“’Tis a good deed—do it, Bombini,” Charles Davis encouraged.
“Shut your face, Davis!” came out from Bert Rhine’s bandages.
Kid Twist drew a revolver, shoved the muzzle of it first into Bombini’s side, then covered the men about the Jew.
Really, I felt a momentary twinge of pity for the Italian. He was caught between the mill-stones, “Bombini, stick that Jew,” Bert Rhine commanded.
The Italian advanced a step, and, shoulder to shoulder, on either side, Kid Twist and Nosey Murphy advanced with him.
“I cannot see him,” Bert Rhine went on; “but by God I will see him!”
And so speaking, with one single, virile movement he tore away the bandages. The toll of pain he must have paid is beyond measurement. I saw the horror of his face, but the description of it is beyond the limits of any English I possess. I was aware that Margaret, at my shoulder, gasped and shuddered.
“Bombini!—stick him,” the gangster repeated. “And stick any man that raises a yap. Murphy! See that Bombini does his work.”
Murphy’s knife was out and at the bravo’s back. Kid Twist covered the Jew’s group with his revolver. And the three advanced.
It was at this moment that I suddenly recollected myself and passed from dream to action.