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character! could never feel easy around. I always had a feeling that he was just about ready to jump at me from the one side I wasn't watching."
    "Alas, poor Rudy," Doc murmured. "But how have you been, my dear-to move from the ridiculous to the sublime?"
    "We-el-" Carol slanted a sultry glance at him. "I think I'll be a lot better tomorrow. You know. After I get a good night's sleep."
    "Tut, tut," said Doc. "I see you're still a very wicked young woman."
    They had driven through Beacon City, commenting wonderingly on the smoke, looking curiously at the milling throngs; and now they were far down the highway on the other side of town. Doc was driving, since Carol had driven all night. She sat sidewise in the seat, facing him, her legs curled under her.
    Their eyes kept meeting. They kept smiling at each other. Doc patted one of her small round flanks, and she held his hand for a moment, gripping it almost fiercely.
    "What are you worried about, Doc?"
    "Worried?"
    "I can always tell. Is it Golie's? You think that if Rudy isn't with us…"
    Doc shook his head. "No trouble there. I wouldn't say I was worried about anything. Just puzzled in a troubled sort of way about our friend Beynon."
    "Oh," said Carol. "Oh, yeah."
    Beynon was an attorney, the chairman of the pardon and parole board. Doc's pardon had been bought from him, and there was still fifteen thousand dollars due on the purchase price. He owned a tiny ranch up in the far corner of the state. A bachelor, he lived on it when he was not occupied with some legal case or his official duties. They were going there now.
    "Doc-" Carol was staring through the windshield. "Let's make a switch. Head right into Mexico from here."
    "We couldn't do it, baby. It's too obvious. We're too close."
    "But you haven't been connected with the job. With any kind of break at all, it'll be days before you are."
    "That doesn't help much. Not when the job's this big and this close to the border. They'll have road blocks up fifty miles this side of El Paso. Everyone'll get a shakedown. Anyone trying to cross over had better be strictly clean and able to prove it, or he's in the soup."
    "Well-but the other way, Doc. Beynon is miles off of our route, and if you think he may be up to something, why-why…"
    "Skip him?" Doc gave her a thoughtful look. "Is that what you were going to suggest, Carol?"
    "Why not? What could he do about it?"
    Doc smiled wryly, almost irritated with her. Leave Beynon holding the sack for his fifteen thousand? A man with his connections who knew as much about them as he did? It was too preposterous to discuss. They were due at his ranch just as quickly as they could get there from Beacon City, and they had damned well better not daily along the way.
    "What could he do?" Carol repeated stubbornly. "Why pay him off, if he's going to make trouble anyway?"
    "I don't know that he is. If he's planning to, however, and if I can't talk him out of it-" Doc left the sentence unfinished, his shrewd eyes thoughtful behind the obscuring sunglasses.
    Beynon hadn't run according to form. What he had done was completely out of character, and having acted in such a way, he must have a motive which did not appear on the surface.
    Doc stroked his jaw, shook his head absently.
    "How did he add up to you, Carol?" he asked. "I mean, aside from the fact that he's an ambitious man with plenty of uses for money. Did he do or say anything that would indicate why he would go for a deal like this one?"
    Carol didn't answer him. Doc was about to repeat the question when he saw that she was asleep.

5
    Doc went to New York the spring that he graduated from high school, a few weeks after his father's death. He was too young to hold political office, and there were no worthwhile jobs in the town. On the other hand, he was convinced, as were his countless friends, that he would be virtually able to pick and choose from the many opportunities available in a large city.
    Things didn't work out that way. He