fore the bullet struck her that Opper could hardly stand it.
Frantically he gripped the lock with the pliers and wrenched back. The rusted jaws slipped off the lock and he fell to his knees. He jumped up and bent over the lock.
It was scratched a little, that was all.
Opper hammered at the lock with the pliers and with the wooden jack-handle. It was like the effort of a child to open a bank vault. After a few minutes of it, with the sound of his blows ringing over the empty fields around him, he stopped.
The whimpering of the trapped thing in the trunk was sounding louder.
The hammering had frightened it. Opper snatched up the metal shank of the screw-driver and reached across the trunk to its hinges. He caught up the heavy, unwieldy jack. The hinges were almost concealed by the rear trunk panel, but he located them. He placed the shank of the screw-driver against one of them and pounded with the jack.
A long, jagged dent leaped into being next to the hinge. The hinge itself bent a little, but was not noticeably injured.
He lost his head a little and hammered wildly, frenziedly at it, with the whimper maddening his ears between blows. The hinge didn't bend any more. Hysterically he raised the jack and brought it down with all his strength on top of the trunk.
The top sagged inward in a deep dent, with a slight hole appearing where the corner of the jack's base had struck.
"My God, no!" Opper chattered aloud, staring at the tiny hole. "Not that way! Somebody could see in!"
Panic-stricken, he battered at the metal around the little hole, trying to force the jagged edges together. Then he stopped abruptly as the sound of a slowing motor came to his ears.
He stared back along the road and saw a battered small car coasting toward him. A leathery-faced man at the wheel was staring first at him and then at the trunk. The man got out of the car and walked toward the sedan. Opper saw a star pinned to his vest, glinting as the lapel of his coat twitched with his walking.
3
With death in his heart, Opper faced the man and forced a smile.
"Let my temper get the best of me," he said loudly. The whimper had stopped for the moment, but it might sound faintly again at any time. "I've lost the key to this trunk, and I was trying to break into it."
"So I see," said the man, his leathery face expressionless.
His level eyes went again from Opper to the trunk.
"Kind of funny, you stopping 'way out here on the road and trying to hammer a trunk open," he said.
"There's nothing funny about it," Opper retorted. He wrenched his eyes from the tiny hole in the trunk's top. If you got right over that hole and looked down hard, you might see "I've lost the key and I want to get into it. That's all. I—I have some route maps in there, and I need them for my day's drive."
"Route maps? You can get those at any filling-station."
"I know," Opper nodded, smiling till his jaws ached. "I thought of that after I'd started to break open the trunk. But then, as I said, I rather lost my temper and gave it a bang on the lid."
"I should think you'd stop at some
