I've quit.
I've been warned off. The boys think I play too rough.
That's why I thought I should give you back your money — because it isn't a completed job by my standards."
He smiled.
"Quit, nothing," he said.
"I'll pay you another thousand dollars to find Rusty.
He doesn't have to come back.
I don't even have to know where he is.
A man has a right to live his own life.
I don't blame him for walking out on my daughter, nor even for going so abruptly.
It was probably a sudden impulse.
I want to know that he is all right wherever he is.
I want to know it from him directly, and if he should happen to need money, I should want him to have that also.
Am I clear?"
I said: "Yes, General."
He rested a little while, lax on the bed, his eyes closed and dark-lidded, his mouth tight and bloodless. He was used up. He was pretty nearly licked.
He opened his eyes again and tried to grin at me.
"I guess I'm a sentimental old goat," he said.
"And no soldier at all.
I took a fancy to that boy.
He seemed pretty clean to me.
I must be a little too vain about my judgment of character.
Find him for me, Marlowe. Just find him."
"I'll try," I said. "You'd better rest now. I've talked your arm off."
I got up quickly and walked across the wide floor and out.
He had his eyes shut again before I opened the door.
His hands lay limp on the sheet.
He looked a lot more like a dead man than most dead men look.
I shut the door quietly and went back along the upper hall and down the stairs.
31
The butler appeared with my hat.
I put it on and said:
"What do you think of him?"
"He's not as weak as he looks, sir."
"If he was, he'd be ready for burial.
What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?"
The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression.
"Youth, sir," he said. "And the soldier's eye."
"Like yours," I said.
"If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours."
"Thanks.
How are the ladies this morning?"
He shrugged politely.
"Just what I thought," I said, and he opened the door for me.
I stood outside on the step and looked down the vistas of grassed terraces and trimmed trees and flowerbeds to the tall metal railing at the bottom of the gardens. I saw Carmen about halfway down, sitting on a stone bench, with her head between her hands, looking forlorn and alone.
I went down the red brick steps that led from terrace to terrace. I was quite close before she heard me.
She jumped up and whirled like a cat.
She wore the light blue slacks she had worn the first time I saw her.
Her blond hair was the same loose tawny wave.
Her face was white.