Nightmare Town: Stories Read Online Free PDF

human palm.
    “Not a bad weapon in a pinch,” the marshal said meaningly as he handed the stick to its owner. Steve took it with the grasp a man reserves for a favourite and constant companion.
    “Not bad,” he agreed. “What happened to the flivver?”
    “It’s in the garage around the corner on Main Street. Pete said it wasn’t altogether ruined, and he thinks he can patch it up if you want.”
    The justice held out the receipt.
    “Am I all through here now?” Steve asked.
    “I hope so,” Judge Denvir said sourly.
    “Both of us,” Steve echoed. He put on his hat, tucked the black stick under his arm, nodded to the big marshal, and left the room.
    Steve Threefall went down the wooden stairs toward the street in as cheerful a frame of mind as his body – burned out inwardly with white liquor and outwardly by a day’s scorching desert-riding – would permit. That justice had emptied his pockets of every last cent disturbed him little. That, he knew, was the way of justice everywhere with the stranger, and he had left the greater part of his money with the hotel proprietor in Whitetufts. He had escaped a jail sentence, and he counted himself lucky. He would wire Harris to send him some of his money, wait here until the Ford was repaired, and then drive back to Whitetufts – but not on a whisky ration this time.
    “You will not!” a voice cried in his ear.
    He jumped, and then laughed at his alcohol-jangled nerves. The words had not been meant for him. Beside him, at a turning of the stairs, was an open window, and opposite it, across a narrow alley, a window in another building was open. This window belonged to an office in which two men stood facing each other across a flat-topped desk.
    One of them was middle-aged and beefy, in a black broadcloth suit out of which a white-vested stomach protruded. His face was purple with rage. The man who faced him was younger – a man of perhaps thirty, with a small dark moustache, finely chiselled features, and satiny brown hair. His slender athlete’s body was immaculately clothed in gray suit, gray shirt, gray and silver tie, and on the desk before him lay a Panama hat with gray band. His face was as white as the other’s was purple.
    The beefy man spoke – a dozen words pitched too low to catch.
    The younger man slapped the speaker viciously across the face with an open hand – a hand that then flashed back to its owner’s coat and flicked out a snub-nosed automatic pistol.
    “You big lard-can,” the younger man cried, his voice sibilant; “you’ll lay off or I’ll spoil your vest for you!”
    He stabbed the protuberant vest with the automatic, and laughed into the scared fat face of the beefy man – laughed with a menacing flash of even teeth and dark slitted eyes. Then he picked up his hat, pocketed the pistol, and vanished from Steve’s sight. The fat man sat down.
    Steve went on down to the street.

    Steve Unearthed the garage to which the Ford had been taken, found a greasy mechanic who answered to the name of Pete, and was told that Whiting’s automobile would be in condition to move under its own power within two days.
    “A beautiful snootful you had yesterday,” Pete grinned.
    Steve grinned back and went on out. He went down to the telegraph office, next door to the Izzard Hotel, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk to look at a glowing, cream-colored Vauxhall-Velox roadster that stood at the curb – as out of place in this grimy factory town as a harlequin opal in a grocer’s window.
    In the doorway of the telegraph office Steve paused again, abruptly.
    Behind the counter was a girl in tan flannel – the girl he had nearly run down twice the previous afternoon – the “Vallance girl” who had refrained from adding to justice’s account against Steve Threefall. In front of the counter, leaning over it, talking to her with every appearance of intimacy was one of the two men he had seen from the staircase window half an hour before – the