Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/63

Rh raced his motor. Its high rattle drowned the whimper. He leaned more calmly over the side of the car.

"I'll want to get into the trunk tonight, anyhow. And I might as well have it opened right away. Can you tell me the name of a good locksmith in the next town?"

The man gave him some name or other. Opper smiled with set jaws, waved, and started down the highway. He moved at a decorous pace, staring straight ahead for a few hundred yards. But his eyes would wander up to the rear-view mirror.

The sheriff was standing in the middle of the road, staring after him. He stayed that way till Opper had rounded a curve and could see him no longer.

Not till then did Opper remember that he had been in such a hurry that he had left his tools by the side of the road. He cried out in a high, cracked voice, at that. Now he was unable even to try to break into the trunk. And in addition he must have raised the sheriff's curiosity to a fever pitch.

carcely able to see where he was going, he drove along the highway, toward the distant swamp which was beckoning now like a dim glimpse of heaven itself.

At noon, Opper slowed at a town which was about halfway between his home and the swamp which was his goal. He turned in to another filling-station and stopped. He had to. The dash indicator showed that he had less than a gallon of gas left, and he dared not run out on the road.

His eyes were staring, glassy, set in deep hollows in his face. His cheeks were drawn and grayish. Dried sweat matted his hair and was glued to his hat-band.

He was not thinking of Lois Blye's money and beauty now. He was thinking of Martia Opper, in the trunk a few feet behind him, locked in with that mewling, half-dead animal.

All morning he had driven with the whimpers sounding in his ears. That dying sound, like the ghost of a scream for mercy, like the sound that had come from his wife's pallid lips the instant before he killed her.

He knew he could not really hear it, over the motor's noise; knew that he only heard it in reality when he was driving slowly and the engine was turning over in a noiseless purr. But tell himself that as he would, the sound beat against his eardrums constantly. The cat, in with that stark, doubled-up bundle.

But now, in spite of the dangerous, telltale whimpering, he had to drive in here and stop for more gas. However, he was crafty. He had chosen this station from among half a dozen others near-by because there was a big truck panting near the pumps while the driver tested his tires. The blast of the truck motor should drown the noise from the trunk.

A neat attendant stepped to the rear and unscrewed the gas cap almost before the car had stopped moving. Opper got hastily from behind the wheel and hurried back.

"Full?" asked the man.

"Yes, fill it," said Opper, thanking heaven for the dull thunder of the truck motor.

He watched the man put the hose nozzle in the intake. This time the hose was not draped over the trunk. Opper had turned as he drove in so that the other side of the car faced the pumps. The attendant started the gas to swishing down the hose. He stared at the dents and scratches on the trunk.

"Somebody try to break into your