breath as I came slowly to my feet.
It was awful. It could break your nerve. We were facing each other across the counter and I was looking right into the dark glasses three feet in front of my eyes. I was robbing a bank with a witness standing there so near he could reach out and touch me, a witness who could send me to the penitentiary for practically the rest of my life except for the fact that he was blind.
“That you, Mister Julian?” he asked.
How did he know somebody was here? Did he know it? I didn’t dare move. And I couldn’t speak. That was the way he identified people, by their voices. And I couldn’t stand there forever. He was reaching out an arm, groping for me. I leaned back, not moving my feet, and the fingers passed an inch away from my tie.
“Ain’t like you, Mister Julian, makin’ fun of ol’ Mort.” I had to get out. I couldn’t stand it. I moved one foot back, picking it up and lowering it carefully and utterly without sound, crepe rubber against tile. Then I moved the other one. I repeated it. I was out of the cage. I held the bag out from my legs so I wouldn’t brush against it. I was past the other cage now, in the railed-off area where the desk was.
I looked at him, and that was when I began to go to pieces. It wasn’t human. He had moved. He had walked along the front of the counter and now he had stopped beside the railing, and he was tracking me. He couldn’t see me, and no pair of ears on earth could have detected any sound, but he was following me as unerringly as radar. I moved, and the gaunt black face and sightless eyes moved with me. “You got no business in heah!” he said. I ran.
8
The street was clear, and there was no one in the alley. I got the trunk of the car open, threw in the bag, tossed the coat on the back seat, and made a U turn, throwing gravel, and shot across Main Street. This way I’d come in behind the Taylor building. They’d have the other street blocked by now, and I had to get into the thick of it without anyone’s seeing me drive up. I slammed ahead two blocks and turned left.
Smoke was pouring into the sky. I hit a jam of abandoned cars, pulled over to the curb, and got out. The crowds were all ahead of me in the street and beginning to push on to the vacant lots around the rear of the building. The fire engine was around in front, in the middle of the worse jam. I circled, keeping to the rear of the crowd. Nobody paid any attention to me. The whole second floor of the building was roaring now, throwing flames into the air. I shoved my way into the knot of people pressed around the fire engine. They had a hose run out, playing a stream on the roof on the other side, and now they were trying to get one on this side. Everybody was yelling and getting in the way. I saw the chance I was looking for and latched on to the hose, up near the nozzle, as they fought to get it strung out through the crowd.
They gave us the pressure before we got set. The hose stiffened, bucked, and threw the man who was carrying the nozzle. The man next in line went for it, got his hands on it, but he was too light and it slapped him off. Two more lunged for it. I piled into them.
“Look out!” I yelled. “Let me at the damned thing!”
I collided with one of the men, knocked him off his feet, and then fell over him on to the hose. I was soaked, drowned, covered with churned-up mud. It was perfect. It was just what I wanted. I got both hands on the nozzle, dug my feet in, and got up. I held it, and started going forward. I could hear the crowd yell.
We had two streams on the fire now, but we might as well have been squirting a burning oil well with water pistols. The whole thing was going up like a Roman candle. A big section of the roof caved in and sparks and embers went exploding upwards in the smoke. The crowd was pushing in across