam?”

Sam got up, stretched and said, “Yow!…”

He leaned over and shook the Kid. “Hey, Kid, wake up. The porter wants to make up your berth…” Suddenly, Sam exclaimed and bent to peer into the Kid’s face. Then his mouth fell open and an expression of horror distorted his face.

“Gawd!” he said.

Johnny Fletcher took one glance at his friend’s face, then stopped over the boy on the bed and shock rippled through him.

The boy was lying on his side, eyes glassy and bulging. Livid, red welts were on the throat. He had evidently been strangled.

By this time the constable saw that something was wrong. “What’s… what’s the matter with him?”

Johnny turned. “He’s… dead.”

“Dead? Why… why…” The constable’s eyes fluttered wildly, then he turned the big key in the lock and pulled the door open. He started to come into the cell but didn’t, for what happened was so sudden and unexpected that even Johnny Fletcher, alert as he usually was, was caught flatfooted.

Old-Timer, the tramp, came up from his bunk and made a rush for the door. A knife flashed in his hand and he struck at the constable. Johnny saw the expression on the constable’s face, heard his cry of pain, and catapulted through the door after the tramp.

Old-Timer was bolting through the street door, and in passing reached out a hand and slammed the door in Johnny’s face. By the time Johnny got it open and hit the street, Old-Timer had a fifty-foot start on him.

It suddenly dawned on Johnny then, that there was something terribly wrong about Old-Timer. He was running as no man of his years or appearance had ever run before. He was gaining on Johnny, on a straightaway track.

Behind Johnny, Sam Cragg yelled hoarsely. “Johnny! Wait for me.”

A couple of the village shopkeepers, letting down awnings in preparation for a hot sun, turned from their work to watch the three men dashing down the main street of the town. But when they saw the constable stagger out of the jail, clutching his side, and heard him crying out: “Stop them! They murdered me,” they ran into their stores.

A hundred feet ahead of Johnny, the tramp whipped around a corner and when Johnny turned it, Old-Timer was in a battered flivver already shooting away.

Johnny groaned and stopped. He stared after the disappearing flivver until Sam caught up to him.

“We gotta keep going, Johnny,” Sam panted. “That goddam tramp stabbed the constable — and did for the Kid.”

“I know,” said Johnny. “And did you see him run? No sixty-year-old bum ever ran like that. Say…” He thrust a hand into his pocket and brought out the card the Kid had forced on him during the night.

He looked at it and whistled, softly. “A pawn ticket. ‘Uncle Joe, The Friend In Need. Columbus, Ohio’… I don’t get it.”

Sam Cragg exclaimed nervously. “If we hang around, they’ll get us. For breaking jail, if not murder…”

“Right you are, Sam,” Johnny said. “We’ve got to put miles behind us. Something tells me that that bum isn’t going to be easy to catch and the boys here’ll pin the Kid’s murder on whoever they can grab — namely Samuel Cragg and John Fletcher. Let’s travel…”

They traveled. Reaching the edge of the little town, they cut across an open field to a patch of woods and stalked through it as silently as the Indians of old — after said Indians had imbibed too freely of the white man’s firewater.

Neither was much on the pioneer stuff. Burly Sam Cragg, in as fine physical condition as a man can be, was the first to complain of the rough going. “My feet are killing me, Johnny. Can’t we take a rest?”

Johnny Fletcher peered back at the solid wall of poplars. “We haven’t come more than a couple of three miles, Sam. They’ll be after us by now. Maybe with bloodhounds.”

“Bloodhounds!” Sam Cragg’s eyes popped open. “Those long-eared mutts they show in the movies? You… you suppose they’ve got some like that up in this goddam country?”

“I don’t know,” Johnny replied, his forehead creased. “But I do think we ought to put some more miles between us and that burg. They’ll shut off the roads and beat the woods. Murder’s murder, Sam, even up here in Minnesota.”

“But we didn’t do it. The bum did. He must have. When they catch him…”

“When they catch him, Sam. Stop to think a minute — what did he look like?”

“Why, just a bum. An old guy…”

“Old? Did you see him run? No old guy ever ran like that.”

Sam was startled. “Huh? You think maybe he wasn’t as old as he looked?”

“Just what did he look like?”

Sam blinked. “Why, like a bum. Maybe fifty-sixty, dirty clothes and a beard…”

“Suppose the beard’s a phony? And the clothes a disguise. That car he made the getaway in… how’d he know it would be around the corner, with the key in it?”

“You think he had it planted there? That he knew he was going to make a getaway?”

Johnny shook his head. “I don’t know what to think, Sam. Honest, I don’t. But doesn’t it strike you as screwy? The whole thing. Why would he want to kill the Kid? And then stab the constable?”

“We don’t know the Kid was killed. He was dead, yeah. But mightn’t he have died naturally?”

Johnny was thoughtful for a moment. Then he took out the pawn ticket. “The Kid woke me up in the middle of the night to give me this. He was scared. Plenty scared. Uh-uh, I say he was murdered. And in view of Old-Timer’s actions later…”

Sam Cragg got to his feet. “I guess I can go another mile.”

“You’ll go more than that, Sammy old boy.”

They continued through the poplars a half mile and came to a small stream. There Sam had his bright idea. “Say, don’t they always walk through water to lose their trail?”

Johnny grinned a twisted grin. “That picture, ‘Fugitive From A Chain Gang,’ must have made an impression on you. All right, we’ll give it a whack. But I’m taking off my shoes…”

Sam Cragg followed Johnny’s example, and carrying their shoes and socks, the two began wading upstream. Fortunately, for them, the creek had a gravel bottom and they were able to travel it without too much difficulty. The trouble came with occasional large stones on which they stepped.

They waded for a quarter mile or so, which Johnny Fletcher thought was enough to foil bloodhounds. They dried their feet then, with handkerchiefs, as best they could and put on their socks and shoes. There were holes in the toes of Sam’s socks.

The foot bath having refreshed them, Sam made no more complaint. For a mile. Then he thought of his stomach. “Geez, I wish we’d had our breakfast first.”

Johnny had already been thinking about that. He had a hunch, however, that it would be some time before they sat down to another square meal. He wondered if hunger would not drive them back into the arms of the law. This country up here was pretty sparsely settled. They had traveled at least four miles from the town where they had been incarcerated and he had yet to see a house.

They sat down on a log to rest a while and then Sam sniffed the air. “I smell smoke. Must be a house around somewheres. Maybe we can get a handout.”

Johnny wondered about that. It was at least an hour and a half since their escape. How quickly did news travel in this country?

He got up and looked in the direction he judged to be south. The trees seemed thinner and he thought there was a clearing just beyond.

“C’mon, Sam,” he said, “let’s see if there’s fire by that smoke.”