The Giant Collection of the Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett

Author:Dashiell Hammett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2016-04-05T16:32:05+00:00

XIII

Except for plenty of guns of all sizes and more than plenty of ammunition to fit, we didn’t find anything very exciting until we came to a heavy door—barred and padlocked—set half in the foundation of the principal building, half in the mound on which the building sat.

I found a broken piece of rusty pick, and knocked the padlock off with it. Then we took the bar off and swung the door open.

Men came eagerly toward us out of an unventilated, unlighted cellar. Seven men who talked a medley of languages as they came.

We used our guns to stop them.

Their jabbering went high, excited.

“Quiet!” I yelled at them.

They knew what I meant, even if they didn’t understand the word. The babel stopped and we looked them over. All seven seemed to be foreigners—and a hard-looking gang of cutthroats. A short Jap with a scar from ear to ear; three Slavs, one bearded, barrel-bodied, red-eyed, the other two bullet-headed, cunning-faced; a swarthy husky who was unmistakably a Greek; a bowlegged man whose probable nationality I couldn’t guess; and a pale fat man whose china-blue eyes and puckered red mouth were probably Teutonic.

Milk River and I tried them out with English first, and then with what Spanish we could scrape up between us. Both attempts brought a lot of jabbering from them, but nothing in either of those languages.

“Got anything else?” I asked Milk River.

“Chinook is all that’s left.”

That wouldn’t help much. I tried to remember some of the words we used to think were French in the A. E. F.

“Que désirez-vous?” brought a bright smile to the fat face of the blue-eyed man.

I caught “Nous allons à les États-Unis” before the speed with which he threw the words at me confused me beyond recognizing anything else.

That was funny. Big ’Nacio hadn’t let these birds know that they were already in the United States. I suppose he could manage them better if they thought they were still in Mexico.

“Montrez-moi votre passe-port.”

That brought a sputtering protest from Blue Eyes. They had been told no passports were necessary. It was because they had been refused passports that they were paying to be smuggled in.

“Quand êtes-vous venu ici?”

Hier meant yesterday, regardless of what the other things he put in his answer were. Big ’Nacio had come straight to Corkscrew after bringing these men across the border and sticking them in his cellar, then.

We locked the immigrants in their cellar again, putting Rainey and the Mexican in with them. Rainey howled like a wolf when I took his hypodermic needle and his coke away from him.

“Sneak up and take a look at the country,” I told Milk River, “while I plant the man you killed.”

By the time he came back I had the dead Mexican arranged to suit me: slumped down in a chair a little off from the front door of the principal building, his back against the wall, a sombrero tilted down over his face.

“There’s dust kicking up some ways off,” Milk River reported. “Wouldn’t surprise me none if we got our company along towards dark.

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