Spade blew his breath out and pushed the Levantine away.
Cairo sprang at him again.
Tears were in Cairo's eyes and his red lips worked angrily, forming words, but no sound came from between them.
Spade laughed, grunted,
"Jesus, you're a pip!" and cuffed the side of Cairo's face with an open hand, knocking him over against the table.
Cairo regained his balance and sprang at Spade the third time.
Spade stopped him with both palms held out on long rigid arms against his face.
Cairo, failing to reach Spade's face with his shorter arms, thumped Spade's arms.
"Stop it," Spade growled.
"I'll hurt you."
Cairo cried,
"Oh, you big coward!" and backed away from him.
Spade stooped to pick up Cairo's pistol from the floor, and then the boy's.
He straightened up holding them in his heft hand, dangling them upside-down by their trigger-guards from his forefinger.
Gutman had put the boy in the rocking chair and stood looking at him with troubled eyes in an uncertainly puckered face.
Cairo went down on his knees beside the chair and began to chafe one of the boy's limp hands.
Spade felt the boy's chin with his fingers.
"Nothing cracked," he said.
"We'll spread him on the sofa."
He put his right arm under the boy's arm and around his back, put his left forearm under the boy's knees, lifted him without apparent effort, and carried him to the sofa.
Brigid O'Shaughnessy got up quickly and Spade laid the boy there.
With his right hand Spade patted the boy's clothes, found his second pistol, added it to the others in his left hand, and turned his back on the sofa.
Cairo was already sitting beside the boy's head.
Spade clinked the pistols together in his hand and smiled cheerfully at Gutman.
"Well," he said, "there's our fail-guy."
Gutman's face was grey and his eyes were clouded.
He did not look at Spade. He looked at the floor and did not say anything.
Spade said:
"Don't be a damned fool again.
You let Cairo whisper to you and you held the kid while I pasted him.
You can't laugh that off and you're likely to get yourself shot trying to."
Gutman moved his feet on the rug and said nothing.
Spade said:
"And the other side of it is that you'll either say yes right now or I'll turn the falcon and the whoie God-damned lot of you in."
Gutman raised his head and muttered through his teeth:
"I don't like that, sir."
"You won't like it," Spade said.
"Well?"
The fat man sighed and made a wry face and replied sadly:
"You can have him."
Spade said:
"That's swell."
XIX.The Russian's Hand
The boy lay on his back on the sofa, a small figure that was—except for its breathing—altogether corpselikc to the eye.
Joel Cairo sat beside the boy, bending over him, rubbing his cheeks and wrists, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him, and peering anxiously down at his white still face.
Brigid O'Shaughmessy stood in an angle made by table and wall. One of her hands was flat on the table, the other to her breast.
She pinched her lower hip between her teeth and glanced furtively at Spade whenever he was not looking at her.
When he looked at her she looked at Cairo and the boy.
Gutman's face had lost its troubled cast and was becoming rosy again.
He had put his hands in his trousers-pockets.