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Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.
It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.”
“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”
Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings.
The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.
What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.
But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery. It’s all right with me, if you’re sure none of the flying pieces will hurt you.”
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”
“I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”
She fought against his arm, squirming around to face him again. “No … tell you … sleep … save her …” “Brigid?” he demanded. “Yes … took her … Bur-Burlingame … twenty-six Ancho … hurry … too late …” Her head fell over on her shoulder.
