as on the other foot.

A cold chill ran up my spine. It was Kenny who was doing the staring
now, and he was looking directly at my shoes. He stood back a bit and
continued to stare. He was dramatizing his sudden triumph in a way that
turned my blood to ice.

Then I saw that Bill was staring too--straight at the shoes of a man he
had known for three years and grown to like and trust. But underlying
the warmth and friendliness in Bill was a granite-like integrity which
nothing could shake.

It was Bill who spoke first. "I guess you'd better take them off, Tom,"
he said. "We may as well be thorough about this."

Sure, I was big. I grew up fast as a kid and at eighteen I weighed two
hundred and thirty pounds, all lean flesh. If shoes ran large I could
sometimes cram my feet into size twelves, but I felt much more
comfortable in a size or two larger than that.

What made it worse, Molly liked me. I was involved with her, but no one
knew how much. No one knew whether we'd quarreled or not, or how
insanely jealous I could be. No one knew whether Molly had only
pretended to like Ned while carrying a torch for me, and how dangerously
complex the situation might have become all along the line.

I stood very still, listening. The whispering was so loud now it drowned
out the sighing of the wind. I looked down at my shoes. They were caked
with mud and soggy and discolored. Day after day I'd trudge back and
forth from the canal to the shacks in the blazing sunlight without
giving my feet a thought until the ache in them had become intolerable,
rest an absolute necessity.

There was only one thing to do--call Kenny's bluff so fast he wouldn't
have time to hurl another accusation at me.

I handed Bill both of my shoes. He looked at me and nodded. I waited,
listening to the whispering rise and fall, watching him stoop and fit
the shoes into the prints on the sand.

He straightened suddenly. His face was expressionless, but I could see
that he was waging a terrible inward struggle with himself.

"Your shoes come pretty close to filling out those prints, Tom," he
said. "I can't be sure--but a wax impression test should pretty well
clear this up." He gripped my arm and nodded toward the shacks. "Better
stick close to me."

Kenny took a slow step backward, his jaw tightening, his eyes searching
Bill's face. "Wax impression test, hell!" he said. "You've got your
murderer. I'm going to see he gets what's coming to him--right now