Billie shifted his chew to the scratched cheek and bunched his shoulders.
“What the hell kind of a crack is that to be making?” he rumbled.
“That means nothing it should not, Billie,” she laughed at him. “It is only an epigram.”
“Yeah?” Billie was sour and truculent. I was beginning to think he didn’t like me. “Well, tell your little fat friend to keep his smart wheezes to himself. I don’t like ’em.”
That was plain enough. Billie wanted an argument. The woman, who held him securely enough to have steered him off, simply laughed again. There was no profit in trying to find the reason behind any of her actions. She was a nut. Maybe she thought that since we weren’t sociable enough for her to keep both on hand, she’d let us tangle, and hold on to the one who rubbed the other out of the picture.
Anyway, a row was coming. Ordinarily I am inclined to peace. The day is past when I’ll fight for the fun of it. But I’ve been in too many rumpuses to mind them much. Usually nothing very bad happens to you, even if you lose. I wasn’t going to back down just because this big stiff was meatier than I. I’ve always been lucky against the large sizes. He had been banged up earlier in the evening. That would cut down his steam some. I wanted to hang around this apartment a little longer, if it could be managed. If Billie wanted to tussle—and it looked as if he did—he could.
It was easy to meet him half-way: anything I said would be used against me.
I grinned at his red face, and suggested to the woman, solemnly:
“I think if you’d dip him in blueing he’d come out the same color as the other pup.”
As silly as that was, it served. Billie reared up on his feet and curled his paws into fists.
“Me and you’ll take a walk,” he decided; “out where there’s space enough.”
I got up, pushed my chair back with a foot, and quoted “Red” Burns to him: “If you’re close enough, there’s room enough.”
He wasn’t a man you had to talk to much. We went around and around.
It was fists at first. He started it by throwing his right at my head. I went in under it and gave him all I had in a right and left to the belly. He swallowed his chew of tobacco. But he didn’t bend. Few big men are as strong as they look. Billie was.
He didn’t know anything at all. His idea of a fight was to stand up and throw fists at your head—right, left, right, left. His fists were as large as wastebaskets. They wheezed through the air. But always at the head—the easiest part to get out of the way.
There was room enough for me to go in and out. I did that. I hammered his belly. I thumped his heart. I mauled his belly again. Every time I hit him he grew an inch, gained a pound and picked up another horsepower. I don’t fool when I hit, but nothing I did to this human mountain—not even making him swallow his hunk of tobacco—had any visible effect on him.
I’ve always had a reasonable amount of pride in my ability to sock. It was disappointing to have this big heaver take the best I could give him without a grunt. But I wasn’t discouraged. He couldn’t stand it forever. I settled down to make a steady job of it.
Twice he clipped me. Once on the shoulder. A big fist spun me half around. He didn’t know what to do next. He came in on the wrong side. I made him miss, and got clear. The other time he caught me on the forehead. A chair kept me from going down. The smack hurt me. It must have hurt him more. A skull is tougher than a knuckle. I got out of his way when he closed in, and let him have something to remember on the back of his neck.
The woman’s dusky face showed over Billie’s shoulder as he straightened up. Her eyes were shiny behind their heavy lashes, and her mouth was open to let white teeth gleam through.
Billie got tired of the boxing after that, and turned the set-to into a wrestling match, with trimmings. I would rather have kept on with the fists. But I couldn’t help myself. It was his party. He grabbed one of my wrists, yanked, and we thudded chest to chest.
He didn’t know any more about this than he had about that. He didn’t have to. He was big enough and strong enough to play with me.
I was underneath when we tumbled down on the floor and began rolling around. I did my best. It wasn’t anything. Three times I put a scissors on him. His body was too big for my short legs to clamp around. He chucked me off as if he were amusing the baby. There was no use at all in trying to do things to his legs. No hold known to man could have held them. His arms were almost as strong. I quit trying.
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 out-smart 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 drivi
ng 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 the Frenchman—the man who had shot at him earlier in the evening. I was putting it up to the Kid. The corridor door was unlocked. If the Kid could get into the building—no great trick—he had a clear path. I didn’t know where he fit in, but I wanted him to join us, and I hoped he wouldn’t disappoint me. If everybody got together here, maybe whatever was going on would come out where I could see it and understand it.
Meanwhile, I kept as much of myself as possible out of the window. The Kid might decide to throw lead from across the alley.
Maurois was facing Inés. Big Chin’s guns were on Billie and me.
“I do not comprends ze anglais ver’ good,” the Frenchman was mocking the woman. “So it is when you say you meet wit’ me, I t’ink you say in New Orleans. I do not know you say San Francisc’. I am ver’ sorry to make ze mistake. I am mos’ sorry zat I keep you wait. But now I am here. You have ze share for me?”
“I have not.” She held her hands out in an empty gesture. “The Kid took those—everything from me.”
“What?” Maurois dropped his taunting smile and his vaudeville accent. His one open eye flashed angrily. “How could he, unless—?”
“He suspected us, Edouard.” Her mouth trembled with earnestness. Her eyes pleaded for belief. She was lying. “He had me followed. The day after I am there he comes. He takes all. I am afraid to wait for you. I fear your unbelief. You would not—”
“C’est incroyable!” Maurois was very excited over it. “I was on the first train south after our—our theatricals. Could the Kid have been on that train without my knowing it? Non! And how else could he have reached you before I? You are playing with me, ma petite Inés. That you did join the Kid, I do not doubt. But not in New Orleans. You did not go there. You came here to San Francisco.”
