lean fingers closed around her gun-hand wrist.
She twisted her body against my right arm, which, benumbed in the automobile accident, wouldn't hold. Her thick body heaved up, turning over on me.
Gunfire roared in my ear, burnt my cheek. The woman's body went limp. When O'Gar and Reddy pulled us apart she lay still. The last bullet had torn through her throat.
I went up to the laboratory. Gabrielle Leggett, with Collinson and the doctor kneeling beside her, was lying on the floor. I told the doctor:
"Mrs. Leggett's dead, I think, but you'd better see if there's any chance. She's on the stairs."
The doctor went out. Collinson, chafing the unconscious girl's hands, looked at me as if I were something he didn't like, and said:
"I hope now you're satisfied with the manner in which your work got done."
"I'm not particularly satisfied with the manner," I told him, "but"―stubbornly ―"it got done."
Collinson returned his attention to the girl, who had moved an arm.
I walked down the hall toward the stairs, repeating my last three words―It got done. I didn't think I was soft-headed enough to have been impressed by Mrs. Leggett's curse, yet I didn't feel that everything was done here. I hadn't the sort of satisfaction you feel when you've completely and finally wound up a job. The diamonds had been recovered; their going had been explained; and everybody who might have been jailed over their going was dead. There were no loose ends that I knew of. Nevertheless. . . . I gave it up, telling myself as I went downstairs:
"Well, if more comes, it'll come."
I was, it turned out, right about that.
THE HOLLOW TEMPLE, by Dashiell Hammett
A further incident in the "black life" of Gabrielle Leggett
IN DECEMBER BLACK MASK
