Free South Wind by Theodore A. Tinsley Page B

couched in the red dust o’ the road. Thunder Run warn’t much of a crick but it certainly did thunder, by Judas Priest! when the stars made everythin’ else quiet an’ the spray kep’ brashin’ an’ gurgling in the dark over them flat stones. An’ the hills—blue, suh!—with hawks driftin’ like dots an’ fat white clouds that never moved …
    “So Alice Anne packed up and left,” Tracy reminded him.
    That was correct. She went No’th. Grandpap couldn’t hold her, not after she married that damn’ Jeff Tayloe. Only seventeen, she was. Headstrong as a colt.
    Jerry stopped sucking the pencil abruptly. So La Carfax was married! Well, well—and also, hum, hum!
    Jeff Tayloe was a scamp, it seemed. A damn’ cawn-pone hill-billy with white teeth an’ a big laughin’ voice—an’ she ma’ied him. Three months later Jeff was in jail and Alice Anne smiled calculatin’ an’ far-away, packed up and went North. Plenty o’ spunk. She wrote letters for a while, then they stopped coming. Never told him her new name—he always wrote to Alice Anne Fenn at general delivery, and after a while his letters came back with big carmine rubber-stamp marks all over them.
    “How long since she left, did you say?” Tracy murmured.
    “Four years this Fall.”
    Humm … Lola Carfax—seventeen and four—check! Three years since Hymie Feldman picked her out of thin air and gave her the juicy lead in “Southern Charm.” A natural! Couldn’t act worth a plugged dime, but her drawl—oh, man! And her luscious innocence in the second act—oh, ma-a-a-an! And her wise, case-hardened persistence in the part after the smash-hit closed. Little Lola knew instinctively what the vise critics didn’t—that Southern Charm was a golden racket in a big evil-minded burg, if you played the role on Park Avenue and met the right people and your voice was as soft and velvety as pollen on a bee’s thigh … A luscious peach from the Southland with a small, rotten pit tucked snugly away in the fruit. Jerry knew the outlines; Patsy would know a hell of a lot more!
    He said, absently, “Beg pardon?”
    “—my declinin’ years,” the old man was saving in a slow, stately murmur. “The last prop of my house. If you could only find her—”
    “I thought you said she had a brother,” Tracy lied in an odd voice.
    The old man hadn’t said anything of the kind, yet he nodded.
    “Did I mention him? Her brother, Henry Fenn, made the supreme sacrifice in France, suh. She’s all I have left.”
    “Check,” said an odd, gasping voice in Jerry’s brain. “No brother to guide her. Then who whelped Buell Carfax? And—holy sweet hominy!—can it be that young Massa Buell has white teeth and a big, laughing voice? Also, how tight are Southern jails, I wonder?”
    He was burning with a desire to get to Patsy and soak up her slants on the subject. Patsy could spear a fish like Lola Carfax with a dozen well-chosen words.
    He got to his feet, smiled, held out his hand.
    “Tell you what, Major. You’ve got me interested. I don’t recognize the photograph but I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind. You wait for developments at the San Pueblo—I’ll have Butch ride you over in a cab. It may take a little time to trace Alice Anne—”
    “I was hopin’ you might find her for me in the next fo’ty-eight hours,” Major Fenn said faintly. “Circumstances at Thunder Run make it impe’ative, I’m afraid—”
    Busted. The old fella had his fare probably and a small, carefully counted roll …
    “We’ll do the best we can, Maje,” said Tracy cheerfully.
    He stepped into the outer office and leaned over Butch’s cauliflower ear.
    “Take this guy over to the San Pueblo. After you’ve parked him, go up to Snitch Collins at the desk and tell him I said to keep his hooks off the major. Tell him if he doesn’t I’ll send someone over there that’ll take him by the ears and smash every—chair in the lobby with his heels! Tell him that from