Nothing I knew was any good against this monster. He was out of my range. I was satisfied to spend all that was left of my strength trying to keep him from crippling me—and waiting for a chance to outsmart him.
He threw me around a lot. Then my chance came.
I was flat on my back, with everything but one or two of my most centrally located intestines squeezed out. Kneeling astride me, he brought his big hands up to my throat and fastened them there.
That’s how much he didn’t know!
You can’t choke a man that way—not if his hands are loose and he knows a hand is stronger than a finger.
I laughed in his purple face and brought my own hands up. Each of them picked one of his little fingers out of my flesh. It wasn’t a dream at that. I was all in, and he wasn’t. But no man’s little finger is stronger than another’s hand. I twisted them back. They broke together.
He yelped. I grabbed the next—the ring fingers.
One of them snapped. The other was ready to pop when he let go.
Jerking up, I butted him in the face. I twisted from between his knees. We came on our feet together.
The doorbell rang.
VIII
Fight interest went out of the woman’s face. Fear came in. Her fingers picked at her mouth.
“Ask who’s there,” I told her.
“Who—who is there?”
Her voice was flat and dry.
“Mrs. Keil,” came from the corridor, the words sharp with indignation. “You will have to stop this noise immediately! The tenants are complaining—and no wonder! A pretty hour to be entertaining company and carrying on so!”
“The landlady,” the dark woman whispered. Aloud: “I am sorry, Mrs. Keil. There will not be more noises.”
Something like a sniff came through the door, and the sound of dimming footsteps.
Inés Almad frowned reproachfully at Billie.
“You should not have done this,” she blamed him.
He looked humble, and at the floor, and at me. Looking at me, the purple began to flow back into his face.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I told this fella we ought to take a walk. We’ll do it now, and there won’t be no more noise here.”
“Billie!” her voice was sharp. She was reading the law to him. “You will go out and have attention for your hurts. If you have not won these fights, because of that am I to be left here alone to be murdered?”
The big man shuffled his feet, avoided her gaze and looked utterly miserable. But he shook his head stubbornly.
“I can’t do it, Inés,” he said. “Me and this guy has got to finish it. He busted my fingers, and I got to bust his jaw.”
“Billie!”
She stamped one small foot and looked imperiously at him. He looked as if he’d like to roll over on his back and hold his paws in the air. But he stood his ground.
“I got to,” he repeated. “There ain’t no way out of it.”
Anger left her face. She smiled very tenderly at him.
“Dear old Billie,” she murmured, and crossed the room to a secretary in a corner.
When she turned, an automatic pistol was in her hand. Its one eye looked at Billie.
“Now, lechón,” she purred, “go out!”
The red man wasn’t a quick thinker. It took a full minute for him to realize that this woman he loved was driving him away with a gun. The big dummy might have known that his three broken fingers had disqualified him. It took another minute for him to get his legs in motion. He went toward the door in slow bewilderment, still only half believing this thing was really happening.
The woman followed him step by step. I went ahead to open the door.
I turned the knob. The door came in, pushing me back against the opposite wall.
In the doorway stood Edouard Maurois and the man I had swatted on the chin. Each had a gun.
I looked at Inés Almad, wondering what turn her craziness would take in the face of this situation. She wasn’t so crazy as I had thought. Her scream and the thud of her gun on the floor sounded together.
“Ah!” the Frenchman was saying. “The gentlemen were leaving? May we detain them?”
The man with the big chin—it was larger than ever now with the marks of my tap—was less polite.
“Back up, you birds!” he ordered, stooping for the gun the woman had dropped.
I still was holding the doorknob. I rattled it a little as I took my hand away—enough to cover up the click of the lock as I pushed the button that left it unlatched. If I needed help, and it came, I wanted as few locks as possible between me and it.
Then—Billie, the woman and I walking backward—we all paraded into the sitting-room. Maurois and his companion both wore souvenirs of the row in the taxicab. One of the Frenchman’s eyes was bruised and closed—a beautiful shiner. His clothes were rumpled and dirty. He wore them jauntily in spite of that, and he still had his walking stick, crooked under the arm that didn’t hold his gun.
Big Chin held us with his own gun and the woman’s while Maurois ran his hand over Billie’s and my clothes, to see if we were armed. He found my gun and pocketed it. Billie had no weapons.
“Can I trouble you to step back against the wall?” Maurois asked when he was through.
We stepped back as if it was no trouble at all. I found my shoulder against one of the window curtains. I pressed it against the frame, and turned far enough to drag the curtain clear of a foot or more of pane.
If the Whosis Kid was watching, he should have had a clear view of
