Nace arose and barged in under a striped canopy which could be telescoped out to meet arriving planes. He entered the flashy waiting room.
“Telegram for Lee Nace!” droned Robin Hood Lloyd.
The Robin Hood was a lean, young-old wolf. His chin bore scars, irregular, wavy lines — marks of an ancient beating with knucks.
The men sat side by side on a modernistic divan. They were chunky. Their faces might have been meaty blocks covered with a good grade of brown saddle leather.
Both wore khaki overalls. Both had newspapers spread open in their laps.
Headlines on the papers read:
OIL SCANDAL GROWING!
There was a picture of a man with a flowing white beard. He looked like Santa Claus. Under that was another black-faced type line.
EDITOR APP LEADS STOLEN OIL INVESTIGATION
Nace sidled, long-legged, for the seated pair. These men did not know him, or they would not be using the telegram ruse to spot him.
He was still moving when his long arms shot out. His hands, long-fingered, bony, swung hard against the right ear of one man and the left ear of the other. Their heads, driven together, made a hollow bonk!
Each man gave one convulsive quiver as he became unconscious. Then they lay back on the modernistic divan, mouths agape, eyes pinched. The newspapers slid off their laps, revealing frontier six-shooters.
Robin Hood Lloyd stood and stared, a yellow telegram envelope dangling from his right hand. Suddenly he dropped the envelope and began to shake his right hand madly.
A small revolver, dislodged from an armpit, dropped out of the sleeve and hung swinging on a string.
Before Robin Hood could seize his hideout weapon, Nace’s fist lashed. It hit the handiest spot — the undershot jaw which gave the Robin Hood his wolf look.
Oklahoma’s bad boy flippered his hands convulsively. He was not entirely knocked out, and feeling himself going down, wheeled in an effort to land on all fours. He failed and hit the floor all spread out.
The sound as he came down was a metallic clank, as of a pile of scrap iron on the tile floor, rather than a man.
Nace had read about this Oklahoma cut-up in the New York papers. The fellow went around armored like a knight of old — not only with a bullet-proof vest, but with steel leg and arm shields.
The Robin Hood rolled on his back, made a tent over his face with his hands, and moaned loudly.
“The wild and wooly west!” Nace said through his teeth. “I’ll show you how we handle ’em back where the lights shine bright!”
He rushed — bent low, long arms hanging down.
He never did know exactly what happened next. One of the men on the modernistic divan unlimbered with a gun. Or maybe it was both of them. A bullet slammed against Nace’s right side. It spun him just enough so that the second slug got him in the stomach. The Robin Hood managed to draw back both feet and kick him in the head.
Nace’s eyes became two gory bonfires of pain. His insides felt as if they were torn out. He started to cave.
It soaked through his dazed brain that he would die if he did. He hauled up, swayed around, and ran blindly for the white blur he knew was the sunlit door.
When he got outside, he knew it only because he seemed to be in a white-hot snow storm. He pawed his kicked face, beat his body where the bullets had hit.
He wore a bulletproof jacket which had saved his life, but the slugs had mauled him horribly.
Flaying his tortured brain, he managed to remember where they had stacked the baggage from the plane. He veered for the luggage heap. His canvas zipper bag was there. He wanted it. It was his war sack, his bag of tricks, his life preserver. He was too drunk with pain to realize he could not get to the bag before the trio in the waiting room could come after him.
Nace never carried a gun. He subscribed to a theory that toting a firearm tended to make a man helpless, if ever he was caught without it.
Finally he snapped out of the daze. He swiveled around drunkenly on a heel.
His hand, clawing inside his coat, fished out a little metal tear-gas firing cylinder. He exploded it in the waiting room door.
On the opposite side of the building, the roadster engine was moaning anxiously. The blond waited, tense at the wheel.
The Robin Hood and his two followers floundered out into the sunlight. Blinded by the tear gas, they were holding hands to keep track of each other. They acted like three small boys trying not to get lost.
“Come on, guys!” rapped the blond. “Blow!”
The blinded Robin Hood tried to climb into the roadster hood, under the impression that he was getting in the back seat. He hauled out a single-action gun, jabbed it above his head and fanned out its five slugs. Then he found the car door and piled in. “O.K. That’ll hold ’em! Blow!”
The roadster seemed to snug its oilpan belly to the ground, then jump. Scooting away, it left a rain of gravel.
“Did you get the dirty so-and-so?” the blond demanded.
“Hell, no!” The Robin Hood held his jaw with a clench so tight that tendons on his hands whitened like chalk rods. “Damn! Did he land one on my kisser!”
“My heroes!” The girl’s voice was dry. But her eyes were brightly glad.
As if it were clawing cats, the wind tore her blond hair about. It was so very blond, that hair, that it was plainly dyed.
Nace staggered around the airport waiting-room, covering as much ground to right and left as he did ahead.
The field operation office was in the same building with the waiting room, but there were doors, probably closed, through which the tear gas had not penetrated.
Like a dude out of a bandbox, a man popped out from an office window. He wore striped trousers and a gray lap-over tea vest. The pearl grip of a derringer protruded, charm-like, from his watch pocket. He pulled his tiny gun, leveled it. The thing made a sound like a giant firecracker and kicked his fist back in his face.
He looked foolish when the slug dug a geyser of dirt not a hundred feet from where he stood.
Nace leaned, white-faced, against a wall, said, “Better get a bow and arrow!”
The dapper man looked around and grinned. “When I do hit ’em, though, I make a big hole! Say, Skipper, you look like hell!”
The pain had faded the adder scar off Nace’s forehead. It was coming back slowly.
“And I was the cookie who was gonna show how it’s done in the east!” he said dryly. “I done swell! Yes, I did!”
The nattily dressed man reloaded his derringer with a cartridge as thick as his little finger. “Y’know who that was?”
“Mr. Lloyd, I believe.”
“You said it, Skipper! Oklahoma’s contribution to the wild and woolly west — the Robin Hood himself. The lad who can walk down Main Street in Tulsa, from the Louvre to Brown-Dunkin’s, and not a cop can see him — because they’re afraid to. ‘Officers again escape Robin Hood,’ is the streamer an Oklahoma City rag runs every time he has a gun fight with the law.”
Nace grimaced. “You talk like a newspaper man! What sheet?”
The dressy man skidded the derringer back into his watch pocket. “The Telegram! Halt Jaxon’s the name. Oil editor!”
“Know Ebenezer App?”
“I ought to! He pays me!”
“Let’s go hunt him up!” Nace suggested.
Dapper Halt Jaxon made a whistling mouth. “You must be Lee Nace, the private shamus the governor hired to come from New York to come here and work with the boss!”
“The same!”
Nace walked behind the waiting room and came back with his canvas zipper bag. “Do we go?”
“We do!”