Nightmare Town Page 4

  “Did you send the wire collect, or do I owe—”

  “Collect.” She did not look up.

  Steve put his elbows on the counter and leaned over; his jaw, still exaggerated by its growth of hair, although he had washed the dirt from it, jutted forward with his determination to maintain a properly serious attitude until he had done this thing that had to be done.

  “Now listen, Miss Vallance,” he said deliberately. “I was all kinds of a damned fool yesterday, and I’m sorrier than I can say. But, after all, nothing terrible happened, and—”

  “Nothing terrible!” she exploded. “Is it nothing to be humiliated by being chased up and down the street like a rabbit by a drunken man with a dirty face in a worse car?”

  “I wasn’t chasing you. I came back that second time to apologize. But, anyway”—in the uncomfortable face of her uncompromising hostility his determination to be serious went for nothing, and he relapsed into his accustomed defensive mockery—“no matter how scared you were you ought to accept my apology now and let bygones be bygones.”

  “Scared? Why—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t repeat words after me,” he complained. “This morning you did it, and now you’re at it again. Don’t you ever think of anything to say on your own account?”

  She glared at him, opened her mouth, shut it with a little click. Her angry face bent sharply over the papers on the desk, and she began to add a column of figures.

  Steve nodded with pretended approval, and took his check across the street to the bank.

  The only man in sight in the bank when Steve came in was a little plump fellow with carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper whiskers hiding nearly all of a jovial round face except the eyes—shrewd, friendly eyes.

  This man came to the window in the grille, and said: “Good afternoon. Can I do something for you?”

  Steve laid down the telegraph company’s check. “I want to open an account.”

  The banker picked up the slip of green paper and flicked it with a fat finger. “You are the gentleman who assaulted my wall with an automobile yesterday?”

  Steve grinned. The banker’s eyes twinkled, and a smile ruffled his whiskers. “Are you going to stay in Izzard?”

  “For a while.”

  “Can you give me references?” the banker asked.

  “Maybe Judge Denvir or Marshal Fernie will put in a word for me,” Steve said. “But if you’ll write the Seaman’s Bank in San Francisco they’ll tell you that so far as they know I’m all right.”

  The banker stuck a plump hand through the window in the grille.

  “I’m very glad to make your acquaintance. My name is David Brackett, and anything I can do to help you get established—call on me.”

  Outside of the bank ten minutes later, Steve met the huge marshal, who stopped in front of him. “You still here?” Fernie asked.

  “I’m an Izzardite now,” Steve said. “For a while, anyhow. I like your hospitality.”

  “Don’t let old man Denvir see you coming out of a bank,” Fernie advised him, “or he’ll soak you plenty next time.”

  “There isn’t going to be any next time.”

  “There always is—in Izzard,” the marshal said enigmatically as he got his bulk in motion again.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, shaved and bathed, though still wearing his bleached khaki, Steve, with his black stick beside him, played stud poker with Roy Kamp and four factory workers. They played in the poolroom next door to the Finn’s lunchroom. Izzard apparently was a wide-open town. Twelve tables given to craps, poker, red dog, and twenty-one occupied half of the poolroom, and white-hot liquor was to be had at the cost of fifty cents and a raised finger. There was nothing surreptitious about the establishment; obviously its proprietor—a bullet-headed Italian whose customers called him “Gyp”—was in favor with the legal powers of Izzard.

  The game in which Steve sat went on smoothly and swiftly, as play does when adepts participate. Though, as most games are, always potentially crooked, it was, in practice, honest. The six men at the table were, without exception, men who knew their way around—men who played quietly and watchfully, winning and losing without excitement or inattention. Not one of the six—except Steve, and perhaps Kamp—would have hesitated to favor himself at the expense of honesty had the opportunity come to him; but where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed honesty not infrequently prevails.

  Larry Ormsby came into the poolroom at a little after eleven and sat at a table some distance from Steve. Faces he had seen in the street during the day were visible through the smoke. At five minutes to twelve the four factory men at Steve’s table left for work—they were in the “graveyard” shift—and the game broke up with their departure. Steve, who had kept about even throughout the play, found that he had won something less than ten dollars; Kamp had won fifty-some.

