The Everlasting Whisper | Page 9

in his chair, his hand gripping Gaynor's knee.

"Ben, it's there. I've always known it, always been willing to bet my
last dollar. Now I'd gamble my life on it."
Gaynor's mouth tightened and his eyes flashed.
"Between you and me, Mark," he said in a voice which dropped
confidentially, "I'd like mighty well to have my share right now. I've
gone in pretty deep here of late, a little over my head, it begins to look.
I've branched out where I would have better played my own game and
been content with things as they were going. I----" But he broke off
suddenly; he was close to the edge of disloyalty now. "What makes you
so sure?" he asked.
"I came up this time from Georgetown. You remember the old trail, up
by Gerle's, Red Cliff and Hell Hole, leaving French Meadows and
Heaven's Gate and Mount Mildred 'way off to the left. I had it all pretty
much my own way until I came to Lookout Ridge. And who do you
suppose I found poking around there?"
"Not old Loony Honeycutt!" cried Gaynor. Then he laughed at himself
for allowing an association of ideas to lead to so absurd a thought. "Of
course not Honeycutt; I saw him last week, as you wanted me to, and
he is cabin-bound down in Coloma as usual. Can't drag his wicked old
feet out of his yard. Who, then, Mark?"
"Swen Brodie then. And Andy Parker."
Gaynor frowned, impressed as King had been before him.
"But," he objected as he pondered, "he might have been there for some
other reason. Brodie, I mean. Remember that the ancient and
time-honoured pastimes of the Kentucky mountains have come into
vogue in the West. Everybody knows, and that includes even the
government agents in San Francisco, that there is a lot of moonshine
being made in out-of-the-way places of the California mountains.
There's a job for Swen Brodie and his crowd. There's talk of it, Mark."
"Maybe," King admitted. "But Brodie was looking for something, and

not revenue men, at that. He and Parker were up on the cliffs not a
quarter-mile from the old cabin. They stood close together, right at the
edge. Parker fell. Brodie looked down, turned on his heel and went off,
smoking his stinking pipe, most likely. I buried Parker the next
morning."
"Poor devil," said Gaynor. Then his brows shot up and he demanded:
"You mean Brodie did for him? Shoved him over?"
"That's exactly what I mean. But I can't tie it to Brodie, not so that he
couldn't shake himself free of it. Parker didn't say so in so many words;
I saw the whole thing from the mountain across the lake, too far to
swear to anything like that. But this I can swear to: Brodie was in there
for the same thing we've been after for ten years. And what is more, it's
open and shut that he was of a mind to play whole-hog and pushed
Andy Parker over to simplify matters. In my mind, even though I can't
hope to ram that down a jury."
"How do you know what Brodie and Parker were after?"
"Andy Parker. He was sullen and tight-mouthed for the most part until
delirium got him. Then he babbled by the hour. And all his talk was of
Gus Ingle and the devil's luck of the unlucky Seven, with every now
and then a word for Loony Honeycutt and Swen Brodie."
"If there is such a thing as devil's luck," said Gaynor with a sober look
to his face, "this thing seems plastered thick with it."
King grunted his derision.
"We'll take a chance, Ben," he said. "And, after all, one man's bane is
another man's bread, you know. Now I've told you my tale, let's have
yours. You saw Honeycutt; could you get anything out of him?"
"Only this, that you are dead right about his knowing or thinking that
he knows. He is feebler than he was last fall, a great deal feebler both in
body and mind. All day he sits on his steps in the sun and peers through

his bleary eyes across the mountains, and chuckles to himself like an
old hen. 'Oh, I know what you're after,' he cackles at me, shrewd
enough to hit the nail square, too, Mark. 'And,' he rambles on, 'you've
come to the right man. But am I goin' to blab now, havin' kept a shut
mouth all these years?' And then he goes on, his rheumy-red eyes
blinking, to proclaim that he is feeling a whole lot stronger these days,
that he is getting his second wind, so to speak; that come mid-spring
he'll be as frisky as a colt, and that then he means to have what is