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fell off, smacked their skulls together with a crack that was like a broom-handle breaking, and dragged their rag-limp bodies out of sight up the alley. While this was happening the boy walked jauntily down the street, without a backward glance.
    When the skull-cracker came out of the alley I saw his face in the light—a dark-skinned, heavily-lined face, broad and flat, with jaw-muscles bulging like abscesses under his ears. He spit, hitched his pants, and swaggered down the street after the boy.
    The boy went into Larrouy’s. The skull-cracker followed him in. The boy came out, and in his rear—perhaps twenty feet behind—the skull-cracker rolled. Jack had tailed them into Larrouy’s while I had held up the outside.
    â€œStill carrying messages?” I asked.
    â€œYes. He spoke to five men in there. He’s got plenty of body-guard, hasn’t he?”
    â€œYeah,” I agreed. “And you be damned careful you don’t get between them. If they split, I’ll shadow the skull-cracker, you keep the goose.”
    We separated and moved after our game. They took us to all the hangouts in San Francisco, to cabarets, grease-joints, pool-rooms, saloons, flop-houses, hook-shops, gambling-joints and what have you. Everywhere the kid found men to speak his dozen words to, and between calls, he found them on street-corners.
    I would have liked to get behind some of these birds, but I didn’t want to leave Jack alone with the boy and his bodyguard—they seemed to mean too much. And I couldn’t stick Jack on one of the others, because it wasn’t safe for me to hang too close to the Armenian boy. So we played the game as we had started it, shadowing our pair from hole to hole, while night got on toward morning.
    It was a few minutes past midnight when they came out of a small hotel up on Kearny Street, and for the first time since we had seen them they walked together, side by side, up to Green Street, where they turned east along the side of Telegraph Hill. Half a block of this, and they climbed the front steps of a ramshackle furnished-room house and disappeared inside. I joined Jack Counihan on the corner where he had stopped.
    â€œThe greetings have all been delivered,” I guessed, “or he wouldn’t have called in his bodyguard. If there’s nothing stirring within the next half hour I’m going to beat it. You’ll have to take a plant on the joint till morning.”
    Twenty minutes later the skull-cracker came out of the house and walked down the street.
    â€œI’ll take him,” I said. “You stick to the other baby.”
    The skull-cracker took ten or twelve steps from the house and stopped. He looked back at the house, raising his face to look at the upper stories. Then Jack and I could hear what had stopped him. Up in the house a man was screaming. It wasn’t much of a scream in volume. Even now, when it had increased in strength, it barely reached our ears. But in it—in that one wailing voice—everything that fears death seemed to cry out its fear. I heard Jack’s teeth click. I’ve got horny skin all over what’s left of my soul, but just the same my forehead twitched. The scream was so damned weak for what it said.
    The skull-cracker moved. Five gliding strides carried him back to the house. He didn’t touch one of the six or seven front steps. He went from pavement to vestibule in a spring no monkey could have beaten for swiftness, ease or silence. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, and the screaming stopped. Three more minutes and the skull-cracker was leaving the house again. He paused on the sidewalk to spit and hitch his pants. Then he swaggered off down the street.
    â€œHe’s your meat, Jack,” I said. “I’m going to call on the boy. He won’t recognize me now.”
    V
    The street-door of the rooming-house was not only unlocked but wide open. I went through it into a