had broken a rib for him, and he had taken a backdoor sneak while the rest of us were busy. Noonan’s men had picked him up in a doctor’s office. The chief failed to get any information out of him, and sent him off to the hospital.
I got up and prepared to leave, saying:
“The Brand girl gave me the tip-off on this. That’s why I asked you to keep her and Rolff out of it.”
The chief took hold of my left hand for the fifth or sixth time in the past couple of hours.
“If you want her taken care of, that’s enough for me,” he assured me. “But if she had a hand in turning that bastard up, you can tell her for me that any time she wants anything, all she’s got to do is name it.”
I said I’d tell her that, and went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o’clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.
Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.
We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of the City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.
I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gunfire from the rear.
I backed into an alley entrance and slid my gun loose. The car came abreast. An arc-light brightened two faces in the front of the car. The driver’s meant nothing to me. The upper part of the other’s was hidden by a pulled-down hat. The lower part was Whisper’s.