  Declining invitations to sit in another game, Steve and Kamp left together, going out into the dark and night-cool street, where the air was sweet after the smoke and alcohol of the poolroom. They walked slowly down the dim thoroughfare toward the Izzard Hotel, neither in a hurry to end their first evening together; for each knew by now that the unpainted bench in front of the telegraph office had given him a comrade. Not a thousand words had passed between the two men, but they had as surely become brothers-in-arms as if they had tracked a continent together.

  Strolling thus, a dark doorway suddenly vomited men upon them.

  Steve rocked back against a building front from a blow on his head, arms were around him, the burning edge of a knife blade ran down his left arm. He chopped his black stick up into a body, freeing himself from encircling grip. He used the moment’s respite this gave him to change his grasp on the stick; so that he held it now horizontal, his right hand grasping its middle, its lower half flat against his forearm, its upper half extending to the left.

  He put his left side against the wall, and the black stick became a whirling black arm of the night. The knob darted down at a man’s head. The man threw an arm up to fend the blow. Spinning back on its axis, the stick reversed—the ferruled end darted up under warding arm, hit jaw-bone with a click, and no sooner struck than slid forward, jabbing deep into throat. The owner of that jaw and throat turned his broad, thick-featured face to the sky, went backward out of the fight, and was lost to sight beneath the curbing.

  Kamp, struggling with two men in the middle of the sidewalk, broke loose from them, whipped out a gun; but before he could use it his assailants were on him again.

  Lower half of stick against forearm once more, Steve whirled in time to take the impact of a blackjack-swinging arm upon it. The stick spun sidewise with thud of knob on temple—spun back with loaded ferrule that missed opposite temple only because the first blow had brought its target down on knees. Steve saw suddenly that Kamp had gone down. He spun his stick and battered a passage to the thin man, kicked a head that bent over the prone, thin form, straddled it; and the ebony stick whirled swifter in his hand—spun as quarter-staves once spun in Sherwood Forest. Spun to the clicking tune of wood on bone, on metal weapons; to the duller rhythm of wood on flesh. Spun never in full circles, but always in short arcs—one end’s recovery from a blow adding velocity to the others stroke. Where an instant ago knob had swished from left to right, now weighted ferrule struck from right to left—struck under upthrown arms, over low-thrown arms—put into space a forty-inch sphere, whose radii were whirling black flails.

  Behind his stick that had become a living part of him, Steve Threefall knew happiness—that rare happiness which only the expert ever finds—the joy in doing a thing that he can do supremely well. Blows he took—blows that shook him, staggered him—but he scarcely noticed them. His whole consciousness was in his right arm and the stick it spun. A revolver, tossed from a smashed hand, exploded ten feet over his head, a knife tinkled like a bell on the brick sidewalk, a man screamed as a stricken horse screams.

  As abruptly as it had started, the fight
stopped. Feet thudded away, forms vanished into the more complete darkness of a side street; and Steve was standing alone—alone except for the man stretched out between his feet and the other man who lay still in the gutter.

  Kamp crawled from beneath Steve’s legs and scrambled briskly to his feet.

  “Your work with a bat is what you might call adequate,” he drawled.

  Steve stared at the thin man. This was the man he had accepted on an evening’s acquaintance as a comrade! A man who lay on the street and let his companion do the fighting for both. Hot words formed in Steve’s throat.

  “You—”

  The thin man’s face twisted into a queer grimace, as if he were listening to faint, far-off sounds. He caught his hands to his chest, pressing the sides together. Then he turned half around, went down on one knee, went over backward with a leg bent over him.

  “Get—word—to—”

  The fourth word was blurred beyond recognition. Steve knelt beside Kamp, lifted his head from the bricks, and saw that Kamp’s thin body was ripped open from throat to waistline.

  “Get—word—to—” The thin man tried desperately to make the last word audible.

