Billie wasn’t long getting up to us. I opened the door when he rang, the woman standing beside me. He didn’t wait for an invitation. He was through the doorway before I had the door half opened. He glared at me. There was plenty of him!
A big, red-faced, red-haired bale of a man—big in any direction you measured him—and none of him was fat. The skin was off his nose, one cheek was clawed, the other swollen. His hatless head was a tangled mass of red hair. One pocket had been ripped out of his coat, and a button dangled on the end of a six-inch ribbon of torn cloth.
This was the big heaver who had been in the taxicab with the woman.
“Who’s this mutt?” he demanded, moving his big paws toward me.
I knew the woman was a goof. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had tried to feed me to the battered giant. But she didn’t. She put a hand on one of his and soothed him.
“Do not be nasty, Billie. He is a friend. Without him I would not this night have escaped.”
He scowled. Then his face straightened out and he caught her hand in both of his.
“So you got away it’s all right,” he said huskily. “I’d a done better if we’d been outside. There wasn’t no room in that taxi for me to turn around. And one of them guys crowned me.”
That was funny. This big clown was apologizing for getting mangled up protecting a woman who had scooted, leaving him to get out as well as he could.