“I’ve got nothing to take,” he said, “but I’ll get into warmer clothes.”
He pulled the wardrobe door open, so that it screened a corner of the room for him to change in. Steve went to a window, and stood there looking between blind and frame, into the dark street where nothing moved. The girl stood close to him, between his arm and side, her fingers twined in his sleeve.
“Will we -? Will we -?”
He drew her closer and answered the whispered question she could not finish.
“We’ll make it,” he said, “if Larry plays square, or if he doesn’t. We’ll make it.”
A rifle cracked somewhere in the direction of Main Street. A volley of pistol shots. The cream-colored Vauxhall came out of nowhere to settle on the sidewalk, two steps from the door. Larry Ormsby, hatless and with his shirt torn loose to expose a hole under one of his collar-bones, tumbled out of the car and through the door that Steve threw open for him.
Larry kicked the door shut behind him, and laughed.
“Izzard’s frying nicely!” he cried, and clapped his hands together. “Come, come! The desert awaits!”
Steve turned to call the blind man. Rymer stepped out from behind his screening door. In each of Rymer’s hands was a heavy revolver. The film was gone from Rymer’s eyes.
His eyes, cool and sharp now, held the two men and the girl.
“Put your hands up, all of you,” he ordered curtly.
Larry Ormsby laughed insanely.
“Did you ever see a damned fool do his stuff, Rymer?” he asked.
“Put your hands up!”
“Rymer,” Larry said, “I’m dying now. To hell with you!”
And without haste he took a black automatic pistol from an inside coat pocket.
The guns in Rymer’s hands rocked the cabin with explosion after explosion.
Knocked into a sitting position on the floor by the heavy bullets that literally tore him apart, Larry steadied his back against the wall, and the crisp, sharp reports of his lighter weapon began to punctuate the roars of the erstwhile blind man’s guns.
Instinctively jumping aside, pulling the girl with him, at the first shot, Sieve now hurled himself upon Rymer’s flank. But just as he reached him the shooting stopped. Rymer swayed, the very revolvers in his hands seemed to go limp. He slid out of Steve’s clutching hands – his neck scraping one hand with the brittle dryness of paper – and became a lifeless pile on the floor.
Steve kicked the dead man’s guns across the floor a way, and then went over to where the girl knelt beside Larry Ormsby. Larry smiled up at Steve with a flash of white teeth.
“I’m gone, Steve,” he said. “That Rymer-fooled us all – phoney films on eyes – painted on – spy for rum syndicate.”
He writhed, and his smile grew stiff and strained.
“Mind shaking hands, Steve?” he asked a moment later.
“You’re a good guy, Larry,” was the only thing he could think to say.
The dying man seemed to like that. His smile became real again.
“Luck to you – you can get a hundred and ten out of the Vauxhall,” he managed to say.
And then, apparently having forgotten the girl for whom he had given up his life, he flashed another smile at Steve and died.
The front door slammed open – two heads looked in. The heads’ owners came in.
Steve bounded upright, swung his stick. A bone cracked like a whip, a man reeled back holding a hand to his temple.
“Behind me -close!” Steve cried to the girl, and felt her hands on his back.
Men filled the doorway. An invisible gun roared and a piece of the ceiling flaked down. Steve spun his stick and charged the door. The light from the lamp behind him glittered and glowed on the whirling wood. The stick whipped backward and forward, from left to right, from right to left. It writhed like a live thing – seemed to fold upon its grasped middle as if spring-hinged with steel. Flashing half-circles merged into a sphere of deadliness. The rhythm of incessant thudding against flesh and clicking on bone became a tune that sang through the grunts of fighting men, the groans and oaths of stricken men. Steve and the girl went through the door.
Between moving arms and legs and bodies the cream of the Vauxhall showed. Men stood upon the automobile, using its height for vantage in the fight. Steve threw himself forward, swinging his stick against shin and thigh, toppling men from the machine. With his left hand he swept the girl around to his side. His body shook and rocked under the weight of blows from men who were packed too closely for any effectiveness except the smothering power of sheer weight.
His stick was suddenly gone from him. One instant he held and spun it; the next, he was holding up a clenched fist that was empty – the ebony had vanished as if in a puff of smoke. He swung the girl up over the car door, hammered her down into the car – jammed her down upon the legs of a man who stood there – heard a bone break, and saw the man go down. Hands gripped him everywhere; hands pounded him. He cried aloud with joy when he saw the girl, huddled on the floor of the car, working with ridiculously small hands at the car’s mechanism.
The machine began to move. Holding with his hands, he lashed both feet out behind. Got them back on the step. Struck over the girl’s head with a hand that had neither thought nor time to make a fist – struck stiff-fingered into a broad red face.
The car moved. One of the girl’s hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off – tore pieces from him – tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them. Then he fell into the car beside the girl.
Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced riflw emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert – white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed – was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.
Presently the girl slowed down, stopped.
“Are you all right?” Steve asked.
“Yes; but you’re -“
“All in one piece,” he assured her. “Let me take the wheel.”
“No! No!” she protested. “You’re bleeding. You’re -“
“No! No!” he mocked her. “We’d better keep going until we hit something. We’re not far enough from Izzard yet to call ourselves safe.”
He was afraid that if she tried to patch him up he would fall apart in her hands. He felt like that.
She started the car, and they went on. A great sleepiness came to him. What a fight! What a fight!
“Look at the sky!” she exclaimed.
He opened his heavy eyes. Ahead of them, above them, the sky was lightening – from blue-black to violet, to mauve, to rose. He turned his head and looked back. Where they had left Izzard, a monstrous bonfire was burning, painting the sky with jewelled radiance.
“Goodbye, Izzard,” he said drowsily, and settled himself more comfortably in the seat.
He looked again at the glowing pink in the sky ahead.
“My mother has primroses in her garden in Delaware that look like that sometimes,” he said dreamily. “You’ll like ‘em.”
His head slid over against her shoulder, and he went to sleep.
HOUSE DICK
The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.
The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it – until the third and last day. Then things changed.