  A hand gripped Steve’s shoulder.

  “What the hell’s all this?” The roaring voice of Marshal Grant Fernie blotted out Kamp’s words.

  “Shut up a minute!” Steve snapped, and put his ear again close to Kamp’s mouth.

  But now the dying man could achieve no articulate sound. He tried with an effort that bulged his eyes; then he shuddered horribly, coughed, the slit in his chest gaped open, and he died.

  “What’s all this?” the marshal repeated.

  “Another reception committee,” Steve said bitterly, easing the dead body to the sidewalk, and standing up. “There’s one of them in the street; the others beat it around the corner.”

  He tried to point with his left hand, then let it drop to his side. Looking at it, he saw that his sleeve was black with blood.

  The marshal bent to examine Kamp, grunted, “He’s dead, all right,” and moved over to where the man Steve had knocked into the gutter lay.

  “Knocked out,” the marshal said, straightening up; “but he’ll be coming around in a while. How’d you make out?”

  “My arm’s slashed, and I’ve got some sore spots, but I’ll live through it.”

  Fernie took hold of the wounded arm.

  “Not bleeding so bad,” he decided. “But you better get it patched up. Doc MacPhail’s is only a little way up the street. Can you make it, or do you want me to give you a lift?”

  “I can make it. How do I find the place?”

  “Two blocks up this street, and four to the left. You can’t miss it—it’s the only house in town with flowers in front of it. I’ll get in touch with you when I want you.”

  —

  STEVE THREEFALL found Dr. MacPhail’s house without difficulty—a two-story building set back from the street, behind a garden that did its best to make up a floral profusion for Izzard’s general barrenness. The fence was hidden under twining virgin’s bower, clustered now with white blossoms, and the narrow walk wound through roses, trillium, poppies, tulips, and geraniums that were ghosts in the starlight. The air was heavily sweet with the fragrance of saucerlike moon flowers, whose vines covered the doctor’s porch.

  Two steps from the latter Steve stopped, and his right hand slid to the middle of his stick. From one end of the porch had come a rustling, faint but not of the wind, and a spot that was black between vines had an instant before been paler, as if framing a peeping face.

  “Who is—” Steve began, and went staggering back.

  From the vine-blackened porch a figure had flung itself on his chest.

  “Mr. Threefall,” the figure cried in the voice of the girl of the telegraph office, “there’s somebody in the house!”

  “You mean a burglar?” he asked stupidly, staring down into the small white face that was upturned just beneath his chin.

  “Yes! He’s upstairs—in Dr. MacPhail’s room!”

  “Is the doctor up there?”

  “No, no! He and Mrs. MacPhail haven’t come home yet.”

  He patted her soothingly on a velvet-coated shoulder, selecting a far shoulder, so that he had to put his arm completely around her to do the patting.

  “We’ll fix that,” he promised. “You stick here in the shadows, and I’ll be back as soon as I have taken care of our friend.”

  “No, no!” She clung to his shoulder with both hands. “I’ll go with you. I couldn’t stay here alone; but I won’t be afraid with you.”

  He bent his head to look into her face, and cold metal struck his chin, clicking his teeth together. The cold metal was the muzzle of a big nickel-plated revolver in one of the hands that clung to his shoulder.

  “Here, give me that thing,” he exclaimed; “and I’ll let you come with me.”

  She gave him the gun and he put it in his pocket.

  “Hold on to my coat-tails,” he ordered; “keep as close to me as you can, and when I say ‘Down,’ let go, drop flat to the floor, and stay there.”

  Thus, the girl whispering guidance to him, they went through the door she had left open, into the house, and mounted to the second floor. From their right, as they stood at the head of the stairs, came cautious rustlings.

  Steve put his face down until the girl’s hair was on his lips.

  “How do you get to that room?” he whispered.

  “Straight down the hall. It ends there.”

  They crept down the hall. Steve’s outstretched hand touched a doorframe.

  “Down!” he whispered to the girl.

