Red O’Leary was across the room, his noodle to an open window.
“Back street,” he whispered. “No way down unless we drop.”
“Anybody in sight?” I asked.
“Don’t see any.”
I looked around the room—bed, couple of chairs, chest of drawers, and a table.
“The table will go through the window,” I said. “We’ll chuck it as far as we can and hope the racket will lead ’em out there before they decide to look up here.”
Red and the girl were assuring each other that each was still all in one piece. He broke away from her to help me with the table. We balanced it, swung it, let it go. It did nicely, crashing into the wall of the building opposite, dropping down into a backyard to clang and clatter on a pile of tin, or a collection of garbage cans, or something beautifully noisy. You couldn’t have heard it more than a block and a half away.
We got away from the window as men bubbled out of Larrouy’s back door.
The girl, unable to find any wounds on O’Leary, had turned to Jack Counihan. He had a cut cheek. She was monkeying with it and a handkerchief.
“When you finish that,” Jack was telling her, “I’m going out and get one on the other side.”
“I’ll never finish if you keep talking—you jiggle your cheek.”
“That’s a swell idea,” he exclaimed. “San Francisco is the second largest city in California. Sacramento is the state capital. Do you like geography? Shall I tell you about Java? I’ve never been there, but I drink their coffee. If—”
“Silly!” she said, laughing. “If you don’t hold still I’ll stop now.”
“Not so good,” he said. “I’ll be still.”
She wasn’t doing anything except wiping blood off his cheek, blood that had better been let dry there. When she finished this perfectly useless surgery, she took her hand away slowly, surveying the hardly noticeable results with pride. As her hand came on a level with his mouth, Jack jerked his head forward to kiss the tip of one passing finger.
“Silly!” she said again, snatching her hand away.
“Lay off that,” said Red O’Leary, “or I’ll knock you off.”
“Pull in your neck,” said Jack Counihan.
“Reddy!” the girl cried, too late.
The O’Leary right looped out. Jack took the punch on the button, and went to sleep on the floor. The big redhead spun on the balls of his feet to loom over me.
“Got anything to say?” he asked.
I grinned down at Jack, up at Red.
“I’m ashamed of him,” I said. “Letting himself be stopped by a paluka who leads with his right.”
“You want to try it?”
“Reddy! Reddy!” the girl pleaded, but nobody was listening to her.
“If you’ll lead with your right,” I said.
“I will,” he promised, and did.
I grandstanded, slipping my head out of the way, laying a forefinger on his chin.
“That could have been a knuckle,” I said.
“Yes? This one is.”
I managed to get under his left, taking the forearm across the back of my neck. But that about played out the acrobatics. It looked as if I would have to see what I could do to him, if any. The girl grabbed his arm and hung on.
“Reddy, darling, haven’t you had enough fighting for one night? Can’t you be sensible, even if you are Irish?”
I was tempted to paste the big chaw while his playmate had him tied up.
He laughed down at her, ducked his head to kiss her mouth, and grinned at me.
“There’s always some other time,” he said good-naturedly.
XI
“We’d better get out of here if we can,” I said. “You’ve made too much rumpus for it to be safe.”
“Don’t get it up in your neck, little man,” he told me. “Hold on to my coattails and I’ll pull you out.”
The big tramp. If it hadn’t been for Jack and me he wouldn’t have had any coattail by now.
We moved to the door, listened there, heard nothing.
“The stairs to the third floor must be up front,” I whispered. “We’ll try for them now.”
We opened the door carefully. Enough light went past us into the hall to show a promise of emptiness. We crept down the hall, Red and I each holding one of the girl’s hands. I hoped Jack would come out all right, but he had put himself to sleep, and I had troubles of my own.
I hadn’t known that Larrouy’s was large enough to have two miles of hallway. It did. It was an even mile in the darkness to the head of the stairs we had come up. We didn’t pause there to listen to the voices below. At the end of the next mile O’Leary’s foot found the bottom step of the flight leading up.
Just then a yell broke out at the head of the other flight.
“All up—they’re up here!”
A white light beamed up on the yeller, and a brogue addressed him from below: “Come on down, ye windbag.”
“The police,” Nancy Regan whispered, and we hustled up our newfound steps to the third floor.
More darkness, just like that we’d left. We stood still at the top of the stairs. We didn’t seem to have any company.
“The roof,” I said. “We’ll risk matches.”
Back in a corner our feeble match-light found us a ladder nailed to the wall, leading to a trap in the ceiling. As little later as possible we were on Larrouy’s roof, the trap closed behind us.
“All silk so far,” said O’Leary, “and if Vance’s rats and the bulls will play a couple of seconds longer—bingavast.”
I led the way across the roofs. We dropped ten feet to the next building, climbed a bit to the next, and found on the other side of it a fire-escape that ran
