Part 87 (1/2)
The whole place was ankle deep in shattered gla.s.s and broken bottles, and the place reeked with smoke and the odour of wine and spirits.
Neeland forced his way forward into the cafe, looked around for Sengoun, and saw him almost immediately.
The young Russian, flushed, infuriated, his collar gone and his coat in tatters, was struggling with some men who held both his arms but did not offer to strike him.
Behind him, crowded back into a corner near the cas.h.i.+er's steel-grilled desk, stood Ilse Dumont, calm, disdainful, confronted by Brandes, whose swollen, greenish eyes, injected with blood, glared redly at her. Stull had hold of him and was trying to drag him away:
”For G.o.d's sake, Eddie, shut your mouth,” he pleaded in English. ”You can't do _that_ to her, whatever she done to you!”
But Brandes, disengaging himself with a jerk, pushed his way past Sengoun to where Ilse stood.
”I've got the goods on _you_!” he said in a ferocious voice that neither Stull nor Curfoot recognised. ”You know what you did to me, don't you! You took my wife from me! Yes, my _wife_! She _was_ my wife! She _is_ my wife!--For all you did, you lying, treacherous s.l.u.t!--For all you've done to break me, double-cross me, ruin me, drive me out of every place I went! And now I've got you! I've sold you out! Get that? And you know what they'll do to you, don't you?
Well, you'll see when----”
Curfoot and Stull threw themselves against him, but Brandes, his round face pasty with fury, struggled back again to confront Ilse Dumont.
”Ruined me!” he repeated. ”Took away from me the only thing G.o.d ever gave me for my own! Took my wife!”
”You dog!” said Ilse Dumont very slowly. ”You dirty dog!”
A frightful spasm crossed Brandes' features, and Stull s.n.a.t.c.hed at the pistol he had whipped out. There was a struggle; Brandes wrenched the weapon free; but Neeland tore his way past Curfoot and struck Brandes in the face with the b.u.t.t of his heavy revolver.
Instantly the group parted right and left; Sengoun suddenly twisted out of the clutches of the men who held him, sprang upon Curfoot, and jerked the pistol from his fist. At the same moment the entire front of the cafe gave way and the mob crashed inward with a roar amid the deafening din of shattered metal and the clash of splintering gla.s.s.
Through the dust and falling shower of debris, Brandes fired at Ilse Dumont, reeled about in the whirl of the inrus.h.i.+ng throng engulfing him, still firing blindly at the woman who had been his wife.
Neeland put a bullet into his pistol arm, and it fell. But Brandes stretched it out again with a supreme effort, pointing at Ilse Dumont with jewelled and b.l.o.o.d.y fingers:
”That woman is a German spy! A spy!” he screamed. ”You d.a.m.n French mutts, do you understand what I say! Oh, my G.o.d! Will someone who speaks French tell them! Will somebody tell them she's a spy! _La femme! Cette femme!_” he shrieked. ”_Elle est espion! Esp----!_” He fired again, with his left hand. Then Sengoun shot him through the head; and at the same moment somebody stabbed Curfoot in the neck; and the lank American gambler turned and cried out to Stull in a voice half strangled with pain and fury:
”Look out, Ben. There are apaches in this mob! That one in the striped jersey knifed me----”
”_Tiens, v'la pour toi, sale mec de malheur!_” muttered a voice at his elbow, and a blow from a slung-shot crushed the base of his skull.
As Curfoot crumpled up, Stull caught him; but the tall gambler's dead weight bore Stull to his knees among the fierce apaches.
And there, fighting in silence to the end, his chalky face of a sick clown meeting undaunted the overwhelming odds against him, Stull was set upon by the apaches and stabbed and stabbed until his clothing was a heap of ribbons and the watch and packet of French bank-notes which the a.s.sa.s.sins tore from his body were dripping with his blood.
Sengoun and Neeland, their evening clothes in tatters, hatless, dishevelled, began shooting their way out of the h.e.l.l of murder and destruction raging around them.
Behind them crept Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl: dust and smoke obscured the place where the mob raged from floor to floor in a frenzy of destruction, tearing out fixtures, telephones, window-sashes, smas.h.i.+ng tables, bar fixtures, mirrors, ripping the curtains from the windows and the very carpets from the floor in their overwhelming rage against this German cafe.
That apaches had entered with them the mob cared nothing; the red l.u.s.t of destruction blinded them to everything except their terrible necessity for the annihilation of this place.
If they saw murder done, and robbery--if they heard shots in the tumult and saw pistol flashes through the dust and grey light of daybreak, they never turned from their raging work.
Out of the frightful turmoil stormed Neeland and Sengoun, their pistols spitting flame, the two women clinging to their ragged sleeves. Twice the apaches barred their way with bared knives, crouching for a rush; but Sengoun fired into them and Neeland's bullets dropped the ruffian in the striped jersey where he stood over Stull's twitching body; and the sinister creatures leaped back from the levelled weapons, turned, and ran.
Through the gaping doorway sprang Sengoun, his empty pistol menacing the crowd that choked the shadowy street; Neeland flung away his pistol and turned his revolver on those in the cafe behind him, as Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl crept through and out into the street.