The chief wanted me to come out to his house for dinner, but I lied out of it, pretending that my wrist–now in a bandage–was bothering me. It was really little more than a burn.
While we were talking about it, a pair of plain-clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with. It had broken a rib for him, and he had taken a back-door sneak while the rest of us were busy. Noonan’s men had picked him up in a doctor’s office. The chief failed to get any information out of him, and sent him off to the hospital.
I got up and prepared to leave, saying:
“The Brand girl gave me the tip-off on this. That’s why I asked you to keep her and Rolff out of it.”
The chief took hold of my left hand for the fifth or sixth time in the past couple of hours.
“If you want her taken care of, that’s enough for me,” he assured me. “But if she had a hand in turning that bastard up, you can tell her for me that any time she wants anything, all she’s got to do is name it.”
I said I’d tell her that, and went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o’clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.
Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.
We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of the City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.
I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.
I backed into an alley entrance and slid my gun loose. The car came abreast. An arc-light brightened two faces in the front of the car. The driver’s meant nothing to me. The upper part of the other’s was hidden by a pulled-down hat. The lower part was Whisper’s.
Across the street was the entrance to another block of my alley, lighted at the far end. Between the light and me, somebody moved just as Whisper’s car roared past. The somebody had dodged from behind one shadow that might have been an ash-can to another.
What made me forget Whisper was that the somebody’s legs had a bowed look.
A load of coppers buzzed past, throwing lead at the first car.
I skipped across the street, into the section of alley that held a man who might have bowed legs.
If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn’t armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.
Three-quarters of a block of this, and a shadow broke away from another shadow–a man going pell-mell away from me.
“Stop!” I bawled, pounding my feet after him. “Stop, or I’ll plug you, MacSwain.”
He ran half a dozen strides farther and stopped, turning.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, as if it made any difference who took him back to the hoosegow.
“Yeah,” I confessed. “What are all you people doing wandering around loose?”
“I don’t know nothing about it. Somebody dynamited the floor out of the can. I dropped through the hole with the rest of them. There was some mugs standing off the bulls. I made the back-trotters with one bunch. Then we split, and I was figuring on cutting over and making the hills. I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I just went along when she blew open.”
“Whisper was pinched this evening,” I told him.
“Hell! Then that’s it. Noonan had ought to know he’d never keep that guy screwed up–not in this burg.”
We were standing still in the alley where MacSwain had stopped running.
“You know what he was pinched for?” I asked.