"Halten Sie sich! Not a move! Otto—get them!"
Don't ever ask me about the next few minutes. I was there in body only. My mind was as blank as a Fourth of July cartridge. I remember seeing figures—two, three, or twenty—darting toward us; I remember yelling, ducking, and punching with one and the same motion; I remember hearing guttural voices snarling commands that ended mostly in "geworden sein" so it must have been German. I remember feeling, with satisfaction, a spurt of sticky warmth deluge my knuckles as I hit the jackpot on something spongy that howled.
I remember, too, hearing Hank gasp, "Judas priest—German spies!" just before his lanky length toppled under the impact of an accurately wielded blackjack. And I remember my last conscious thought: that when I got a chance I must offer an apology to sour-puss Grimper. Because that thin, hawk-nosed stencil of superiority-plus was—what-ever else his faults—a bang-up fighting man in a pinch! With a fury incredible in one his size and build, he was laying about him like a demon. One Heinie was peacefully slumbering at his ankles already, a second was bawling for assistance.
Then three, or four, or a thousand of them rushed me at the same time. I remember something playing "Heavy, heavy—what hangs over your head?" above my cranium—then that's all I do remember. A bomb exploded in my cerebrum and I went to beddy-bye.
I had a nice little dream, then. I dreamed I was in Spain during the Inquisition, and a black-robed priest had me fastened to a windlass. As he murmured pious paternosters in my ears, he was gently screwing the instrument tighter, and I was gasping with pain as my arms slowly, grindingly, withdrew from their sockets.
I wriggled, emitting a muffled howl, and awakened to find the dream based on cold, brutal fact! My mouth was full of cotton waste—slightly the worse for wear—explaining my muffled tones. My arms were tied together with a short scrap of hemp; this length had been passed through the draw-chain of a skylight, and thus, securely locked, I hung dangling like a pendulum with my toes barely scraping the floor.
Nor was I the only trussed duck in this tableau. My pal Hank was swinging from another skylight chain a few yards away, while Grimper made it three-on-a-ratch. The government agent was the luckiest of us all. He was out cold, and so he didn't have to listen—as did Cleaver and I—to the gleeful chucklings of the saboteurs.
And chuckling they were, like the hooded villains in a Victorian meller-drammer. Apparently one or two thousand of them had gone home, because there were now only a half dozen, but these six were the nastiest looking Nazis I ever hope not to see again. Beetle-browed thugs, fine examples of the pure Aryanism Herr Shickelgruber is always bragging on.