“What are you going to do with us, sir?” Isaac Chantz demanded of me, in defiance to the gangsters, who were expected to do the talking.
Bert Rhine lurched angrily toward the sound of the Jew’s voice. Chantz’s partisans drew closer to him.
“Jail you,” I answered from above. “And it shall go as hard with all of you as I can make it hard.”
“Maybe you will an’ maybe you won’t,” the Jew retorted.
“Shut up, Chantz!” Bert Rhine commanded.
“And you’ll get yours, you wop,” Chantz snarled, “if I have to do it myself.”
I am afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I have been priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was I in observing the moving drama beneath me that for the moment I failed to glimpse the tragedy into which it was culminating.
“Bombini!” Bert Rhine said.
His voice was imperative. It was the order of a master to the dog at heel. Bombini responded. He drew his knife and started to advance upon the Jew. But a deep rumbling, animal-like in its sound and menace, arose in the throats of those about the Jew.
Bombini hesitated and glanced back across his shoulder at the leader, whose face he could not see for bandages and who he knew could not see.