They came close by the bed and he could hear them breathing. They were snorting like horses after a run and making enough racket to wake the dead. Whoever it was certainly was overanxious. When the light went out this time Bender opened his right eye and saw a man above him big as all outdoors and got a gleam of something steely in his hand.
The man was fixing to knife him.
Like a flash he slid out of bed backwards, pulling his automatic out from under the pillow with him and when his foot struck the floor he knew this was no time to play around.
He flicked his gun down and squeezed the trigger a couple of times and in the light of the explosion he saw an agonized face and imagined he could hear the bullets thud home with a soft plunk like he had shot a piece of liver.
He dropped down quickly to use the bed as a barricade but before he could hide himself or fire at the second man there was another crack, sharper and more staccato than his, and a finger of flame reached out and went through his right arm and he knew he was shot.
He fell to the floor and tried to push his gun over to his left hand but his right hand wouldn't respond. He had a frantic moment and his arm was numb and dead and somehow he got the crazy idea that he had been sleeping on it and that it was asleep. Then he knew that couldn't be... so he reached over with his left hand and got the automatic and stuck his hand up to rub out the other assailant.
The assailant could see better than he could and he fired again over the bed, the bullet singing by Tom Bender's head and biting off a lot of plaster behind him.
Bender turned the nose of his automatic down and got the bead and then crack — crack came from the window sill. The man across the bed spun around like a toy top and fell with a loud noise and somebody jumped down off the sill and ran into the room.
Bender crawled up saying: “Who is it? Who is it?”
“Cap'n? Cap'n?” the man said.