Читать книгу Timber-Wolf онлайн

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"He ain't dead!" Billy Winch's breath was expelled in a long, grateful sigh, which, before his lungs flattened, was choked by a nervous giggle. "I'm here, Timber," he said softly. "You know me, old boy!"

"You damn little fool," was Bruce Standing's grunted answer. Yet his voice was gentle and his eyes for one rare and fleeting instant as soft as a lover's.

Billy Winch, a man of resource, was now himself again, cool and past all silly sentiment. He turned from the fallen man to the crowding onlookers, and his eyes darkened with fury. He snatched up the rifle which Standing had let fall, and, still kneeling, whipped it up over his head, brandishing it like a war club.

"Out of this, every one of you!" he shouted at them. "Give him air and give me room to work in, else I bash your brains out!"

Had he been less in earnest some man of them might have found occasion to mark the absurdity of a cripple, squatting on the floor, waving a gun over his head and ordering them about. But as things were, no man appeared to glimpse this angle of it. One by one, with his eyes and the eyes of Timber-Wolf glaring at them, they went hastily out through the window.