'Dinah,' Rolff called without turning his face from me, 'you Won't--'
But she laughed, came close to his back, and wound her strong arms around him, pulling his arms down, pinning them to his sides.
I shoved Thaler out of the way with my right arm, and kept my gun on him while I yanked Rolff's weapons out of his hands. Dinah turned the lunger loose.
He took two steps toward the dining room door, said wearily, 'There is no--' and collapsed on the floor.
Dinah ran to him. I pushed Thaler through the hall door, past the still sleeping Jerry, and to the alcove beneath the front stairs, where I had seen a phone.
I called Noonan, told him I had Thaler, and where.
'Mother of God!' he said. 'Don't kill him till I get there.'
XIV. Max
The news of Whisper's capture spread quickly. When Noonan, the coppers he had brought along, and I took the gambler and the now conscious Jerry into the City Hall there were at least a hundred people standing around watching us.
All of them didn't hook pleased. Noonan's coppers--a shabby lot at best--moved around with whitish strained faces. But Noonan was the most triumphant guy west of the Mississippi. Even the bad luck he had trying to third- degree Whisper couldn't spoil his happiness.
Whisper stood up under all they could give him. He would talk to his lawyer, he said, and to nobody else, and he stuck to it. And, as much as Noonan hated the gambler, here was a prisoner he didn't give the works, didn't turn over to the wrecking crew. Whisper had killed the chief's brother, and the chief hated his guts, but Whisper was still too much somebody in Poisonville to be roughed around.
Noonan finally got tired of playing with his prisoner, and sent him up--the prison was on the City Hall's top floor--to be stowed away. I lit another of the chief's cigars and read the detailed statement he had got from the woman in the hospital. There was nothing in it that I hadn't learned from Dinah and MacSwain.
The chief wanted me to come out to his house for dinner, but I lied out of it, pretending that my wrist--now in a bandage--was bothering me. It was really little more than a burn.
While we were talking about it, a pair of plain-clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with. It had broken a rib for him, and he had taken a back-door sneak while the rest of us were busy. Noonan's men had picked him up in a doctor's office. The chief failed to get any information out of him, and sent him off to the hospital.
I got up and prepared to leave, saying:
'The Brand girl gave me the tip-off on this. That's why I asked you to keep her and Rolff out of it.'
The chief took hold of my left hand for the fifth or sixth time in the past couple of hours.
'If you want her taken care of, that's enough for me,' he assured me. 'But if she had a hand in turning that bastard up, you can tell her for me that any time she wants anything, all she's got to do is name it.'
I said I'd tell her that, and went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o'clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.
Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.
We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of the City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.
I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.
I backed into an alley entrance and slid my gun loose. The car came abreast. An arc-light brightened two faces in the front of the car. The driver's meant nothing to me. The upper part of the other's was hidden by a pulled-down hat. The lower part was Whisper's.
Across the street was the entrance to another block of my alley, lighted at the far end. Between the light and me, somebody moved just as Whisper's car roared past. The somebody had dodged from behind one shadow that might have been an ash-can to another.
What made me forget Whisper was that the somebody's legs had a bowed look.
A load of coppers buzzed past, throwing lead at the first car.
I skipped across the street, into the section of alley that held a man who might have bowed legs.
If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn't armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.
Three-quarters of a block of this, and a shadow broke away from another shadow--a man going pell-mell away from me.
'Stop!' I bawled, pounding my feet after him. 'Stop, or I'll plug you, MacSwain.'
He ran half a dozen strides farther and stopped, turning.
'Oh, it's you,' he said, as if it made any difference who took him back to the hoosegow.
'Yeah,' I confessed. 'What are all you people doing wandering around loose?'
'I don't know nothing about it. Somebody dynamited the floor out of the can. I dropped through the hole with the rest of them. There was some mugs standing off the bulls. I made the back-trotters with one bunch. Then we split, and I was figuring on cutting over and making the hills. I didn't have nothing to do with it. I just went along when she blew open.'
