“What did you do to them?” Jack asked when they were sitting still.
“Things.”
“Oh.”
Ten minutes passed and Jack, saying, “Look,” was pointing a forefinger at a taxicab drawing up to the Buckman’s side door.
The Kid, carrying two traveling-bags, left the building first, then, when he was in the taxicab, Despain and the girl ran out to join him. The taxicab ran away.
Jack leaned forward and told his driver what to do. They ran along in the other cab’s wake. They wound through streets that were bright with morning sunlight, going by a devious route finally to a battered brown stone house in west Forty-ninth Street.
Despain’s cab stopped in front of the house and, once more, the Kid was the first of the trio out on the sidewalk. He looked up and down the street. He went up to the front door of the house and unlocked it. Then he returned to the taxicab. Despain and the girl jumped out and went indoors hurriedly. The Kid followed with the bags.
“Stick here with the cab,” Ned Beaumont told Jack.
‘What are you going to do?”
“Try my luck.”
Jack shook his head. “This is another wrong neighborhood to look for trouble in,” he said.
Ned Beaumont said: “If I come out with Despain, you beat it. Get another taxi and go hack to watch the Buckman. If I don’t come out, use your own judgment.”
He opened the cab-door and stepped out. He was shivering. His eyes were shiny. He ignored something that Jack leaned out to say and hurried across the street to the house into which the two men and the girl had gone.
He went straight up the front steps and put a hand on the door-knob. The knob turned in his hand. The door was not locked. He pushed it open and, after peering into the dim hallway, went in.
The door slammed shut behind him and one of the Kid’s fists struck his head a glancing blow that carried his cap away and sent him crashing into the wall. He sank down a little, giddily, almost to one knee, and the Kid’s other fist struck the wall over his head.
He pulled his lips back over his teeth and drove a fist into the Kid’s groin, a short sharp blow that brought a snarl from the Kid and made him fall back so that Ned Beaumont could pull himself up straight before the Kid was upon him again.
Up the hallway a little, Bernie Despain was leaning against the wall, his mouth stretched wide and thin, his eyes narrowed to dark points, saying over and over in a low voice: “Sock him, Kid, sock him Lee Wilshire was not in sight.
The Kid’s next two blows landed on Ned Beaumont’s chest, mashing him against the wall, making him cough. The third, aimed at his face, he avoided. Then he pushed the Kid away from him with a forearm against his throat and kicked the Kid in the belly. The Kid roared angrily and came in with both fists going, but forearm and foot had carried him away from Ned Beaumont and had given Ned Beaumont time to get his right hand to his hip-pocket and to get Jack’s revolver out of his pocket. He had not time to level the revolver, but, holding it at a downward angle, he pulled the trigger and managed to shoot the Kid in the right thigh. The Kid yelped and fell down on the hallway floor. He lay there looking up at Ned Beaumont with frightened bloodshot eyes.
Ned Beaumont stepped back from him, put his left hand in his trousers-pocket, and addressed Bernie Despain: “Come on out with me. I want to talk to you.” His face was sullenly determined.
Footsteps ran overhead, somewhere back in the building a door opened, and down the hallway excited voices were audible, but nobody came into sight.
Despain stared for a long moment at Ned Beaumont as if horribly fascinated. Then, without a word, he stepped over the man on the floor and went out of the building ahead of Ned Beaumont. Ned Beaumont put the revolver in his jacket-pocket before he went down the street-steps, but he kept his hand on it.