We were close enough for any of the four to have reached out and touched me. One of them I could shoot before I was smothered—one out of four. That meant that each of them had only one chance out of four of being the victim—low enough odds for any but the most cowardly of men.
I grinned what was supposed to be a confident grin—because I was up against it hard—and reached for the telephone: I had to do something! Then I cursed myself! I had merely changed the signal for the onslaught. It would come now when I picked up the receiver.
But I couldn’t back down again—that, too, would be a signal—I had to go through with it.
The perspiration trickled across my temples from under my hat as I drew the phone closer with my left hand.
The street door opened! An exclamation of surprise came from behind me.
I spoke rapidly, without taking my eyes from the four men in front of me.
“Quick! The phone! The police!”
With the arrival of this unknown person—one of Newhouse’s customers, probably—I figured I had the edge again. Even if he took no active part beyond calling the police in, the enemy would have to split to take care of him—and that would give me a chance to pot at least two of them before I was knocked over. Two out of four—each of them had an even chance of being dropped—which is enough to give even a nervy man cause for thinking a bit before he jumps.
“Hurry!” I urged the newcomer.
“Yes! Yes!” he said—and in the blurred sound of the s there was evidence of foreign birth.
Keyed up as I was, I didn’t need any more warning than that.
I threw myself sidewise—a blind tumbling away from the spot where I stood. But I wasn’t quite quick enough.
The blow that came from behind didn’t hit me fairly, but I got enough of it to fold up my legs as if the knees were hinged with paper—and I slammed into a heap on the floor. …
Something dark crashed toward me. I caught it with both hands. It may have been a foot kicking at my face. I wrung it as a washerwoman wrings a towel.
Down my spine ran jar after jar. Perhaps somebody was beating me over the head. I don’t know. My head wasn’t alive. The blow that had knocked me down had numbed me all over. My eyes were no good. Shadows swam to and fro in front of them—that was all. I struck, gouged, tore at the shadows. Sometimes I found nothing. Sometimes I found things that felt like parts of bodies. Then I would hammer at them, tear at them. My gun was gone.
My hearing was no better than my sight—or not so good. There wasn’t a sound in the world. I moved in a silence that was more complete than any silence I had ever known. I was a ghost fighting ghosts.
I found presently that my feet were under me again, though some squirming thing was on my back, and kept me from standing upright. A hot, damp thing like a hand was across my face.
I put my teeth into it. I snapped my head back as far as it would go. Maybe it smashed into the face it was meant for. I don’t know. Anyhow the squirming thing was no longer on my back.
Dimly I realized that I was being buffeted about by blows that I was too numb to feel. Ceaselessly, with head and shoulders and elbows and fists and knees and feet, I struck at the shadows that were around me. …
Suddenly I could see again—not clearly—but the shadows were taking on colors; and my ears came back a little, so that grunts and growls and curses and the impact of blows sounded in them. My straining gaze rested upon a brass cuspidor six inches or so in front of my eyes. I knew then that I was down on the floor again.
As I twisted about to hurl a foot into a soft body above me, something that was like a burn, but wasn’t a burn, ran down one leg—a knife. The sting of it brought consciousness back into me with a rush.
I grabbed the brass cuspidor and used it to club a way to my feet—to club a clear space in front of me. Men were hurling themselves upon me. I swung the cuspidor high and flung it over their heads, through the frosted glass door into California Street.
Then we fought some more.
But you can’t throw a brass cuspidor through a glass door into California Street between Montgomery and Kearny without attracting attention—it’s too near the heart of daytime San Francisco. So presently—when I was on the floor again with six or eight hundred pounds of flesh hammering my face into the boards—we were pulled apart, and I was dug out of the bottom of the pile by a squad of policemen.
Big sandy-haired Coffee was one of them, but it took a lot of arguing to convince him that I was the Continental operative who had talked to him a little while before.
“Man! Man!” he said, when I finally convinced him. “Them lads sure—God! have worked you over! You got a face on you like a wet geranium!”
I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny.
I looked out of the one eye, which was working just now, at the five men lined up across the office—Soules, the three inky printers, and the man with the blurred s, who had started the slaughter by tapping me on the back of the head.
He was a rather tall man of thirty or so, with a round ruddy face that wore a few bruises now. He had
