"Davis, Harold A - Nopo Gets His Man - (Avenger 3911)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Harold A)

And he'd done it single-handed. That was where the nickname had come from. Beavers had never
been one to rush wildly on the trail of some gunman or killer. He'd always taken his time, had
figured out what he would do in the killer's place, where he would go and hide. Then he had gone out
and got him.

"No posse," had been his stock answer in those days. "I've always been able to bring them in
alone!" He said it so often that finally he'd been nicknamed No Posse Beavers. Then the name had
been shortened to just Nopo.

But that was long ago, he thought wearily. His time was past. There were fast cars, two-way
radios, lots of modern equipment for getting criminals these days.

True, he was still a deputy sheriff, but that was just an honorary job. No one ever expected him
to take it seriously. It was just a tribute paid to a man who once had been good.


GRIMLY, he brought his mind back to the words gushing from the radio.

"--two men, Perley Jenkins and Hyde Slivers, serving life terms for murder, escaped from the
State prison last night after cowing the warden and a guard with guns that somehow had been smuggled
in to them.

"They fled in a prison car, and killed a motorist an hour later, when he balked at exchanging
autos with them. Before leaving the prison, they took several other guns from the warden's office.

"Finding of the two bodies near the city indicates they probably are coming this way. Officers
believe they have traded cars again, probably taking the machine driven by the last two they
killed--"

Absently, Nopo Beavers resumed his task of pulling porcupine quills from Chesty's paw. His mind
no longer was following the radio announcer's story. Unconsciously, he was reverting to a habit of a
lifetime--he was trying to figure out what he would do if he was an escaped convict and a killer.

That was something he still could do, even if he was no longer sheriff, but only an inactive
deputy and proprietor of a mountain filling station.

As far as that was concerned. he really couldn't call himself much of a filling station owner.
That had been only a blind; so that he could have a logical excuse for deserting the city, for
living where he could spend most of his time hunting. He'd purposely picked a site for his filling
station on a mountain road that saw little travel even in the summer. Now that it was fall, days
might pass without a car going by.

He had a radio to give him outside news. That was all he needed any more. But it was tough to
realize that he had been forgotten entirely. Now, when every officer for miles around had been
notified to keep on the lookout for two killers, no one had remembered to telephone him--to ask him
to be on the watch, also.

Of course, as the radio announcer had said, the two probably were making for the city. But were
they?