Weight on rubber heels, I backed away from my chair until the frame of the cellar door touched my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this party. I like an even break or better, and this didn’t look like one.
So when a thin line of light danced out of the kitchen to hit the chair in the passsageway, I was three steps cellar-ward, my back flat against the stair-wall.
The light fixed itself on the chair for a couple of seconds, and then began to dart around the passageway, through it into the room beyond. I could see nothing but the light.
Fresh sounds came to me—the purr of automobile engines close to the house on the road side, the soft padding of feet on the back porch, on the kitchen linoleum, quite a few feet. An odor came to me—an unmistakable odor—the smell of unwashed Chinese.
Then I lost track of these things. I had plenty to occupy me close up.
The proprietor of the flashlight was at the head of the cellar steps. I had ruined my eyes watching the light: I couldn’t see him.
The first thin ray he sent downstairs missed me by an inch—which gave me time to make a map there in the dark. If he was of medium size, holding the light in his left hand, a gun in his right, and exposing as little of himself as possible—his noodle should have been a foot and a half above the beginning of the light-beam, the same distance behind it, six inches to the left—my left.
The light swung sideways and hit one of my legs.
I swung the barrel of my gun at the point I had marked X in the night.
His gunfire cooked my cheek. One of his arms tried to take me with him. I twisted away and let him dive alone into the cellar, showing me a flash of gold teeth as he went past.
The house was full of “Ah yahs” and pattering feet.
I had to move—or I’d be pushed.
Downstairs might be a trap. I went up to the passageway again.
The passageway was solid and alive with stinking bodies. Hands and teeth began to take my clothes away from me. I knew damned well I had declared myself in on something!
I was one of a struggling, tearing, grunting and groaning mob of invisibles. An eddy of them swept me toward the kitchen. Hitting, kicking, butting, I went along.
A high-pitched voice was screaming Chinese orders.
My shoulder scraped the doorframe as I was carried into the kitchen, fighting as best I could against enemies I couldn’t see, afraid to use the gun I still gripped.
I was only one part of the mad scramble. The flash of my gun might have made me the center of it. These lunatics were fighting panic now: I didn’t want to show them something tangible to tear apart.
I went along with them, cracking everything that got in my way, and being cracked back. A bucket got between my feet.
I crashed down, upsetting my neighbors, rolled over a body, felt a foot on my face, squirmed from under it, and came to rest in a corner, still tangled up with the galvanized bucket.
Thank God for that bucket!
I wanted these people to go away. I didn’t care who or what they were. If they’d depart in peace I’d forgive their sins.
I put my gun inside the bucket and squeezed the trigger. I got the worst of the racket, but there was enough to go around. It sounded like a crump going off.
I cut loose in the bucket again, and had another idea. Two fingers of my left hand in my mouth, I whistled as shrill as I could while I emptied the gun.
It was a sweet racket!
When my gun had run out of bullets and my lungs out of air, I was alone. I was glad to be alone. I knew why men go off and live in caves by themselves. And I didn’t blame them!
Sitting there alone in the dark, I reloaded my gun.
On hands and knees I found my way to the open kitchen door, and peeped out into the blackness that told me nothing. The surf made guzzling sounds in the cove. From the other side of the house came the noise of cars. I hoped it was my friends going away.
I shut the door, locked it, and turned on the kitchen light.
The place wasn’t as badly upset as I had expected. Some pans and dishes were down and a chair had been broken, and the place smelled of unwashed bodies. But that was all—except a blue cotton sleeve in the middle of the floor, a straw sandal near the passageway door, and a handful of short black hairs, a bit blood-smeared, beside the sandal.
In the cellar I did not find the man I had sent down there. An open door showed how he had left me. His flashlight was there, and my own, and some of his blood.
Upstairs again, I went through the front of the house. The front door was open. Rugs had been rumpled. A blue vase was broken on the floor. A table was pushed out of place, and a couple of chairs had been upset. I found an old and greasy brown felt hat that had neither sweatband nor hatband. I found a grimy photograph of President Coolidge—apparently cut from a Chinese newspaper—and six wheat-straw cigarette papers.
I found nothing upstairs to show that any of my guests had gone up there.
It was half past two in the morning when I heard a car drive up to the front door. I peeped out of Lillian Shan’s bedroom window, on the second floor. She was saying good night to Jack Garthorne.
I went back to the library to wait for her.
“Nothing happened?” were her first words, and they sounded more like a prayer than anything else.
“It did,” I told her, “and I suppose you had your breakdown.”
For
