Then I saw something else.
We were going down a long, narrow hall that had brown-painted doors close together on either side. All these doors were closed—secretive-looking in the dim light. Abreast of one of them, a glint of dull metal caught my eye—a dark ring in the door’s center.
I went to the floor.
Going down as if I’d been knocked, I missed the flash. But I heard the roar, smelled the powder.
My guide spun around, twisting out of one slipper. In each of his hands was an automatic as big as a coal scuttle. Even while trying to get my own gun out I wondered how so puny a man could have concealed so much machinery on him.
The big guns in the little man’s hands flamed at me. Chinese-fashion, he was emptying them—crash! crash! crash!
I thought he was missing me until I had my finger tight on my trigger. Then I woke up in time to hold my fire.
He wasn’t shooting at me. He was pouring metal into the door behind me—the door from which I had been shot at.
I rolled away from it, across the hall.
The scrawny little man stepped closer and finished his bombardment. His slugs shredded the wood as if it had been paper. His guns clicked empty.