The Black Mountain

They weren't. I took my time and made sure. I suspected Bua when I put a piece of fuzz from my jacket on his nostrils, holding his lips shut, and it floated off, but two more tries showed that it had been only a current in the air. "No shamming," I reported. "It was close quarters. If you wanted any --" "This is what I wanted. Let him down." I went and took the chain off the peg and eased it up. I suppose I should have been 229 more careful, but my nerves were a little ragged, and when I saw his feet were on the floor I loosened my grip, and his weight jerked the chain out of my hands as he collapsed on the stone. I went to him and got out my pocket knife to cut the cord from his wrists, but Wolfe spoke. "Wait a minute. Is he alive?" I inspected him. "Sure he's alive. He just passed out, and I don't blame him." "Will he die?" "Of what? Did you bring smelling salts?" "By heaven," he blurted with sudden ferocity, "you'll clown at your funeral! Tie his ankles and we'll go upstairs. I doubt if the shots could have been heard outside even if there were anyone to hear them, but I want to get out of here." I obeyed. There was a choice of ropes to tie his ankles with, and it didn't take long. When I finished, Wolfe was at the door with a lantern in his hand, and I got one from the shelf and followed him out and up the fifteen steps. We went up faster than we had come down. He said we had better make sure there was no one else in the fort, and I agreed. He knew his way around as well as if he had built it himself, and we covered it all. He even had me climb the ladder to the tower, while he stood at the 230 foot with my Colt in his hand, talking Albanian -- I suppose warning anyone in the tower that if I were attacked he would pump them. When I rejoined him intact we went back to ground level and on outdoors, and he sat down on a flat rock at the corner nearest the trail. On its surface beside him was a big dark blotch. "That's where Pasic killed the dog," I remarked. "Yes. Sit down. As you know, I look at people when I talk to them, and I don't like to stretch my neck." I sat on the blotch. "Oh, you want to talk?" "I don't want to, I have to. Peter Zov is the man who murdered Marko." I stared at him. "What is this, a hunch?" "No. A certainty." "How come?" He told me what the man in the chair had said. 231 Chapter 13 I sat for a minute and chewed on it, squinting at the sun. "If you had told me before we walked in," I said, "it would have taken just one more bullet." "Pfui. Could you have shot him hanging there?" "No." "Then don't try to saddle me with it." I chewed on it some more. "It's cockeyed. He killed Marko. I killed the birds that killed Carla." "In a fight. You had no choice. With him we have." "Name it. You go down and knife him. Or I go and shoot him. Or one of us challenges him to a duel. Or we shove him off a cliff. Or we leave him there to starve." I had an idea. "You wouldn't buy any of those, and neither would I, but what's wrong with this? We turn him over to Danilo and his pals and tell them what you heard. 232 That ought to do it." "No." "Okay, it's your turn. We may not have all day because company may come." "We must take him back to New York." I guess I gaped. "And you scold me for clowning." "I'm not clowning. I said with him we have a choice, but we haven't. We are constrained."

"By what?" "By the obligation that brought us here. What Danilo's wife told him was cogent but not strictly accurate. If personal vengeance were the only factor I could, as you suggested, go and stick a knife in him and finish it, but that would be accepting the intolerable doctrine that man's sole responsibility is to his ego. That was the doctrine of Hitler, as it is now of Malenkov and Tito and Franco and Senator McCarthy, masquerading as a basis of freedom, it is the oldest and toughest of the enemies of freedom. I reject it and condemn it. You look skeptical. I suppose you're thinking that I have sometimes been high-handed in dealing with the hired protectors of freedom in my adopted land -- the officers of the law." "Not more than a thousand times," I protested.