Fred MacIsaac - Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.69, No. 5, August 13, 1932

Lying in the road with bullets whining over him, Bradley swore hed follow his assailants to hell itself to get them.

There were three men in the low-slung red roadster with the New York license plates, grim-mouthed men who took the state troopers measure with hard eyes as his motorcycle came coughing into Sam Witherspoons filling station below Barlows with hardly a gill of gas left in the tank.

Old Sam had been afraid of them. That showed in his face when the light over the pump fell upon the gray uniform behind him. Relief was in his voice, too. He called over his shoulder:

Lo, Bradley. Be with you in a minute.

Trooper Bradley, one foot on the ground, the other long putteed leg dangling over the saddle, was returning the stares from the roadster with interest. From his angle of vision, the light wasnt so good. It didnt give him as clear a look at the faces of the three in the New York car as he could have wished.

Even then he had a queer conviction that would probably be faces worth remembering; but the roadster stood well beyond the pump and the passengers were outside the shine of the single bulb burning above it. When they had tossed a crumpled bill to Sam Witherspoon and pulled away, they left with Bradley only an impression of hard-bitten mouths, rocky jaws and alert, metallic eyes glinting out of the shadows of low-drawn hat brims.

He shook his head after them. They had looked like thugs on quick appraisal, and probably were. The roads were full of their kind nowadays, particularly up in these border counties where so many gangsters from the big towns had bought up great tracts of wild acreage and established camps. Crooks, racketeers, city scum, rolling around in high-priced cars that not one honest man in a thousand could afford to buy or run, lording it with their pockets stuffed with blood-stained money and nothing for a policeman to do but turn his head the other way when they passed. The law was a finicky thing, a shield to the criminal unless you caught him in the very act of crime.

Up by the pump, Witherspoon was chuckling.

Diggety-dog! Well, if thems hijackers, I could sure stand more of their kind o trade. He came to Bradley smoothing and patting a grimy green bill. Five simoleons for eleven gallons of the regular is what they left and dodburn me if I wasnt scared that they aimed to stick me up.

Five dollars was more than twice the price of eleven gallons of gas. Bradley, wondering whether the tip would have been so lavish if the hard-boiled New Yorkers hadnt found a sudden cause for haste in his appearance, put the question into words.

Dunno about that, Witherspoon said, still a little green around the gills. But Ill tell you the truth, trooper, they had my hair standing straight on end until you buzzed along. Maybe I shouldnt be saying it after they treated me so good, but well, theyre totin a piece of freight thats fit to give any peaceable citizen the jim-jams.

Bradley, bent over the cap of his gas tank, looked up quickly. Yes? What was it, Sam?

Witherspoon shifted his cud, cocked an apprehensive eye toward the diminishing red dot that was the roadsters tail light, and started a shrug that ended in a shudder.

Now, thats something, trooper, he said, that I wouldnt want to answer straight out. Matter o fact, I couldnt, not bein familiar with that kind of hardware. But it wasnt no sewing machine and it wasnt no shotgun, either.

Bradley had straightened. You mean a machine gun?

Just on guesswork, yes, Witherspoon nodded. It was on the floor in back of the car, covered with a robe. In the rumble. The fellow sittin there happened to kick the robe just while I was leading the gas-hose back to the tank and I couldnt help but see that mean-looking snout poking out from under it. The fellow in the rumble seat give me just about the dirtiest look I ever had out of human eyes. One of the men in the front turned around and cussed him hot and heavy, and then yelled at me to mind my own damn business and fill that tank fast.

Bradley looked eastward up the road, caught a last glimpse of the tail light as it whipped around a curve and judged that the roadster must be traveling now with the throttle wide open.

Mines the same order, Sam, he snapped. Fill her fast! A moment after that, tank brimming and capped and engine roaring, he shot a glance at his wrist-watch. Exactly quarter to nine, Sam, he said and held the dial to the light for verification. Be sure to remember; maybe Ill have to call you as a witness.

That was over Sam Witherspoons head, a mystery that he still was considering open-mouthed when Bradley had melted noisily and rapidly into the night, bound east.

On roads as good as this one, seventy miles an hour was what Trooper Bradley considered just about a good cruising speed. Now, with a moving objective ahead of him as fleet as that big-engined roadster, he bore on the gas until the needle of his speedometer was flickering past eighty.

Five miles east of Sam Witherspoons filling station, siren shrieking a demand for right of way, he crossed Canada Pike at a dizzy speed that turned the broad ribbon of cement into a mere chalk mark beneath his streaming eyes. Beyond the Pike, he had ripped through seven more miles of crisp October night before his spotlight, whitening a New York license plate ahead, vindicated his judgment in keeping on the straightaway.

He was well up into the hill country then, in the most desolate part of his wide-flung and sparsely settled bailiwick. The nearest town, Holtsville, was more than twenty miles away. Within a range of half a dozen miles there wasnt even so much as an occupied dwelling, nothing but deserted farmhouses, forlorn and falling into decay.

The single spotlight on their trail evidently had told its story to the men in the roadster. It had been their strategy not to make a race of it, but to slacken speed. Bradley himself slowed down and a grin came to his lips when he had clocked them for a quarter mile. They were jogging along at thirty-five miles an hour now, law-abiding citizens so far as speed regulations were concerned.

That was all right as far as it went, but Bradley had a trump to play an ace that, if not up his sleeve, was at least in plain sight on his wrist.

He eased his holster forward, loosened the heavy service pistol in it and sped to overtake the suspected car.

Nothing was left of Bradleys smile when he had swung alongside the roadster. His shouted, Pull over! was strictly and briskly official.

Armaments and odds regardless, the New Yorkers were not hunting trouble just then. The driver obediently stepped on his brake and threw out his clutch. As he looked inquiringly at the trooper, the glimmer of the dashlight showed an expression of exaggeratedly innocent surprise on his face.

Whats wrong, officer? he wanted to know.

Thirty-five an hour is legal up here, aint it? asked the flat-nosed man beside him, his voice dulcet.

Thats as high as weve been hittin it, trooper, chimed in the passenger in the rumble seat. Thirty-five. Never an inch more. We dont know these roads so good, anyway see?

They hadnt recognized Bradley in the darkness; that was plain enough to him.

Then my speedometer must be wrong, he said mildly. Closer to sixty-five is how I