But she said grimly, "Oh, no, you don't! You're staying right here!

You're going to sleep in my brother's room, and my pa is going to put a padlock on the door so you don't go roaming off to call up that no-account other you and get in more trouble!"

"I might mess things up if I don't talk to him," Sam objected.

"He's messed things up enough by talking to you! The idea of repeating our private affairs! He hadn't ought to know them! And I'm not sure,"

she said ominously, "that you didn't tell him! If you did, Sam Yoder--"

Sam didn't argue that point, for there was no argument to make. He was practically meek until he discovered after supper that the schedule for the evening was a game of cribbage played in the living room where Rosie's mother and father were.

He mentioned unhappily to Rosie that they were acting like old married people without the fun of getting that way, but he said that only once.

Rosie glared at him. And when bedtime came, she shooed him into her brother's room and her father padlocked him in.

He did not sleep well.

Next morning, there was Rosie in her blue jeans with a monkey wrench in her pocket, ready to go riding with him. She did. And the next day. And the next. Nothing happened. The state banking a.s.sociation put up five thousand dollars reward for the bank robbers and the insurance company put up some more, but there wasn't a trace of the criminals.

There wasn't a trace of criminality about Sam, either. Rosie rode with him, but they exchanged not one single hand-squeeze, nor one melting glance, nor did they even play footsie while they were eating lunch in the truck outside a filling station. Their conduct was exemplary and it wore on Sam. Possibly it wore on Rosie, too.

One day Sam said morosely, as he chewed on a ham sandwich at lunch, "Rosie, I'm crazy about you, but this feels like I been divorced without ever even getting married first."

And Rosie snapped, "If I told you how I feel, that other you in the week after next would laugh his fool head off. So shut up!"

Things were bad, and they got no better. For nearly a week, Rosie rode everywhere with Sam in his truck. They acted in a manner which Rosie's parents would in theory have approved, but didn't even begin to believe in. They did nothing the world could not have watched without their being embarra.s.sed, and they said very little that all the world would not have been bored to hear.

It must have been the eleventh of July when they almost snapped at each other and Rosie said bitterly, "Let me drive a while. I need to put my mind on something that it don't make me mad to think about!"

"Go ahead," Sam invited gloomily. He stopped the truck and got out the door. "I don't look for any happiness in this world any more, anyway."

He went around to the other side of the truck while she slid to the driver's seat.

"Tomorrow's going to be the twelfth," she said. "Do you realize that?"

"I hadn't given it much thought," admitted Sam, "but what's the difference?"

"That's the day where the other you was when he called you up the first time."

"That's right," said Sam morbidly. "It is."

"And so far," added Rosie, jamming her foot viciously down on the accelerator, "I've kept you honest. If you change into a scoundrel between now and tomorrow--"

She changed to second gear. The truck jerked and bounced.

"Hey!" cried Sam. "Watch your driving!"

"Don't you tell me how to drive!"

"But if I get killed before tomorrow--"

Rosie changed gear again, but too soon. The truck bucked, and she jammed down the accelerator again, and it almost leaped off the road.

"If you get killed before tomorrow," raged Rosie, "it'll serve you right! I've been thinking and thinking and thinking. And even if I stop you from being a crook, there'll always be that--other you--knowing everything we say and do." She was. .h.i.tting forty miles an hour and speeding up. "So there'd still be no use. No hope, anyway."

She sobbed, partly in fury and partly in grief. And the roadway curved sharply just about there and she swung the truck crazily around it--and there was a car standing only halfway off the road.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Sam grabbed for the steering wheel, but there wasn't time. The light half-truck, still accelerating, hit the parked car with the noise of dozens of empty oil-drums falling downstairs. The truck slued around, bounced back, and then it charged forward and slammed into the parked car a second time. Then it stalled.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Somebody yelled at Sam. He got out of the truck, looking at the damage and trying to figure out how it was that neither he nor Rosie had been killed, and trying worriedly to think how he was going to explain to the telephone company that he'd let Rosie drive.

The voice yelled louder. Right at the edge of the woodland, there was a reddish-haired character screaming at him and tugging at his hip pocket.

The words he used were not fit for Rosie's sh.e.l.l-like ears--even if they probably came near matching the way she felt. The reddish-haired man said more nasty words at the top of his voice. His hand came out of his hip pocket with something glittering in it.

Sam was swinging when the glitter began and he connected before the gun fired. There was a sort of squashy, smacking sound and the reddish-haired man lay down quietly in the road.

"Migawd!" said Sam blankly. "This was the fella in front of the bank!

He's one of those robbers!"

He stared. There was a loud crashing in the brushwood. The accident had happened at the edge of some woodland, and Sam did not need a high I.Q.

to know that the friends of the red-haired man must be on the way.

A second later, he saw them. Rosie was just getting out of the car then.

She was very pale and there wasn't time to tell her to get started up if possible and away from there.

One of the two running men was carrying a canvas bag with the words BANK OF DUNNSVILLE on it.

The men came at Sam, meanwhile expressing opinions of the state of things, of Sam, of the Cosmos--of everything but the weather--in terms even more reprehensible than the first man had used.

They saw the reddish-haired man lying on the ground. One of them--he'd come out into the road behind the truck and was running toward Sam--jerked out a pistol. He was about to use it on Sam at a range of something like six feet when there was a peculiar noise behind him. It was a sort of hollow _klunk_ which, even at such a time, needed to have attention paid to it. He jerked his head around to see.

The _klunk_ had been made by Rosie's monkey wrench, falling imperatively on the head of the second man to come out of the woods. She had carried it to use on Sam, but she used it instead on a total stranger. He fell down and lay peacefully still.

Then Sam swung a second time, at the second man to draw a pistol on him.

Then there was only the sweet singing of birds among the trees and the whirrings and other insect-noises of creatures in the gra.s.s and brushwood.

Presently there were other noises, but they were made by Rosie. She wept, hanging onto Sam.

He unwound her arms from around his neck and thoughtfully went to the back of the truck and got out some phone wire and his pliers. He fastened the three strangers' hands together behind them, and then their feet, and he piled them in the back of the light truck, along with the money they had stolen.

They came to, one by one, and Sam explained severely that they must watch their language in the presence of a lady. The three were so dazed, though, by what had befallen them that the warning wasn't really necessary.