He searched my clothing for weapons. His hands were as rough as a tiger"s claws. Finding nothing, he stepped back. And he kicked me, kicked the part of me that polishes the chair.
The kick, a horrible thing that turned my spine to tingling stone, propelled me headlong toward a door that was closed. I tried to gasp a remonstrance at this unseemly treatment.
"Shaddup!" he said. "Open that door. And one funny move, I"ll blow ya apart!"
He certainly was displaying none of the fine manners he"d shown on our previous meeting. And, as Savage had said, his wounds did not appear serious.
IMPATIENT ferocity continued to impel the man; he kicked me again when my hand hesitated on the door. I threw the door open, and more falling than on my feet, followed it into another vast room. This one could very well have been one of those rooms in museums of arts which depict period furniture; here the period was French, one of the Louis motifs-I was too disturbed to remember which Louis, and might not have been certain on the point anyway.
There were two men in this room. I knew neither one, yet I was able to surmise their ident.i.ty at once. . . .
One, who lay sprawled on the floor, his hands tied behind him with a length of braided curtain pull-cord, must be the chap who had attacked the polite young man and taken the box from him.
The box lay on a delicately carved table.
The other gentleman, of course, had to be Mr. Farrar, Lila"s father. The family resemblance, fine features and alert eyes, a trim moulding of the body, was quite evident. Mr. Farrar occupied a large chair. He sat very still, kept his hands in plain sight.
"Mr. Farrar?" I said.
He gave me a tense look, a slight nod.
"I"m Henry A. E. Jones, and I"m dreadfully sorry our meeting had to be under such circ.u.mstances-"
"Wha.s.sa matter with the circ.u.mstances?" demanded the polite-young-man.
"I"m afraid," I told Mr. Farrar, "that you"re the victim of this chap. Am I right?"
He gazed at me stiffly and with a pale countenance. He was, one could see, the sort who under more favorable conditions would be very congenial.
"I don"t know," said Mr. Farrar presently, "what is happening, exactly."
He sounded extremely confused and bitter."Perhaps I can explain," I began, "the situation-"
"Shaddup!" said polite-man. Incidently, he bore little resemblance to his original suave self.
I saw no reason why I shouldn"t talk. "Really, I want to explain-"
Polite-man said, "How the h.e.l.l"d you get here, pan-face?"
"If you mean me-" I began.
"I mean you. Answer the question."
"I"m trying to inform you that I accompanied Doc Savage here and-"
The effect of this was outstanding. The bound man on the floor gave a fish-like flop. Mr. Farrar"s jaw fell, and his eyes widened-an indication that he had heard of the Savage chap, which was a little disappointing to me. But the largest response came from my bedeviler.
"What?" he screamed. "You came with Doc Savage? Is he involved in this now?"
"Yes, you see I-"
I didn"t finish. One does not complete statements when one sees one is going to die. For polite-man was going to kill me. I am no great student of human nature, but I did not need to be-one could see it in his eyes, like poisonous snakes. He was going to kill me.
He said so, too. He said: "One guy we don"t need is you!" He said it to me. His inference was plain.
Quite deliberately, he c.o.c.ked his revolver.
HAVE you ever seen death? I mean, have you ever stood on legs without strength and stared into death"s empty sockets? I had never. Once I had pneumonia and nearly died, but I really did not know much about it until later, when they told me; there was no consciousness of death nearness at the time. It was nothing like this. I am an abstracted soul when I walk, and I have had cars dust me off, and felt very trembly later-but even those occasions weren"t like this.
For what happened next, I can only explain that I must have reverted to a primary instinct. The instinct to live, to breathe, to have consciousness, to know life-nothing else mattered. My mind must have functioned like chains of electric sparks, for it occurred to me that begging for my life would be useless.
This man was going to kill.
I didn"t want to die, and I whirled and hit him. I grabbed his gun. There was no science; I have heard that soldiers and police officers have judo methods of disarming an opponent. I did not know these. All I had was madness, a desperation not to die.
The gun roared in my hands. The noise was terrible. The bullet went somewhere. I suppose it could have gone into me and I would not have known.
Strength of madness must have been in me. Because suddenly my opponent, a larger man than I, somewhat, was flying away. I followed him, screaming, spray flying from my lips. Mr. Farrar was staring at me in paralyzed wonder.
The man on the floor, the one tied with curtain cord, the one who answered the description of the fellowwho had taken the package from polite-man, began floundering madly. He must have had his hands nearly free. Because he loosened them at once. He sprang to his feet.
This man ran from the room. Ran toward the exit.
Polite-man clawed at my face. I tried to knock his brains out with the gun. I had his gun now. I did not know how to shoot it; shooting it did not occur to me at all. And presently the gun was lost; it went skittering and hopping across the carpet.
We fought. Primitively. The way beasts fight. The way beasts deal death to one another. And polite-man was cursing and screaming, and not in bravery. He must have partaken of my frenzy, of my madness of effort, because suddenly he tore free from me.
Polite-man ran from the room. He, too, went toward the exit.
I ran the other way. I ran past Mr. Farrar, reached a door, tried to open it. It would not open. I was so upset that I could not even solve the simple problem of turning a door k.n.o.b to get a door open. That was how nearly terror had carried me to the level of the animal.
