I said: “Fancy, meeting you here.”
I turned around and looked at Mrs. Healey. She was still standing against the wall with her hand across her mouth. Then the ceiling fell down on top of my head and everything got dark very suddenly.
Darkness was around me when I opened my eyes, but I could see the outlines of a window and I could hear someone breathing somewhere near me. I don’t know how long I was out. I sat up and my head felt like it was going to explode; Flay down again and closed my eyes.
After a while I tried it again and it was a little better. I crawled towards what I figured to be a door and ran into the wall and I got up on my feet and felt along the wall until I found the light switch.
Raines was lying in the same place I’d smacked him, but his hands and feet were tied with a length of clothes-line and there was a red, white and blue silk handkerchief jammed into his mouth. His eyes were open and he looked at me with an expression that I can only describe as bitter amusement.
Card was lying belly-down on the floor near the door into the dining-room. He was the hard breather I’d heard in the darkness. He was still out.
I ungagged Raines and sat down. I kept having the feeling that my head was going to blow up. It was a very unpleasant feeling.
In a little while Raines got his jaws limbered up and started talking. The first thing he said was: “What a bright boy you turned out to be!” I was too sick to know very much about what that meant — or care.
He went on like that for some time, talking in a high, squeaky voice, and the idea gradually filtered through the large balloon-shaped ache that my head had turned into.
It seems that Raines and the Mackay gal had juggled Healey into a swell spot. One of their angles was that Healey, in an expansive moment, had entirely forgotten about Mrs. Healey and married Miss Mackay. They had a lot of material besides; everything from the Mann Act to mayhem. When he’d made the hundred and fifty grand lick in Quebec they’d jumped him in Chicago.