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.