The Chee-Chalker

 

Paul Wagner owned the Tamgas Trading Company and was a very important man in Ketchikan, even in Alaska. “Aren’t you with the FBI?”

 

Norton looked at him from under his hat brim.

 

“Fagler said you were and I wanted to know what you thought about it. I’m Paul Wagner.”

 

“Well?”

 

“I wanted to know what you thought about this. It is serious. James England was an important fellow to Alaska. His station up there on the knoll is Alaska’s biggest and best. Now what’s going to happen to it? I depend on him, or rather did, for my advertising. What do you make of it?” 

 

“Make of what?” said Norton.

 

“Why, his murder.”

 

“I thought they said it was suicide.”

 

“They said it was accidental.”

 

“I wasn’t listening very closely.”

 

“What do you make of it?”

 

“Why should I make anything of it? It’s none of my business.”

 

“I thought you were in town to look into his disappearance.”

 

“Did you?”

 

“Well,” said Wagner, his dark face turned full on Norton now, “that was my impression. The Federal marshal wasn’t making any progress and so I thought you had been sent down to look into it.”

 

“Know anything about it?”

 

“About his disappearance?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Wagner looked closely at Norton but he couldn’t see through the rain and shadows well enough. “I know no more than anybody else. He had no enemies in particular and he was well loved.”

 

“I heard differently,” said Norton.

 

“No man is worth his salt who hasn’t a few enemies,” said Wagner nervously. He stayed around for nearly a minute but nothing more was said and so, uncomfortably, he went away.

 

Norton was glad he had gone. He wanted some more cold rain on his face. He wished corpses weren’t a part of a lawman’s business. At times like these he intensely regretted the small gold disc pinned to his wallet. That small gold disc sent him to such unseemly places.

 

Ketchikan, for example.

 

He looked at the rain and wondered that the skies were never emptied. A hundred and eighty inches a year was a tropical output with none of the tropical advantages. Of course it wasn’t as cold here as it was in Juneau. Far north though it was, it was as warm through the winter as most of the US coastal towns. If only it wouldn’t rain.

 

Bill Norton did not much like this country. He had been in it six months, most of the six spent behind a desk in Juneau, the last spent wandering around Ketchikan trying to get a lead on a sack of “snow” and Jerry McCain. He had found the heroin leading nowhere so far as he could discover. And he had found no sign of FBI special agent Jerry McCain. There was no more “snow.” There was no trail whatever leading to the disappearance of his former boss. There was only rain. Rain and bars and drunken Indians and soldiers much drunker. Bill Norton, looking at the bobbing masthead and boom of a halibut boat tied to the Tamgas dock, was reminded of a gibbet.

 

Up the slippery boards skated a burblingly active young man, one of Bill’s main responsibilities. Chick Star had just graduated from the School in Washington. Some clerk had sent him to Alaska on the first boat. Chick wore people out.

 

“What’s the excitement?” said Chick.

 

“Corpse,” said Norton diffidently.

 

“Aw, honest? Who, where?”

 

“England. Drowned.”

 

“Gee! You finally located England? Gosh! Say, that’s good work! Gosh, why wasn’t I around?”

 

“If you’d stop chasing klootches you might get in on something sometime,” said Norton, bored.

 

“Klootches,” said Chick in a hurt voice. “I don’t chase klootches. I can’t stand the sight of an Indian. Why would I chase klootches?”

 

He was so earnestly involved, so gashed to the marrow, that Norton looked at him. Chick was six feet seven. He weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds. He ran into and knocked over things. He was twenty-three and serious. He was full of ambition. He polished his gold disc every night before he went to bed and carried his heavy Colt revolver to dances.

 

“If you don’t you’ll go nutty with this rain,” said Norton.

 

“Oh, I like the rain,” said Chick. “It’s exciting. Things are dark and mysterious. Where’d you find England?”

 

“I didn’t find him.”

 

“But you must have,” said Chick, gloatingly surveying his hero. “Was he stabbed?”

 

“He fell in and hit his head on a piling. The fish ate his face.”

 

“Aw.”

 

“Well if you can’t take it you’ve got no business hanging around the Bureau.”

 

“You’re being modest,” said Chick hopefully. “You found him and he was murdered and you know who did it.”

 

“Sherlock Holmes doesn’t happen to be even a faint relation of mine,” said Norton. He slogged through the horizontal sea in the air toward bed at the Sourdough Hotel.

 

“Say!” said Chick, “did you see that?”

 

“What?”

 

“Those two men come out from behind that truck and turn the corner up there. They looked suspicious!”

 

“If they’re suspicious you’ve given them plenty of warning with that brass voice of yours.”

 

“Honest they did.”

 

“Probably were having a quiet drink where their pals wouldn’t ask for any.”

 

Chick loped up beside Norton, splashing heavily through the puddles like an overgrown tank and thoroughly spattering his despondent boss. Suddenly Chick threw out his arm to stop Norton and almost knocked him flat backwards on the slippery boardwalk.

 

“Look at that!” said Chick in what he hopefully supposed to be a whisper.

 

A young woman had come out of the door of the Sourdough Hotel ahead of them. The lights from the windows were not sufficient to show her features but they were ample to bring into silhouette the two men who emerged from an alleyway. The silhouettes swooped down upon the young woman and grabbed her. Hurriedly they led her straight toward the dock. They evidently did not see Chick and Norton standing on the walk before them for all was blackness in that direction.

 

“Take your hands off me!” protested a girl’s voice.

 

“Come along,” said one of her captors.

 

Norton was always faintly nervous when he was with Chick. He could never be sure what Chick would do. Chick would follow orders after a fashion—with a few “improvements” of his own—but when Chick had no specific orders, anything might happen.