“You want to stool-pigeon for me?”
He looked me straight in the eye and said evenly:
“There’s no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.”
“I’ll give you something to do, MacSwain.” I took out Myrtle Jennison’s document and passed it to him. “Tell me about that.”
He read it through carefully, his lips framing the words, the match wavering up and down in his mouth. He got up, put the paper on the bed beside me, and scowled down at it.
“There’s something I’ll have to find out about first,” he said, very solemnly. “I’ll be back in a little while and give you the whole story.”
I laughed and told him:
“Don’t be silly. You know I’m not going to let you walk out on me.”
“I don’t know that.” He shook his head, still solemn. “Neither do you. All you know is whether you’re going to try to stop me.”
“The answer’s yeah,” I said while I considered that he was fairly hard and strong, six or seven years younger than I, and twenty or thirty pounds lighter.
He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me with solemn eyes. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at him with whatever kind of eyes I had at the time. We did this for nearly three minutes.
I used part of the time measuring the distance between us, figuring out how, by throwing my body back on the bed and turning on my hip, I could get my heels in his face if he jumped me. He was too close for me