Nightmare Town: Stories by Dashiell Hammett Read Free Book Online Page B

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 centre 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 centre 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,