I don't know why I waited. I could have squeezed the trigger and killed him before he knew what hit him. But for some reason I didn't.
I saw a knife glint dully as he began to move forward. Then I saw who it was.
I must have given a grunt of surprise, because the figure wheeled quickly in my direction. I didn't see a thing, but instinct told me to do something and do it in a hurry. I started to dive, and as I moved to one side the knife flashed and glittered, cutting the air down over my head. There was a sudden thud as it buried itself in the wall. I heard the quivering, disappointed whine of well-tempered steel. Then I slammed into a pair of legs and we crashed to the floor.
The would-be killer was Marta, the Mexican girl.
I heard clothing tear as we went down. I made a grab for her arms but she jerked away and gouged bloody holes in my face with her fingernails. I grabbed again and this time I got her down, my hands on her shoulders and my knee in her stomach. Her body was smooth and hot, and somehow hard and soft at the same time, like gun steel covered with velvet. Neither of us made a sound. We had landed near the window, and cold moonlight fell on her sweating face. Her blouse had come apart in the fight, and from her waist up she was mostly naked. She twisted her head to one side and sank those white, gleaming teeth in my wrist.
I heard myself howl as she broke loose and dived across the floor for one of my guns. But I grabbed her hair and jerked her back, scratching and clawing like some wild animal. I could feel warm blood running down my arm, and when she tried to bite me again I hit her. I hit her in the mouth as hard as I could. I felt her lips burst on my knuckles and blood spurted halfway across the room.
“Goddamn you!” I heard myself saying. She was limp on the floor, but I still had a hold of her hair, holding her head up. “Goddamn you!” I let go of her hair and her head hit the floor like a ripe melon. She was as limp as a rag, and I didn't give a damn if she never got up.
I fumbled around the dark room in my underwear until I finally found my shirt and got some matches. After a while I got the lamp burning and poured some water into the crock bowl and began washing the blood off my arm. But I couldn't stop the blood that kept gushing out of the deep double wound on my left wrist. The pain went all the way up to my shoulder and down to my guts. Anger swarmed all over me like a prairie fire.
“Get up, goddamn you!” I said. But she didn't move. I went over and gathered up my guns and her knife, trailing blood all over the place. Then I jerked off half her blouse and wrapped it tightly around my forearm. Pretty soon the bleeding stopped.
After a while she began to stir. She lifted herself slowly to her knees, shaking her head dumbly like a poleaxed calf.
“Get out of here,” I said tightly. “And stay out. So help me, if you ever try a thing like that again I'll kill you.”
She looked at me for a long time with those stupid eyes. She looked like hell. Her mouth was bloody and her lips were beginning to puff. She didn't look so damned wild and deadly now.
I went over to the door and flung it open. “Go on, get out of here.”
She managed to get to her feet, swaying, almost falling on her face again. She put one foot out, as if it were the first step she had ever taken. Then she tried the other one. After a while she made it to the hallway. I slammed the door and locked it.
I don't know how long I sat there on the springless bed, nursing my arm and letting the anger burn itself out. But finally the red haze began to lift and I could think straight again.
She had tried to kill me! That was the thing that got me, when I began to think about it. But why? I didn't know enough about women to answer that. A lot of people had tried to kill me at one time or another, but, before tonight, never a woman. Maybe she was just plain crazy. I remembered that Kreyler had said that when I had asked him about her. Maybe Kreyler knew what he was talking about.
My wrist was still giving me trouble. The pain was no longer located in any one particular spot; the whole arm throbbed and ached all the way to the marrow of the bone. I got up and washed it again in water and tried to do a better job of bandaging it, but I couldn't tell any difference in the way it felt. That was when I heard somebody on the stairs. Footsteps in the hall.
I found my pistol and blew out the lamp. When the footsteps stopped in front of my door I was ready. I jerked the door open and stepped to one side, my pistol cocked.
It was the girl again, Marta.
She had washed the blood off her face but she was still a long way from being a beauty. Her face was swollen, her lips were split and puffed all out of shape. But she had found a clean blouse from somewhere to replace the one I had torn off of her—and in her hands she had a bottle of whisky.
“Whisky good for arm,” she said flatly. “I fix.”
There was no fight left in her. Her eyes had the vacant, weary look that you see in the eyes of very old people, or perhaps the dying. I felt like a fool holding a gun on her, and in the back of my mind I suppose I felt sorry for what I had done to her, even if she had tried to kill me. What could I do with a girl like that? I couldn't hate her. I couldn't feel anything for her but a vague kind of pity.
And I was dead tired and maybe I did need the whisky.
“All right,” I said. “Wait until I light the lamp again.”
I lit the lamp and she came into the room, almost timidly. She took the bowl of bloody water, threw it out the window, and filled the bowl up again from the pitcher. “Come,” she said.
She unwrapped my arm and washed the wound again. Then she opened the bottle and poured the whisky over my wrist and I almost hit the ceiling.
“Bad now,” she said, “but good tomorrow.”
“If I live until tomorrow. At the rate things are going, there's a good chance that I won't.”
She began bandaging the wrist again, without saying anything. I turned the bottle up and drank some of the clear, coal-oil-tasting fluid. It was the raw, sour-mash stuff that the Mexicans make for themselves, and when it hit
