Creeping Siamese and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

questioningly.
    â€œYes, Austin,” she said, putting gauze and scissors on the table, and sitting down beside him on the davenport. “Tell them.”
    He patted her hand and looked up at me again with the expression of a man who has seen a nice spot on which to lay down a heavy load.
    â€œSit down. It isn’t a long story, but sit down.”
    We found ourselves chairs.
    â€œMolloy—Sam Molloy—that is his name, or the name I have always known him by. He came here this afternoon. He’d either called up the theater or gone there, and they had told him I was home. I hadn’t seen him for three years. We could see—both my wife and I—that there was something the matter with him when he came in.
    â€œWhen I asked him, he said he’d been stabbed, by a Siamese, on his way here. He didn’t seem to think the wound amounted to much, or pretended he didn’t. He wouldn’t let us fix it for him, or look at it. He said he’d go to a doctor after he left, after he’d got rid of the thing. That was what he had come to me for. He wanted me to hide it, to take care of it until he came for it again.
    â€œHe didn’t talk much. He was in a hurry, and suffering. I didn’t ask him any questions. I couldn’t refuse him anything. I couldn’t question him even though he as good as told us that it was illegal as well as dangerous. He saved our lives once—more than my wife’s life—down in Mexico, where we first knew him. That was in 1916. We were caught down there during the Villa troubles. Molloy was running guns over the border, and he had enough influence with the bandits to have us released when it looked as if we were done for.
    â€œSo this time, when he wanted me to do something for him, I couldn’t ask him about it. I said, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me the package. It wasn’t a large package: about the size of—well—a loaf of bread, perhaps, but quite heavy for its size. It was wrapped in brown paper. We unwrapped it after he had gone, that is, we took the paper off. But the inner wrapping was of canvas, tied with silk cord, and sealed, so we didn’t open that. We put it upstairs in the pack room, under a pile of old magazines.
    â€œThen, at about a quarter to twelve tonight—I had only been in bed a few minutes, and hadn’t gone to sleep yet—I heard a noise in here. I don’t own a gun, and there’s nothing you could properly call a weapon in the house, but that walking stick”—indicating the hickory stick on the table—“was in a closet in our bedroom. So I got that and came in here to see what the noise was.
    â€œRight outside the bedroom door I ran into a man. I could see him better than he could see me, because this door was open and he showed against the window. He was between me and it, and the moonlight showed him fairly clear. I hit him with the stick, but didn’t knock him down. He turned and ran in here. Foolishly, not thinking that he might not be alone, I ran after him. Another man shot me in the leg just as I came through the door.
    â€œI fell, of course. While I was getting up, two of them came in with my wife between them. There were four of them. They were medium-sized men, brown-skinned, but not so dark. I took it for granted that they were Siamese, because Molloy had spoken of Siamese. They turned on the lights here, and one of them, who seemed to be the leader, asked me:
    â€œâ€˜Where is it?’
    â€œHis accent was pretty bad, but you could understand his words good enough. Of course I knew they were after what Molloy had left, but I pretended I didn’t. They told me, or rather the leader did, that he knew it had been left here, but they called Molloy by another name—Dawson. I said I didn’t know any Dawson, and nothing had been left here, and I tried to get them to tell me what they expected to find. They wouldn’t,