ten to reason was being borne to eternal oblivion. No one would ever hear of her again. She would just—disappear.
Opper's lips jerked nervously, with something like a grin.
A little more than four hundred miles away, near the resort where he was supposed to be at the moment, was a great swamp. The muck of this swamp, in places, was bottomless. Anything thrown into the muck sank beyond possible recovery, to lie in slimy darkness for the rest of time.
Bottomless! He should know. He had spent his boyhood near the swamp. He had seen animals flounder in there, never to be glimpsed again. He'd heaved boulders into it, and watched while they sank slowly, soundlessly.
He glanced at his watch. In ten hours of easy driving he'd be beside the swamp. After a wait, with black night shrouding him, he would unfasten the metal trunk on the rack behind, and throw it into the muck with his silenced gun also within it.
As easy as that.
Trunk and body and gun would sink to eternal darkness. And George Opper, in a year or so, with the world convinced that Martia Opper had run off secretly with another man, would marry Lois Blye.
So he drove along the deserted highway, hat off while the morning breeze bathed his forehead, resting and thinking of Lois. And his sedan looked like any other rather outmoded sedan of a biggish sort. And the big metal trunk on the rear rack gleamed dully in the rising sun, giving no hint whatever of the burden it contained. . . .
At about seven o'clock, the dash indicator showed that he needed gasoline. He started to turn into a big filling-station in a town that he was passing through, decided against it, and went on to the open country till he hit an obscure, single-pump station in front of a crossroads store. He stopped beside the pump and a young fellow in overalls came out.
"Fill the t" Opper began.
Then he stopped. His breath whistled between his teeth, and his face went pasty white.
Till this moment he had forgotten something. The gasoline tank was in the rear of the car, under the trunk. The gas intake was right beside it.
"You want it filled, you say?" the boy asked, staring curiously.
"Yes," faltered Opper, swallowing. "Yes."
He had to have gas, regardless of the position of the gasoline intake. The boy went to the rear of the car. Opper got from behind the steering-wheel and walked back, too, on legs that trembled.
He watched the boy's hands. They were brushing against the trunk. The intake cap stuck a little. Finally it came loose, and the lad's hand thumped against the trunk with the suddenness of it. The trunk gave out a dead, muffled sound.
Opper's teeth almost met in his lower lip. Sweat was dewing his forehead, feeling clammy in the cool of the morning.
"How many will she take?" said the boy.
"About twelve gallons," George Opper heard himself say. His voice had an odd muffled sound, as though he stood far off and heard it through a thin partition.
The boy inserted the bronze hose-nozzle into the intake pipe and carelessly draped the hose over the trunk. And then Opper heard it.
A faint, almost inaudible whimper