  Her fingers released his coat. He flung the door open, jumped through, slammed it behind him. A head-sized oval was black against the gray of a window. He spun his stick at it. Something caught the stick overhead; glass crashed, showering him with fragments. The oval was no longer visible against the window. He wheeled to the left, flung out an arm toward a sound of motion. His fingers found a neck—a thin neck with skin as dry and brittle as paper.

  A kicking foot drove into his shin just below the knee. The paperish neck slid out of his hand. He dug at it with desperate fingers, but his fingers, weakened by the wound in his forearm, failed to hold. He dropped his stick and flashed his right hand to the left’s assistance. Too late. The weakened hand had fallen away from the paperish neck, and there was nothing for the right to clutch.

  A misshapen blot darkened the center of an open window, vanished with a thud of feet on the roof of the rear porch. Steve sprang to the window in time to see the burglar scramble up from the ground, where he had slid from the porch roof, and make for the low back fence. One of Steve’s legs was over the sill when the girl’s arms came around his neck.

  “No, no!” she pleaded. “Don’t leave me! Let him go!”

  “All right,” he said reluctantly, and then brightened.

  He remembered the gun he had taken from the girl, got it out of his pocket as the fleeing shadow in the yard reached the fence; and as the shadow, one hand on the fence top, vaulted high over it, Steve squeezed the trigger. The revolver clicked. Again—another click. Six clicks, and the burglar was gone into the night.

  Steve broke the revolver in the dark, and ran his fingers over the back of the cylinder—six empty chambers.

  “Turn on the lights,” he said brusquely.

  —

  WHEN THE GIRL had obeyed, Steve stepped back into the room and looked first for his ebony stick. That in his hand, he faced the girl. Her eyes were jet-black with excitement and pale lines of strain were around her mouth. As they stood looking into each other’s eyes something of a bewilderment began to show through her fright. He turned away abruptly and gazed around the room.

  The place had been ransacked thoroughly if not expertly. Drawers stood out, their contents strewn on the floor; the bed had been stripped of clothing, and pillows had been dumped out of their cases. Near the door a broken wall-light—t
he obstruction that had checked Steve’s stick—hung crookedly. In the center of the floor lay a gold watch and half a length of gold chain. He picked them up and held them out to the girl.

  “Dr. MacPhail’s?”

  She shook her head in denial before she took the watch, and then, examining it closely, she gave a little gasp. “It’s Mr. Rymer’s!”

  “Rymer?” Steve repeated, and then he remembered. Rymer was the blind man who had been in the Finn’s lunchroom, and for whom Kamp had prophesied trouble.

  “Yes! Oh, I know something has happened to him!”

  She put a hand on Steve’s left arm.

  “We’ve got to go see! He lives all alone, and if any harm has—”

  She broke off, and looked down at the arm under her hand.

  “Your arm! You’re hurt!”

  “Not as bad as it looks,” Steve said. “That’s what brought me here. But it has stopped bleeding. Maybe by the time we get back from Rymer’s the doctor will be home.”

  They left the house by the back door, and the girl led him through dark streets and across darker lots. Neither of them spoke during the five-minute walk. The girl hurried at a pace that left her little breath for conversation, and Steve was occupied with uncomfortable thinking.

  The blind man’s cabin was dark when they reached it, but the front door was ajar. Steve knocked his stick against the frame, got no answer, and struck a match. Rymer lay on the floor, sprawled on his back, his arms outflung.

  The cabin’s one room was topsy-turvy. Furniture lay in upended confusion, clothing was scattered here and there, and boards had been torn from the floor. The girl knelt beside the unconscious man while Steve hunted for a light. Presently he found an oil lamp that had escaped injury, and got it burning just as Rymer’s filmed eyes opened and he sat up. Steve righted an overthrown rocking-chair and, with the girl, assisted the blind man to it, where he sat panting. He had recognized the girl’s voice at once, and he smiled bravely in her direction.

  “I’m all right, Nova,” he said; “not hurt a bit. Someone knocked at the door, and when I opened it I heard a swishing sound in my ear—and that was all I knew until I came to to find you here.”