Rosy-checked Rusty, still holding his cards at the table, said gloomily, but without emotion: 'Jesus, Jeff, you'll croak him.'
Jeff said: 'Him?' He indicated the man at his feet by kicking him not especially hard on the thigh. 'You can't croak him. He's tough. He's a tough baby. He likes this.' He bent down, grasped one of the unconscious man's lapels in each hand and dragged him to his knees. 'Don't you like it, baby?' he asked and holding Ned Beaumont up on his knees with one hand, struck his face with the other fist.
The door-knob was rattled from the outside.
Jeff called: 'Who's that?'
Shad O'Rory's pleasant voice: 'Me.'
Jeff dragged Ned Beaumont far enough from the door to let it open, dropped him there, and unlocked the door with a key taken from his pocket.
O'Rory and Whisky came in. ORory looked at the man on the floor, then at Jeff, and finally at Rusty. His blue-grey eyes were clouded, When he spoke it was to ask Rusty: 'Jeff been slapping him down for the fun of it?'
The rosy-checked boy shook his head. 'This Beaumont is a son of a bitch,' he said sullenly. 'Every time he comes to he gets up and starts something.'
'I don't want him killed, not yet,' O'Rory said. He looked down at Ned Beaumont. 'See if you can bring him around again. I want to talk to him.'
Rusty got up from the table. 'I don't know,' he said. 'He's pretty far gone.'
Jeff was more optimistic. 'Sure we can,' he said. 'I'll show you. Take his feet, Rusty.' He put his hands under Ned Beaumont's armpits.
They carried the unconscious man into the bathroom and put him in the tub. Jeff put the stopper in and turned on cold water from both the faucet below and the shower above. 'That'll have him up and singing in no time,' he predicted.
Five minutes later, when they hauled him dripping from the tub and set him on his feet, Ned Beaumont could stand. They took him into the bedroom again. O'Rory was sitting on one of the chairs smoking a cigarette. Whisky had gone.
'Put him on the bed,' O'Rory ordered.
Jeff and Rusty led their charge to the bed, turned him around, and pushed him down on it. When they took their hands away from him he fell straight hack on the bed. They pulled him into a sitting position again and Jeff slapped his battered face with an open hand, saying: 'Come on, Rip Van Winkle, come to life.'
'A swell chance of him coming to life,' the sullen Rusty grumbled.
'You think he won't?' Jeff asked cheerfully and slapped Ned Beaumont again.
Ned Beaumont opened the one eye not too swollen to be opened.
O'Rory said: 'Beaumont.'
Ned Beaumont raised his head and tried to look around the room, but there was nothing to show he could see Shad O'Rory.
O'Rory got up from his chair and stood in front of Ned Beaumont, bending down until his face was a few inches from the other man's. He asked: 'Can you hear me, Beaumont?'
Ned Beaumont's open eye looked dull hate into O'Rory's eyes.
O'Rory said: 'This is O'Rory, Beaumont. Can you hear what I say?'
Moving his swollen lips with difficulty, Ned Beaumont uttered a thick 'Yes.'
O'Rory said: 'Good. Now listen to what I tell you. You're going to give me the dope on Paul.' He spoke very distinctly without raising his voice, without his voice losing any of its musical quality. 'Maybe you think you won't, but you will. I'll have you worked on from now till you do. Do you understand me?'
Ned Beaumont smiled. The condition of his face made the smile horrible. He said: 'I won't.'
O'Rory stepped back and said: 'Work on him.'
While Rusty hesitated, the apish Jeff knocked aside Ned Beaumont's upraised hand and pushed him down on the bed. 'I got something to try.' He scooped up Ned Beaumont's legs and tumbled them on the bed. He leaned over Ned Beaumont, his hands busy on Ned Beaumont's body.
Ned Beaumont's body and arms and legs jerked convulsively and three times he groaned. After that he lay still.
Jeff straightened up and took his hands away from the man on the bed. He was breathing heavily through his ape's mouth. He growled, half in complaint, half in apology: 'It ain't no good now. He's throwed another joe.'
When Ned Beaumont recovered consciousness he was alone in the room. The lights were on. As laboriously as before he got himself out of bed and across the room to the door. The door was locked. He was fumbling with the knob when the door was thrown open, pushing him back against the wall.
Jeff in his underwear, barefoot, came in. 'Ain't you a pip?' he said. 'Always up to some kind of tricks. Don't you never get tired of being bounced on the floor?' He took Ned Beaumont by the throat with his left hand and struck him in the face with his right fist, twice, but not so hard as he had hit him before. Then he pushed him backwards over to the bed and threw him on it. 'And stay put awhile this time,' he growled.
Ned Beaumont lay still with closed eyes.
Jeff went out, locking the door behind him.
Painfully Ned Beaumont climbed out of bed and made his way to the door. He tried it. Then he withdrew two steps and tried to hurl himself against it, succeeding only in lurching against it. He kept trying until the door was flung open again by Jeff.
Jeff said: 'I never seen a guy that liked being hit so much or that I liked hitting so much.' He leaned far over to one side and swung his fist up from below his knee.
Ned Beaumont stood blindly in the fist's path. It struck his cheek and knocked him the full length of the room. He lay still where he fell. He was lying there two hours later when Whisky came into the room.
Whisky awakened him with water from the bathroom and helped him to the bed. 'Use your head,' Whisky begged him. 'These mugs'll kill you. They've got no sense.'
Ned Beaumont looked dully at Whisky through a dull and bloody eye. 'Let 'em,' he managed to say.
He slept then until he was awakened by O'Rory, Jeff, and Rusty. He refused to tell O'Rory anything about Paul Madvig's affairs. He was dragged out of bed, beaten into unconsciousness, and flung into bed again. This was repeated a few hours later. No food was brought to him.
Going on hands and knees into the bathroom when he had regained consciousness after the last of these beatings, he saw, on the floor behind the wash-stand's pedestal, a narrow safety-razor-blade red with the rust of months. Getting it out from behind the pedestal was a task that took him all of ten minutes and his nerveless fingers failed a dozen times before they succeeded in picking it up from the tiled floor. He tried to cut his throat with it, but it fell out of his hand after he had no more than scratched his chin in three places. He lay down on the bathroom-floor and sobbed himself to sleep.
When he awakened again he could stand, and did. He doused his head in cold water and drank four glasses of water. The water made him sick and after that he began to shake with a chill. He went into the bedroom and lay down on the bare blood-stained mattress, but got up almost immediately to go stumbling and staggering in haste back to the bathroom, where he got down on hands and knees and searched the floor until he had found the rusty razor-blade. He sat on the floor and put the razorblade into his vest-pocket. Putting it in, his fingers touched his lighter. He took the lighter out and looked at it. A cunning gleam came into his one open eye as he looked at the lighter. The gleam was not sane.
Shaking so that his teeth rattled together, he got up from the bathroom-floor and went into the bedroom again. He laughed harshly when he saw the newspaper under the table where the apish dark man and the sullen rosy-checked boy had played cards. Tearing and rumpling and wadding the paper in his hands, he carried it to the door and put it on the floor there. In each of the drawers in the chest of drawers he found a piece of wrapping- paper folded to cover the bottom. He rumpled them and put them with the newspaper against the door. With the razor-blade he made a long gash in the mattress, pulled out big handfuls of the coarse grey cotton with which the mattress was stuffed, and carried them to the door. He was not shaking now, nor stumbling, and he used both hands dexterously, but presently he tired of gutting the mattress and dragged what was left of it—tick and all—to
