“We’ll get through and block the window!” Pat yelled in my ear.
“Like hell—” I began, but he was gone ahead into the confusion.
I went after him.
I didn’t mean to block the window. I meant to save Pat from his foolishness. No five men could have fought through that boiling turmoil of maniacs. No ten men could have turned them from the window.
Pat—big as he is—was down when I got to him. A half dressed girl—a child—was driving at his face with sharp high-heels. Hands, feet, were tearing him apart.
I cleared him with a play of gun-barrel on shins and wrists—dragged him back.
“Myra’s not there!” I yelled into his ear as I helped him up. “Elwood’s not there!”
I wasn’t sure, but I hadn’t seen them, and I doubted that they would be in this mess. These savages, boiling again to the window, with no attention for us, whoever they were, weren’t insiders. They were the mob, and the principals shouldn’t be among them.
“We’ll try the other rooms,” I yelled again. “We don’t want these.”
Pat rubbed the back of his hand across his torn face and laughed.
“It’s a cinch I don’t want ’em any more,” he said.
We went back to the head of the stairs the way we had come. We saw no one. The man and girls who had been in the next room were gone.
At the head of the stairs we paused. There was no noise behind us except the now fainter babel of the lunatics fighting for their exit.
A door shut sharply downstairs.
A body came out of nowhere, hit my back, flattened me to the landing.
The feel of silk was on my cheek. A brawny hand was fumbling at my throat.
I bent my wrist until my gun, upside down, lay against my cheek. Praying for my ear, I squeezed.
My cheek took fire. My head was a roaring thing, about to burst.
The silk slid away.
Pat hauled me upright.
We started down the stairs.
Swish!
A thing came past my face, stirring my bared hair.
A thousand pieces of glass, china, plaster, exploded upward at my feet.
I tilted head and gun together.
A Negro’s red-silk arms were still spread over the balustrade above.
I sent him two bullets. Pat sent him two.
The Negro teetered over the rail.
He came down on us, arms outflung—a dead man’s swan-dive.
We scurried down the stairs from under him.
He shook the house when he landed, but we weren’t watching him then.
The smooth sleek head of Raymond Elwood took our attention.
In the light from above, it showed for a furtive split-second around the newel-post at the foot of the stairs. Showed and vanished.
Pat Reddy, closer to the rail than I, went over it in a one-hand vault down into the blackness below.
I made the foot of the stairs in two jumps, jerked myself around with a hand on the newel, and plunged into the suddenly noisy dark of the hall.
A wall I couldn’t see hit me. Caroming off the opposite wall, I spun into a room whose curtained grayness was the light of day after the hall.
IX
Pat Reddy stood with one hand on a chair-back, holding his belly with the other. His face was mouse-colored under its blood. His eyes were glass agonies. He had the look of a man who had been kicked.
The grin he tried failed. He nodded toward the rear of the house. I went back.
In a little passageway I found Raymond Elwood.
He was sobbing and pulling frantically at a locked door. His face was the hard white of utter terror.
I measured the distance between us.
He turned as I jumped.
I put everything I had in the downswing of my gun-barrel—
A ton of meat and bone crashed into my back.
I went over against the wall, breathless, giddy, sick.
Red-silk arms that ended in brown hands locked around me.
I wondered if there was a whole regiment of these gaudy Negroes—or if I was colliding with the same one over and over.
This one didn’t let me do much thinking.
He was big. He was strong. He didn’t mean any good.
My gun-arm was flat at my side, straight down. I tried a shot at one of the Negro’s feet. Missed. Tried again. He moved his feet. I wriggled around, half facing him.
Elwood piled on my other side.
The Negro bent me backward, folding my spine on itself like an accordion.
I fought to hold my knees stiff. Too much weight was hanging on me. My knees sagged. My body curved back.
Pat Reddy, swaying in the doorway, shone over the Negro’s shoulder like the Angel Gabriel.
Gray pain was in Pat’s face, but his eyes were clear. His right hand held a gun. His left was getting a blackjack out of his hip pocket.
He swung the sap down on the Negro’s shaven skull.
The black man wheeled away from me, shaking his head.
Pat hit him once more before the Negro closed with him—hit him full in the face, but couldn’t beat him off.
Twisting my freed gun-hand up, I drilled Elwood neatly through the chest, and let him slide down me to the floor.
The Negro had Pat against the wall, bothering him a lot. His broad red back was a target.
But I had used five of the six bullets in my gun. I had more in my pocket, but reloading takes time.
I stepped out of Elwood’s feeble hands, and went to work with the flat of my gun on the Negro. There was a roll of fat where his skull and neck fit together. The third time I hit it, he flopped, taking Pat with him.
I rolled him off. The blond police detective—not very blond now—got up.
At the other end of the passageway, an open door showed an empty kitchen.
Pat and I went to the door that Elwood had been playing with. It was a solid piece of carpentering, and neatly fastened.
Yoking ourselves together, we began