Thwarted, unable to open the door, I turned with my back to the panel, a cornered thing. My knees gave way and I was sitting on the floor. I began to shake. Tears came.
Mr. Farrar was staring at me in wonder.
I have never been a worse mess in my life.
Chapter VII.
WHEN Doc Savage came, he was accompanied by the Mayfair fellow and by Lila Farrar. They immediately observed that something violent had happened, and Lila, with a cry of anxiety, ran to her father. He a.s.sured her that he was safe.
Mr. Farrar, after another wondering glance at me, stated, "I have just witnessed the most remarkable thing."
"Henry is that at any time," Monk Mayfair remarked, but his oafish humor fell flat.
With a concise use of words, Mr. Farrar then explained what had happened. He shook his head several times in amazement while doing so. "It was the craziest thing I ever saw, the way this fellow took that gunman."
Savage said briskly that he would see if he could find some trace of the pair. He went out.
Mayfair examined me. "I didn"t think you had it in you, Henry."
It was a most difficult thing to muster my self-control, but with herculean effort, I succeeded-outwardly, at least. My wits, once a.s.sembled, enabled me to think coherently, and I saw that I needed an explanation for my behavior in trying to get out of the room after my opponent had fled. Except for that part, my actions might be construed as extreme bravery-which, the more I thought about it, they were.
"I have very little recollection of the latter part of the fight," I said untruthfully. "I was struck, I believe, on the head."They seemed to accept this.
I continued: "I remember faintly trying to pursue the fellow through a door-but things are very vague about that."
"You mean," said Mr. Farrar wonderingly, "you weren"t scared?"
It would have been very impressive to profess a total lack of fear. But it would also have been laying it on a trifle thick.
"I imagine," I said stiffly, "that I had a normal amount of apprehension. Accented, I"m afraid-or perhaps confused is the word-by the fact that the fellow had struck me over the head a couple of times before I came into this room."
This wasn"t quite the fact either-it was his foot that had struck me, and not on the head.
Mr. Farrar and Lila were favorably impressed now.
But the Mayfair lout said, "Before you become too brave, Henry, you might explain how you happened not to stay in the car like you were told to do."
"I"m not," I retorted, "the sort of fellow who likes to be left in camp like the squaws and children while the braves. .h.i.t the war path."
"Ho!" said Monk Mayfair.
DOC SAVAGE entered, empty-handed from his search for polite-man and the other. He confessed his failure. But he added, "It"s rather unfortunate Henry stirred up things, because Monk and myself were working out a smoother approach that would have enabled us to catch the fellow, and possibly wind the whole thing up."
"It"s purely conjectural that you would have caught him-or them," I said hurriedly. "They might have escaped anyway."
He admitted this was true. He couldn"t very well do otherwise.
I pointed at Dido Alstrong"s package on the table.
"And I recovered the package," I added triumphantly.
Savage"s expression seemed rather noncommital for a moment, then he turned to Mr. Farrar, asking, "Have you an idea what it"s about?"
Mr. Farrar shook his head. "None."
"But father!" gasped his daughter. "You must have! Those men were here! Didn"t they say anything?"
The father stroked his daughter"s hair fondly, but his facial lines were bleak.
"I didn"t know either of those rascals," he said presently. "Here"s what happened: The first one, the one with the package, came nearly an hour ago. He was announced by the phone operator downstairs as a Mr. Quade, on an important mission from Dido Alstrong. Naturally I admitted him-and he stuck a gun in my face."Mr. Farrar wheeled quickly, went to a divan, reached behind it, and came up with a firearm.
"This gun," he continued. "The fellow told me to sit down, shut up, and not try anything. I did so, not being a fool and"-he glanced at me-"lacking a certain kind of courage. Well this fellow, Quade, if that was his name, which I doubt, sat down too. We waited. I tried to demand an explanation. Quade said shut up, he was expecting a visitor. And then that other rascal came."
Savage interrupted: "Was the fellow the visitor Quade was expecting?"
"Not at all." Farrar shook his head. "Quite the contrary. The second man came in unexpectedly, overpowered Quade, and tied him up."
"Oh."
"They were obviously bitter enemies."
"What makes you think so?"
"Why, he tied Quade up, didn"t he? And he threatened Quade"s life, and he was going to kill Henry, here."
Mr. Farrar had a fine, clear-minded face, and he was speaking honestly, straight-forwardly. One could heartily approve of the man.
Savage asked, "Exactly what words did they say to each other?"
"It was nearly all profanity," said Farrar. "Quade cursed the other for a meddler, a thief, and much worse. The other called Quade the same things."
"Was the package mentioned?"
"Oh, yes."
"In what way?"
"Why, I gathered the fight was about it. Both wanted it."
"Any hint as to the contents?"
"None."
"And you didn"t know the men, don"t know what is it all about?"
"That," said Farrar, "is correct."
It seemed to me that there was a certain wrongful att.i.tude in the air, a suspicion directed toward Mr.
Farrar, intimating he might be able to tell more. I felt this was utterly unjustifiable. He was being fine and cooperative, and handling himself well, considering how his household had been disrupted.
"It"s funny," remarked Mayfair, "that them two ginzos came here."
"Dammit, that"s something I can"t explain!" said Mr. Farrar testily.