“Square, yes—corners just sticking out! Well, when you do rob us, Jasper, I’ll look up John. But do try to keep from robbing us as long as you can. I’d hate to have to associate with a religious detective in a boiled shirt!”
Both men laughed, and Jasper went back to his cage. His head continued to hurt, he admitted. The president advised him to lay off for a week. He didn’t want to, he said. With the new munition industries due to the war in Europe, there was much increase in factory pay rolls, and Jasper took charge of them.
“Better take a week off than get ill,” argued the president late that afternoon.
Jasper did let himself be persuaded to go away for at least a week-end. He would run up north, to Wakamin Lake, the coming Friday, he said; he would get some black-bass fishing, and be back on Monday or Tuesday. Before he went he would make up the pay rolls for the Saturday payments and turn them over to the other teller. The president thanked him for his faithfulness, and as was his not infrequent custom invited Jasper to his house for the evening of the next day—Thursday.
That Wednesday evening Jasper’s brother John appeared at the Soul Hope meeting in Rosebank. When he had gone home and had magically turned back into Jasper this Jasper did not return the wig and garments of John to the bureau but packed them into a suitcase, took the suitcase to his room in Vernon and locked it in his wardrobe.
Jasper was amiable at dinner at the president’s house on Thursday, but he was rather silent, and as his head still throbbed he left the house early—at nine-thirty. Sedately, carrying his gray silk gloves in one hand and pompously swinging his stick with the other, he walked from the president’s house on the fashionable boulevard back to the center of Vernon. He entered the public garage in which his car was stored.
He commented to the night attendant: “Head aches. Guess I’ll take the ’bus out and get some fresh air.”
He drove away at not more than fifteen miles an hour. He headed south. When he had reached the outskirts of the city he speeded up to a consistent twenty-five miles an hour. He settled down in his seat with the unmoving steadiness of the long-distance driver: his body quiet except for the tiny subtle movements of his foot on the accelerator, of his hands on the steering wheel—his right hand across the wheel, holding it at the top, his left elbow resting easily on the cushioned edge of his seat and his left hand merely touching the wheel.
He drove in that southern direction for fifteen miles—almost to the town of Wanagoochie. Then by a rather poor side road he turned sharply to the north and west, and making a huge circle about the city drove toward the town of St. Clair. The suburb of Rosebank, in which his brother John lived, is also north of Vernon. These directions were of some importance to him: Wanagoochie eighteen miles south of the mother city of Vernon; Rosebank, on the other hand, north, eight miles north, of Vernon; and St. Clair twenty miles north—about as far north of Vernon as Wanagoochie is south.
On his way to St. Clair, at a point that was only two miles from Rosebank, Jasper ran the car off the main road into a grove of oaks and maples and stopped it on a long-unused woodland road. He stiffly got out and walked through the woods up a rise of ground to a cliff overlooking a swampy lake. The gravelly farther bank of the cliff rose perpendicularly from the edge of the water. In that wan light distilled by stars and the earth he made out the reedy expanse of the lake. It was so muddy, so tangled with sedge grass that it was never used for swimming; and as its only inhabitants were slimy bullheads few people ever tried to fish there. Jasper stood reflective. He was remembering the story of the farmer’s team which had run away, dashed over this cliff and sunk out of sight in the mud bottom of the lake.