Gutman said, in a voice that tried to make firmness ingratiating:
"Come now, gentlemen, let's keep our discussion on a friendly basis; but there certainly is"—he was addressing Spade—"something in 'what Mr. Cairo says.
You must take into consideration the—"
"Like hell I must."
Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness.
"If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird?
If I know you can't afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?"
Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions.
His eyes twinkled between puckered lids.
Presently he gave his genial answer:
"Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill."
"Sure," Spade agreed, "but they're not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down.
See what I mean? If you try anything I don't like I won't stand for it.
I'll make it a matter of your having to call it off or kill me, knowing you can't afford to kill me."
"I see what you mean."
Gutman chuckled.
"That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away."
Spade too was all smiling blandness.
"That's the trick, from my side," he said, "to make my play strong enough that it ties you up, but yet not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment."
Gutman said fondly:
"By Cad, sir, you are a character!"
Joel Cairo jumped up from his chair and went around behind the boy and behind Gutman's chair.
He bent over the back of Gutman's chair and, screening his mouth-i and the fat man's ear with his empty hand, whispered.
Gutman listened attentively, shutting his eyes.
Spade grinned at Brigid O'Shaughnessy.
Her lips smiled feebly in response, but there was no change in her eyes; they did not lose their numb stare.
Spade turned to the boy:
"Two to one they're selling you out, son."
The boy did not say anything.
A trembling in his knees began to shake the knees of his trousers.
Spade addressed Gutman:
"I hope you're not letting yourself be in— fluenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving."
Gutman opened his eyes.
Cairo stopped whispering and stood erect behind the fat n-ian's chair.
Spade said:
"I've practiced taking them away from both of them, so there'll be no trouble there.
The punk is—"
In a voice choked horribly by emotion the boy cried,
"All right!" and jerked his pistol up in front of his chest.
Gutman flung a fat hand out at the boy's wrist, caught the wrist, and bore it and the gun dow-n while Gutman's fat body was rising in haste from the rocking chair. Joel Cairo scurried around to the boy's other side and grasped his other arm.
They wrestled with the boy, forcing his arms down, holding them down, while he struggled futilely against them.
Words came out of the struggling group: fragments of the boy's incoherent speech—"right … go . . . bastard . . . smoke"—Gutman's "Now, now, Wilmer!" repeated many times; Cairo's "No, please, don't" and "Don't do that, Wilmer."
Wooden-faced, dreamy-eyed, Spade got up from the sofa and went over to the group.
The boy, unable to cope withi the weight against him, had stopped struggling. Cairo, still holding the boy's arm, stood partly in front of him, talking to him soothingly.
Spade pushed Cairo aside gently and drove his left fist against the boy's chin.
The boy's head snapped back as far as it could whuie his arms were held, and then came forward.
Gutman began a desperate
"Here, what—?" Spade drove his right fist ag ainst the boy's chin.
Cairo dropped the boy's arm, letting him collapse against Gutman's great round belly.
Cairo sprang at Spade, clawing at his face with the curved stiff fingers of both-i hands.