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 favour 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 slick; 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 other’s 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 lo 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 saucer-like 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.