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“Pretty tough about poor old Georgie—not even enough guts to shoot me when you had the chance.” I picked up the bottle George had dropped and set it in front of him. “What you need is a good drink. See, George?—three good shots left. Aren’t you glad it didn’t all spill?”

“Don’t want no more, Sammy.” He closed his eyes. “Put away that gun, will you? I never meant you no harm.”

“I said take a drink.” He didn’t move. I sat down opposite him, still covering him with the gun. “Give me the watch, George.”

He seemed to wake up all of a sudden. “Is that what you’re after? Sure, Sammy, here it is, if that’ll make things square. How can I explain how I get when I’m drunk? I just lose control of myself, kid.” He handed me Jerry’s watch. “Here, Sammy. After all old Georgie’s put you through, God knows you’ve earned it.”

I set the watch hands at noon, and pushed down the winder. The tiny chimes sounded twelve times, striking twice each second.

“Worth a thousand bucks in New York, Sammy,” said George thickly, as the chimes rang.

“That’s how long you have to drink out of that bottle, George,” I said, “as long as it takes the watch to strike twelve.”

“I don’t get it. What’s the big idea?”

I laid the watch on the table. “Like you said, George, it’s a funny thing about strychnine—a little of it can save your life.” I pushed the winder on the watch again. “Have a drink to Jerry Sullivan, buddy.”

The chimes tinkled again. Eight…nine…ten…eleven…twelve. The room was quiet.

“O.K., so I didn’t drink,” said George, grinning. “So what happens now, Boy Scout?”

III.

When I began this story, I said I thought it was a murder story. I’m not sure.

I made it back to the American lines, all right, and I reported that George had killed himself accidentally with a pistol he’d found in a ditch. I signed an affidavit swearing it had happened that way.

What the hell, he was dead, and that was that, wasn’t it? Who’d have benefited if I’d told them I shot George? My soul? George’s soul, maybe?

Well, Army Intelligence smelled something fishy about the story quick enough. At Camp Lucky Strike, near Le Havre, France, where they had all of the repatriated prisoners of war waiting for boats home, I got called into a tent Intelligence had set up there. I’d been in camp for two weeks, and was due to ship out the next afternoon.

A gray-haired major asked the questions. He had the affidavit in front of him, and he passed over the story about the pistol in the ditch without showing much interest. He quizzed me for quite a while about how George had behaved in prison camp, and he wanted to know exactly what George looked like. He took notes on what I told him.

“Sure you have the name right?” he asked.

“Yessir, and the serial number, too. Here’s one of his dogtags, sir. I left the other one with the body. Sorry, sir, I meant to turn this in before now.”

The major studied the tag, finally fastened it to the affidavit, and slipped both into a thick folder. I could see George’s name written on the outside. “I don’t know exactly what to do with this next,” he said, toying with the tie-string on the folder. “Quite a guy, George Fisher.” He offered me a cigarette. I took it, but I didn’t light it right away.

This was it. God knows how, but they’d found out the whole story, I thought. I wanted to yell, but I kept on smiling, my teeth clamped together hard.

The major took his time about phrasing the next sentence. “The tag is a phony,” he said at last, smiling a little. “There’s nobody by that name missing from the U.S. Army.” He leaned forward to light my cigarette. “Maybe we’d better turn this folder over to the Germans so they can notify the next of kin.”

I’d never seen George Fisher before they brought him into prison camp alone that day eight months previous, but I should have known the type. I grew up with a couple of kids like him. He must have been a good Nazi to get his job in German Intelligence, because as I said, most of the Bund kids didn’t do that well. I don’t know how