Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

“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 — the 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.”

He frowned with sudden anxiety, got to his feet, and moved across the room. Steve pulled a chair and an upset table from his path, and the blind man dropped on his knees in a corner, fumbling beneath the loosened floor boards. His hands came out empty, and he stood up with a tired droop to his shoulders. “Gone,” he said softly.

Steve remembered the watch then, took it from his pocket, and put it into one of the blind man’s hands.

“There was a burglar at our house,” the girl explained. “After he had gone we found that on the floor. This is Mr. Threefall.”

The blind man groped for Steve’s hand, pressed it, then his flexible fingers caressed the watch, his face lighting up happily.

“I’m glad,” he said, “to have this back — gladder than I can say. The money wasn’t so much — less than three hundred dollars. I’m not the Midas I’m said to be. But this watch was my father’s.”

He tucked it carefully into his vest, and then, as the girl started to straighten up the room, he remonstrated.

“You’d better run along home, Nova; it’s late, and I’m all right. I’ll go to bed now, and let the place go as it is until to-morrow.”