“Edouard!” she protested, fingering his sleeve with one brown hand, the other holding her throat as if she were having trouble getting the words out. “You cannot think that thing! Do not those weeks in Boston say it is not possible? For one like the Kid—or like any other—am I to betray you? You know me not more than to think I am like that?”
She was an actress. She was appealing, and pathetic, and anything else you like—including dangerous.
The Frenchman took his sleeve away from her and stepped back a step. White lines ringed his mouth below his tiny mustache, and his jaw muscles bulged. His one good eye was worried. She had got to him, though not quite enough to upset him altogether. But the game was young yet.
“I do not know what to think,” he said slowly. “If I have been wrong—I must find the Kid first. Then I will learn the truth.”
“You don’t have to look no further, brother. I’m right among you!”
The Whosis Kid stood in the passageway door. A black revolver was in each of his hands. Their hammers were up.
IX
It was a pretty tableau.
There is the Whosis Kid in the door—a lean lad in his twenties, all the more wicked-looking because his face is weak and slack-jawed and dull-eyed. The cocked guns in his hands are pointing at everybody or at nobody, depending on how you look at them.
There is the brown woman, her cheeks pinched in her two fists, her eyes open until their green-grayishness shows. The fright I had seen in her face before was nothing to the fright that is there now.
There is the Frenchman—whirled doorward at the Kid’s first word—his gun on the Kid, his cane still under his arm, his face a tense white blot.
There is Big Chin, his body twisted half around, his face over one shoulder to look at the door, with one of his guns following his face around.
There is Billie—a big, battered statue of a man who hasn’t said a word since Inés Almad started to gun him out of the apartment.
And, last, here I am—not feeling so comfortable as I would home in bed, but not actually hysterical either. I wasn’t altogether dissatisfied with the shape things were taking. Something was going to happen in these rooms. But I wasn’t friendly enough to any present to care especially what happened to whom. For myself, I counted on coming through all in one piece. Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed. I’ve had twenty years of experience at dodging that. I can count on being one of the survivors of whatever blow-up there is. And I hope to take most of the other survivors for a ride.
But right now the situation belonged to the men with guns—the Whosis Kid, Maurois and Big Chin.
The Kid spoke first. He had a whining voice that came disagreeably through his thick nose.
“This don’t look nothing like Chi to me, but, anyways, we’re all here.”
“Chicago!” Maurois exclaimed. “You did not go to Chicago!”
The Kid sneered at him.
“Did you? Did she? What would I be going there for? You think me and her run out on you, don’t you? Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you, and the same as the three of us done to the boob.”
“That may be,” the Frenchman replied; “but you do not expect me to believe that you and Inés are not friends? Didn’t I see you leaving here this afternoon?”
“You seen me, all right,” the Kid agreed; “but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else. But I ain’t got nothing against you now. I thought you and her had ditched me, just as you think me and her done you. I know different now, from what I heard while I was getting in here. She twisted the pair of us, Frenchy, just like we twisted the boob. Ain’t you got it yet?”
Maurois shook his head slowly.
What put an edge to this conversation was that both men were talking over their guns.
“Listen,” the Kid asked impatient
ly. “We was to meet up in Chi for a three-way split, wasn’t we?”
The Frenchman nodded.
“But she tells me,” the Kid went on, “she’ll connect with me in St. Louis, counting you out; and she ribs you up to meet her in New Orleans, ducking me. And then she gyps the pair of us by running out here to Frisco with the stuff.
“We’re a couple of suckers, Frenchy, and there ain’t no use of us getting hot at each other. There’s enough of it for a fat two-way cut. What I say is let’s forget what’s done, and me and you make it fifty-fifty. Understand, I ain’t begging you. I’m making a proposition. If you don’t like it, to hell with you! You know me. You never seen the day I wouldn’t shoot it out with you or anybody else. Take your pick!”
The Frenchman didn’t say anything for a while. He was converted, but he didn’t want to weaken his hand by coming in too soon. I don’t know whether he believed the Kid’s words or not, but he believed the Kid’s guns. You can get a bullet out of a cocked revolver a lot quicker than out of a hammerless automatic. The Kid had the bulge there. And the Kid had him licked because the Kid had the look of one who doesn’t give a damn what happens next.
Finally Maurois looked a question at Big Chin. Big Chin moistened his lips, but said nothing.
Maurois looked at the Kid again, and nodded his head.
“You are right,” he said. “We will do that.”
“Good!” The Kid did not move from his door. “Now who are these plugs?”
“These two”—Maurois nodded at Billie and me—“are friends of our Inés. This”—indicating Big Chin—“is a confrere of mine.”
“You mean he’s in with you? That’s all right with me.” The Kid spoke crisply. “But, you understand, his cut comes out of yours. I get half, and no trimming.”
The Frenchman frowned, but he nodded in agreement.
“Half is yours, if we find it.”
“Don’t get no headache over that,” the Kid advised him. “It’s here and we’ll get it.”
He put one of his guns away and came into the room, the other gun hanging loosely at his side. When he walked across the room to face the woman, he managed it so that Big Chin and Maurois were never behind him.