Della Street was seated on the running board of the automobile, making friends with some half-dozen chipmunks. The little animals came almost to her fingertips before turning to scamper away to the comparative safety of a dead pine log, where they chattered their spirits up before slowly creeping back, to approach within a matter of inches. Up in the pine tree above her head a bluejay, apparently thinking she was feeding the chipmunks, fluttered nervously from limb to limb, dropping ever lower, cocking his head from side to side, muttering low throaty squawks of protest at being excluded from the feast — a strange combination of impudence and diffidence.
“Hello, Chief,” she said. “Who’s the new arrival?”
“Waid, the secretary,” Mason replied. “He has something to tell them. That’s why they came up here to the cabin. They wanted to meet Waid where no newspaper men would be around... And Paul Drake’s telephoned he has something hot in San Molinas.”
“How about Waid?” she asked. “Going to wait and see if he’ll talk, Chief?”
“No. We’ll rush to San Molinas. Sergeant Holcomb will warn Waid not to tell me whatever it is he knows, but Charles Sabin will get it out of him later, and then we’ll find out. Come on, tell your friends good-by and let’s go.”
He climbed in behind the steering wheel, started the car, and drove slowly down the driveway which led from the cabin. Once or twice he stopped to look overhead in the branches of the pine tree. “That bluejay,” he said, laughing, “is still following us. I wonder if there isn’t something I could find to feed him.”
“There’s some peanut brittle in a bag in the glove compartment,” Della Street said. “You might break a peanut out of that.”
“Let’s try,” Mason said.
He opened the glove compartment, and Della pulled out a paper bag. “Here are a couple of loose peanuts in the bottom of the bag,” she told him, and poured them into Mason’s cupped hand.
He stood on the running board, held his hands up above his head so that the bluejay could see the shelled peanuts. The jay fluttered noisily from branch to branch, swooped down until he was almost even with Mason’s shoulder, then, becoming frightened at his own temerity, zoomed upward with a startled squawk. Twice he repeated this maneuver. The third time, he perched on Mason’s hand long enough to grab one of the peanuts in his beak before jumping up, to flutter into the branches of the tree overhead.