“Look out for Gwynne!”
A man’s voice. Recognizable. Hodge.
The fight went farther away from me. I turned my head a little; an arm was there, all crumpled up under my head and shoulder. Whose arm could that be? Not mine. I could never get my arm into a position like that. Cement floor under it. I was in the basement, then. Slowly I got my position. Light over me. I was at the foot of the stairs. The fight must be going on over by the furnace. I looked that way, dizzily. Three fighters. Three men, fighting. Striking, staggering back, surging forward again.
One face bent sidewise as a fist flashed forward. Hodge, that was, his hair all over his face. Blood on it. Was he the Death? Three men, all fighting each other. I couldn’t see—was it two against one, or were there three sides? I thought of the stacks of money, lying there in that step as in a box. That was it. They were fighting for the money. I was still puzzling over it when one man went down. For a second the group hung stationary: two men standing bent and spent over one man fallen.
One man turned and bounded at me.
“Watch him!” he yelled. It was Hodge. “I’ve got to get her upstairs. Get a doctor! Get Strom! Get a doctor first!”
He lifted me quickly, charged upstairs. I noticed that the arm under me, the extra arm, came, too. It must be mine, then.
But my mind wasn’t on it. My mind was on the significant group by the furnace. The group of two with one man crouched, panting, over the second lying quiet with his head against the furnace.
One thing more I saw, my head bobbing back over Hodge’s shoulder.
Money.
Money strewn far and wide. Money on the basement floor.
The arm didn’t seem to hurt much then, with Hodge yelling orders and pushing glasses in my face and people running. But the minute the doctor came and touched it, it hurt, excruciatingly.
I pleased myself very much by fainting again. I came to at intervals after that, always under odd and unexplainable circumstances. Once I was on a bed, but it was moving fast. Once I was on a bed, but it was shooting upward. Once I was on a bed with a blinding light over it; my eyes were quickly covered, and the only air to breathe was sickeningly sweet. Once I was on a bed, but when I moved, knives struck at me from six sides.
The next time I came out of it the circumstances were still odd, but explainable.
I was in a hospital.
I was so bandaged, I couldn’t move, but even if I could have moved, I wouldn’t have wanted to. I tried wiggling my little finger once, and the result told me that was nothing to do at all.
There was a nurse in bright morning light.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good morning,” she said with that impersonal cheer nurses use bedside. “And how are we feeling this morning?”
I didn’t care how she felt.
“What’s the matter with me?”
“Just a few simple fractures,” she encouraged. “You fell downstairs.”
“Who was it jumped at me?”
“Now, now, just be quiet and rest.”
That was all I could get out of her.
All I did that day was sleep and ask questions that weren’t answered. I’d sleep, and then the questions would get so insistent, I’d wake up to ask them, but that was all the good it did me. I asked the nurse, the doctor, a woman who came in and swept, a cheekbony intern. I asked Hodge Kistler.
He came in sometime during the afternoon. I woke up as far as I could for the occasion.
“Did you get him?”
“Yes, we got him this time. You won’t be jumped at again.”
“Who was it?”
“You’re not supposed to be excited.”
“How can I keep from getting excited when no one will tell me anything? Did he get the money? I found the money. I found a lot of money. It was in the step below the top. Who was it? Was it Mr. Halloran?”
“The patient is getting excited. You will have to go now,” the nurse said, and shoved him out.
I hope the look I gave her was nasty, but only one eye was out of the bandages.
“Tomorrow,” she told me. “Just be quiet until tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll let Mr. Kistler talk to you for fifteen whole minutes.”
She wiped my tongue with a soppy piece of rag.
By the next afternoon, I was still sleepy enough to drop off occasionally, but I didn’t drop off when it came near three o’clock. I was burning with impatience, and it’s no fun burning when you can’t even move, and no one ever answers.
Hodge came promptly at three. He walked in, short and quick, grinning his three-cornered grin; his face looked scrubbed with pleasure and triumph.
“Well, well, so you’re going to live,” he crowed over me.
“Who said I wasn’t?”
“Well, I was sort of doubtful when I saw you hadn’t landed on your head. You should always take knocks on your head; it seems to hurt you less.”
“I haven’t time to be insulted. Who was it?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t know. And I’m going to break in a few more places if I don’t know pretty soon.”
“What did you see in that top step?”
“Money.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“Then you didn’t take the money out?”
“I took some money out. I lifted the top of the step, and took the rags out and took up the newspaper, and there it was. Packages of money. I lifted some out. And then it hit me, bang.”
“I thought it was like that. He was bending over you at the bottom of the stairs when I got there. Said he’d heard you fall and run down, but he was clutching money in his hand, and when I saw the black scarf in his pocket I reached for his chin.”
“He? He! Would you like me crazy?”
“Me? My, no. But I think you deserve the full dramatic impact. You see, in one
