Corkscrew and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Page B

all over again to ask me to forgive her.
    â€œI was so afraid you’d kill him, because he’s only a kid, and somebody had told him a lot of things about you and me, and I knew how crazy he was, and he’s only a kid, and I was so afraid you’d kill him,” and so on and so on.
    Half an hour of this had me woozy with fever.
    â€œAnd now he won’t talk to me, won’t even look at me, won’t let me come in here when he’s here. And nothing will ever make things right again, and I was so afraid you’d kill him, because he’s only a boy, and …”
    I had to shut my eyes and pretend I had passed out to shut her up.
    I must have slept some, because when I looked around again it was day, and Milk River was in the chair.
    He stood up, not looking at me, his head hanging.
    â€œI’ll be moving on, Chief, now that you’re coming around all right. I want you to know, though, that if I’d knowed what that—done to your gun I wouldn’t never have throwed down on you.”
    â€œWhat was the matter with you, anyhow?” I growled at him.
    His face got beet-color and he shuffled his feet.
    â€œCrazy, I reckon,” he mumbled. “I had a couple of drinks, and then Bardell filled me full of stuff about you and her, and that you was playing me for a Chinaman. And—and I just went plumb loco, I reckon.”
    â€œAny of it left in your system?”
    â€œHell, no, chief! I’d give a leg if none of it had never happened!”
    â€œThen suppose you stop this foolishness and sit down and talk sense. Are you and the girl still on the outs?”
    They were, most emphatically, most profanely.
    â€œYou’re a big boob!” I told him. “She’s a stranger out here, and homesick for her New York. I could talk her language and knew the people she knew. That’s all there was—”
    â€œBut that ain’t the big point, chief! Any woman that would pull a—”
    â€œBunk! It was a shabby trick, right enough. But a woman who’ll pull a trick like that for you when you are in a jam is worth a million an ounce, and you’d know it if you had anything to know anything with. Now you run out and find this Clio person, and bring her back with you, and no nonsense!”
    He pretended he was going reluctantly. But I heard her voice when he knocked on her door. And they let me lay there in my bed of pain for one solid hour before they remembered me. They came in walking so close together that they were stumbling over each other’s feet.
    â€œNow let’s talk business,” I grumbled. “What day is this?”
    â€œMonday.”
    â€œDid you get the Jew?”
    â€œI done that thing,” Milk River said, dividing the one chair with the girl. “He’s over to the county seat now—went over with the others. He swallowed that self-defense bait, and told me all about it. How’d you ever figure it out, chief?”
    â€œFigure what out?”
    â€œThat the Jew killed poor old Slim. He says Slim come in there that night, woke him up, ate a dollar and ten cents’ worth of grub on him, and then dared him to try and collect. In the argument that follows, Slim goes for his gun, and the Jew gets scared and shoots him—after which Slim obligingly staggers out o’ doors to die. I can see all that clear enough, but how’d you hit on it?”
    â€œI oughtn’t give away my professional secrets, but I will this once. The Jew was cleaning house when I went in to ask him for what he knew about the killing, and he had scrubbed his floor before he started on the ceiling. If that meant anything at all, it meant that he had had to scrub his floor, and was making the cleaning general to cover it up. So maybe Slim had bled some on that floor.
    â€œStarting from that point, the rest came easily enough. Slim leaving the Border Palace in a wicked frame of mind, broke after his earlier