Noonan ordered this and that.
A trio of coppers went around each side of the building. Three others, including a machine-gunner, remained by the gate. The rest of us walked through tin cans, bottles, and ancient newspaper to the front of the house.
The gray-mustached detective who had sat beside me in the car carried a red ax. We stepped up on the porch.
Noise and fire came out under a window sill.
The gray-mustached detective fell down, hiding the ax under his Corpse.
The rest of us ran away.
I ran with Noonan. We hid in the ditch on the Inn side of the road. It was deep enough, and banked high enough, to let us stand almost erect without being targets.
The chief was excited.
“What luck!” he said happily. “He’s here, by God, he’s here!”
“That shot came from under the sill,” I said. “Not a bad trick.”
“We’ll spoil it, though,” he said ‘cheerfully. “We’ll sieve the dump. Duffy ought to be pulling up on the other road by now, and Terry Shane won’t be many minutes behind him. Hey, Donner!” he called to a man who was peeping around a boulder. “Swing around back and tell Duffy and Shane to start closing in as soon as they come, letting fly with all they got. Where’s Kimble?”
The peeper jerked a thumb toward a tree beyond him. We could see only the upper part of it from our ditch.
“Tell him to set up his mill and start grinding,” Noonan ordered. “Low, across the front, ought to do it like cutting cheese.”
The peeper disappeared.
Noonan went up and down the ditch, risking his noodle over the top now and then for a look around, once in a while calling or gesturing to his men.
He came back, sat on his heels beside me, gave me a cigar, and lit one for himself.
“It’ll do,” he said complacently. “Whisper won’t have a chance. He’s done.”
The machine-gun by the tree fired, haltingly, experimentally, eight or ten shots. Noonan grinned and let a smoke ring float out of his mouth. The machine-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was. Noonan blew another smoke ring and said:
“That’s exactly what’ll do it.”
I agreed that it ought to. We leaned against the clay bank and smoked while, farther away, another machine-gun got going, and then a third. Irregularly, rifles, pistols, shot-guns joined in. Noonan nodded approvingly and said:
“Five minutes of that will let him know there’s a hell.”
When the five minutes were up I suggested a look at the remains. I gave him a boost up the bank and scrambled up after him.
The roadhouse was as bleak and empty-looking as before, but more battered. No shots came from it. Plenty were going into it.
“What do you think?” Noonan asked.
“If there’s a cellar there might be a mouse alive in it.”
“Well, we could finish him afterwards.”
He took a whistle out of his pocket and made a lot of noise. He waved his fat arms, and the gun-fire began dwindling. We had to wait for the word to go all the way around.
Then we crashed the door.
The first floor was ankle-deep with booze that was still gurgling from bullet holes in the stacked-up cases and barrels that filled most of the house.
Dizzy with the fumes of spilled hooch, we waded around until we had found four dead bodies and no live ones. The four were swarthy foreign-looking men in laborers’ clothes. Two of them were practically shot to pieces.
Noonan said:
“Leave them here and get out.”
His voice was cheerful, but in a flashlight’s glow his eyes showed white-ringed with fear.
We went out gladly, though I did hesitate long enough to pocket an unbroken bottle labeled Dewar.
A khaki-dressed copper was tumbling off a motorcycle at the gate. He yelled at us:
“The First National’s been stuck up.”
Noonan cursed savagely, bawled:
“He’s foxed us, damn him! Back to town, everybody.”
Everybody except us who had ridden with the chief beat it for the machines. Two of them took the dead detective with them.