Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

18 BILL BARNES he began to move forward. A button of his pajamas scraped the floor. He squeezed his body against the floor and waited. The absolute stillness of the room was terrific. It beat in his ears and left him weak and shaking. He edged forward a foot, two, three. Then a creak sounded in what he knew to be a corner. He flipped up his automatic and fired one shot, rolling quickly to the left as he fired. A gun roared twice from the corner, the bullets thudding into the wall behind Shorty. He spread four more shots across the far side of the room and rolled back to the right. The seconds stretched into minutes and hours, it seemed to Shorty, as he waited. Then he began to advance again. His hand came up against a wall. He began to circle the room inch by inch until he was near the door. He slipped his hand up the wall and pushed the light button. As_ light flooded the room he dove for the pro- tection of the bed. But what he saw in that one fleeting glance told him he had nothing more to fear. He got to his feet with his gun held in front of him. A man was sprawled out in the mid- dle of the floor. He was lying on his stomach and his arms and legs were spread wide. Blood was gushing out on the rug from a gaping hole in the back of his head. “Got him in the face and it tore the back of his head out!” Shorty said in a horrified voice. Voices sounded outside in the hall- way. Some one beat on his door with heavy fists. “Shorty!” Bill Barnes’ voice came to him. “Open up, fella! Are you all right?” The fists continued to beat on the wood. Shorty moved toward the door like a man in a trance. The hand that un- locked the snap lock was shaking. So was the one that still held his gun. He opened the door and stared at Bill Barnes as though he had never seen him before. Bill looked at his white, tense face and strode into the room, His breath hissed through his nostrils as he saw the thing lying on the floor. He looked from it to Shorty with wide, questioning eyes. “Who is it, fella?” Shorty shook his head as “Red” Glea- son and Sandy Sanders pushed into the room followed by one of the Barnes Heilner Field guards and “Cy” Hawkins, an- other of Bill’s pilots. Bill dropped on one knee and grasped the man’s wrist. Then pushed his hand in under his shirt. His blue eyes were narrowed, his bronzed face a trifle whiter when he looked up and shook his head. “He’s dead!” he said. A torrent of questions suddenly leaped from Shorty’s lips. He threw his automatic on the bed and sat down as he spoke. “Who the devil is he? I woke up for some reason and got the idea there was some one in the room. [| kept quiet until he put on a flashlight and began to rummage through my desk. I could only see his hand but I thought it was Sandy up to some of his deviltry. I shouted at him and he buried three bul- lets in my bed!” He pointed to the bed in evidence. “I grabbed my gun. and COLA) icbook CO