The door swung open, pushed by the wreck of a man who was trying to hold himself up by clinging to the sliding panel in the door’s center.
Dummy Uhl—all the middle of him gone—slid down to the floor and made more of a puddle than a pile there.
The hall filled with yellow men, black guns sticking out like briars in a blackberry patch.
I got up. My guide dropped his guns to his side and sang out a guttural solo. Chinese began to disappear through various doors, except four who began gathering up what twenty bullets had left of Dummy Uhl.
The stringy old boy tucked his empty guns away and came down the hall to me, one hand held out toward my gun.
“You give ’em,” he said politely.
I gave ’em. He could have had my pants.
My gun stowed away in his shirt-bosom, he looked casually at what the four Chinese were carrying away, and then at me.
“No like ’em fella, huh?” he asked.
“Not so much,” I admitted.
“All light. I take you.”
Our two-man parade got under way again. The ring-around-the-rosy game went on for another flight of stairs and some right and left turns, and then my guide stopped before a door and scratched it with his fingernails.