"Slim," Louie and Joe, their eyes returning to Brennan from the hole in the wall, continued to stare at him like hypnotized men.
A white, scared face showed in the doorway. It was the proprietor, roused by the pistol shot. He was almost bowled over a few seconds later when Sweeney, with a squad of detectives, all with guns in their hands, burst into the room.
John saw them snap handcuffs on "Slim" and the two "bashers" and then the room began going around and around and the figures before him began floating up and down. There was a roaring sound in his ears and everything went black. His knees sagging, he sank slowly to the floor.
* * *
He dreamed a dream that was half nightmare and half ecstasy before he regained complete consciousness.
First he was in a room without doors battling alone against an endless line of alternate Louies and Joes who vanished when he struck them. Then he was on the floor waiting to be kicked by a pair of legs that had no body and that tormented him by dancing a jig to the rhythm of a sing-song rendition of "Gunga Din."
When the bodiless legs disappeared he found himself mingling in an every-day Spring street crowd with a towel turban stained with blood, on his head and wondering why none paid the slightest attention to him or his strange headgear. Alma Sprockett stopped him at a corner and begged him not to tell something he knew nothing of, and he promised her he wouldn't tell and went on his way racking his brain to remember what she had said to him.
A life-size photograph of Consuello came to life, stepped out of its frame in a theater lobby and sailed through a casement window bordered with red geraniums until it reached the top of a hill, marked with a sign board, on which were the words, "Green and Friendly." He sat at her feet on the hilltop and told her all the earth was servant to just the two of them. They were supremely happy sitting there, for days and weeks and years, until a crimson rain fell and a terrible thunder roared. Bolts of lightning crashed all around him and a splinter from one of the bolts was imbedded in his eye and his head began to ache, and then—
He opened his eyes. He was in a bed at the receiving hospital. Putting a hand to his face he felt a bandage over the cut in his cheek, made by Louie's black-jack, and gauze, held in place by strips of adhesive tape, covering the laceration over his eyes made by Joe's brass knuckles. His right hand was in a stiff, straight bandage, the fingers held flat by splints. Brennan and the chief surgeon were standing at his bedside.