Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

When I got to it and looked he was a black shape growing smaller every instant along the tricky sand. There was a bang from the front door, over to my left, and the black shape spun around, turned toward the house once more as if in ghastly surprise. Then it collapsed into just a smudge on the sand.

She was still standing there in the room when I came back again a couple minutes later. Not moving, not seeing anything. The damn radio was still going. Someone was singing “Something Came and Got Me in the Spring.” I went over, snapped it off.

She was holding her arm out, bent at the elbow, the forearm up perpendicular to her face, stiff as a ramrod. There was a short gash across the top of it, with a jagged piece of glass caught between the lips of the shallow wound. Even as I looked it dropped out of its own weight.

She spoke, so then I knew she’d seen me. “Is he gone?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I tied my handkerchief around her bleeding arm. “Thank God you heard me through the door! I didn’t save you — this did. Gee, you were plucky to do it!”

“I didn’t hear you,” she said dully, “This must have happened when he bent me backwards over the table and my arm hit the broken glass—”

I led her out of the house with my arm around her. I saw the two cops standing in the middle distance looking down at something, hidden from us by a rise of ground. “Don’t look over that way,” I said to her.

“What’s he done to me?” she asked piteously. “I’ll see shadows, be afraid now, all my life.”

“No, you won’t,” I promised. “There’s still that bright sun and blue sky, and someday soon a guy’ll come along that’ll be able to tell you all about it better than your old brother can!”

The Balinese Dagger by Richard B. Sale

They were after Daffy Dill’s double-edged dagger, something he had never stopped to think could swing either way into a quick payoff.

I

On a dark and gloomy Monday morning when I was feeling like a frog who’d been mud-packed during a drought, I arrived at the city room of the New York Chronicle to engage in a little more or less honest work which pays me fifty-five smackers a week.

I was passing wearily through the outer reception office, when who should give me the highsign but Dinah Mason, the platinum-haired Westport gal who is the blight of my life and who handles the switchboard of the Chronicle’s frantic telephone system.

“Well, well,” she said, cocking her head for a good look at me. “If it isn’t Custer’s last stand. What poisoned you?”

“Garbo,” I said fervently, “never mix old-fashions and daiquiris. I have learned — to my sad regret — that these concoctions are too, too inimical.”

“Inimical?” she said. “Ha-ha. That reminds me — the Old Man was speaking of you only Saturday and he used the same word. Only he said that Daffy Dill and a news beat were inimical. I don’t know what he could have meant.”

“The Old Man,” I said stiffly, “was just talking through his hair — which he has not in large quantities. I’d like to tell him a thing or two—”

“Why, that’s fine, Rasputin,” Dinah said. “Only ten minutes ago he told me to tell you that he wanted to see you when you came in. Run right along, Daffy darling, and just in case you’re thinking of proposing again, the answer is — as ever — nay, nay.”

I wasn’t doing any good there, so I dragged myself wearily through the city room to the Old Man’s private doghouse and went in without knocking, just to bolster my bravado.

The Old Man was sitting at his desk with his green eyeshade down over his face and his bald head glistening like a snake’s spine. He looked like a little goblin and the moment I came in, he said, “Hello, Daffy,” without glancing up, and then: “Sit down.”

I sat down and lighted a cigarette.

“Daffy,” he murmured, looking grieved, “a very sad thing has happened.”

“Chief!” I said, alarmed. “I’m not fired?”

“Worse than that,” he said. “Solly Sampson is home, fighting with a pair of lavender elephants. He was out on a binge last night and therefore he cannot handle his beat today.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Something tells me I’m the guy behind the eight ball.”

“Being as how you are such an elegant sailor,” the Old Man replied ghoulishly, “I figured that today you could take over Solly’s department and cover the waterfront. Specifically, the job is this: the S. S. Aranthic arrives at ten today from a round-the-world cruise. Aboard her is ye well-known and now retired insurance detective, Kirk Rainsford.”

“Listen, chief,” I said sadly, “I like the sea like a fish loves a solid cement swimming pool. Nix on it. I’ll be sick all the way down the bay. That tug is a gem when it comes to rolling.”

“I was saying that Rainsford is aboard the Aranthic.”