Where is he?" he yelled. "What have you done with the poor man? Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? Where is he, I say?"
He was coming down the corridor, yelling at the top of his lungs; and I could hear several people scurrying along with him, trying to shush him up, but no one had ever had much luck at that and they didn't either. I'd never seen him in my life--just heard him a couple of times on the radio--but I knew it was him. I reckon I'd have known he'd come even if I hadn't heard him. You didn't have to see or hear Billy Boy Walker to know he was around. You could just kind of sense it.
They stopped in front of my door, and Billy Boy started beating on it like they didn't have a key and he was going to have to knock it down.
"Mr. Ford! My poor man!" he yelled; and, man, I'll bet they could hear him all the way into Central City. "Can you hear me? Have they punctured your eardrums? Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow!"
He kept it up, beating on the door and yelling, and it sounds like it must've been funny but somehow it wasn't. Even to me, knowing that they hadn't done a thing to me, really, it didn't sound funny. I could almost believe that they "had" put me through the works.
They managed to get the door unlocked, and he came bounding in. And he looked as funny--he should have looked as funny as he should have sounded--but I didn't feel the slightest call to laugh. He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head. Everything about him was sort of off-size and out-ofshape, as the saying is. But I couldn't see a thing to laugh about. Neither, apparently, could the nurse and the two attendants and old Doc Bony-face.
Billy Boy flung his arms around me and called me a "poor man" and patted me on the head. He had to reach up to do it; but he didn't seem to reach and it didn't seem funny.
He turned around, all at once, and grabbed the nurse by the arm. "Is this the woman, Mr. Ford? Did she beat you with chains? Fie! Fah! Abomination!" And he scrubbed his hand against his pants, glaring at her.
The attendants were helping me into my clothes, and they weren't losing any time about it. But you'd never have known it to hear Billy Boy. "Fiends!" he yelled. "Will your sadistic appetites never be satiated? Must you continue to stare and slaver over your handiwork? Will you not clothe this poor tortured flesh, this broken creature that was once a man built in God's own image?"
The nurse was spluttering and sputtering, her face a half-dozen different colors. The doc's bones were leaping like jumping-jacks. Billy Boy Walker snatched up the night-can, and shoved it under his nose. "You fed him from this, eh? I thought so! Bread and water, served in a slop jar! Shame, shame, fie! You did do it? Answer me, sirrah! You didn't do it? Fie, fah, paah! Perjurer, suborner! Answer, yes or no!"
The doc shook his head, and then nodded. He shook and nodded it at the same time. Billy Boy dropped the can to the floor, and took me by the arm. "Never mind your gold watch, Mr. Ford. Never mind the money and jewelry they have stolen. You have your clothes. Trust me to recover the rest--and more! Much, much more, Mr. Ford."
He pushed me out the door ahead of him, and then he turned around real slow and pointed around the room. "You," he said softly, pointing them out one by one. "You and you and you are through. This is the end for you. The end."
He looked them all in the eye, and no one said a word and none of them moved. He took me by the arm again, and we went down the corridor, and each of the three gates were open for us before we got to 'em.
