Rex Stout by The Mountain Cat Read Free Book Online Page A

to be several places where the jagged edges of the ore had broken the skin.
    “Uncle Quin!” she said urgently. “Uncle! Uncle Quin!” Then she jerked her hand away as she saw his eyelids flutter. They closed again and then opened once more. He moved his head, moaned, moved his head again, and was staring at her.
    “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 thetraffic, 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