They Never Looked Inside by Michael Gilbert Page A

answer,” admitted the Demon Child, grudgingly. “That’s what Curly always says. I can’t see it. Me, I’d shoot the guy who was hollering.”
    “You’d be wrong,” said McCann. “If he was shouting for help, it would be too late to shoot him, probably, and if no one had heard his shout, they’d certainly hear your gun going off. So what’s the use of shooting to stop him shouting?”
    “What about the guy who’s getting up to come at you?”
    “Most people do one thing at a time. If he’s engaged in getting up the chances are he’s not engaged in drawing his own gun. The man who’s sitting still is the dangerous character. He’s probably reaching for his own gun under the table. And he’ll shoot better sitting down.
    “It’s just a question of intelligent anticipation,” went on McCann, “like boxing.”
    This long shot landed in the gold all right.
    His gaoler’s face broke into what might have been quite an attractive smile if its owner had ever bothered to clean his teeth.
    “Say, mister, what d’you know about boxing?”
    He jumped into a quick weaving action, feet and hands right and left – unfortunately bringing himself no closer to the Major’s ever-ready foot.
    “I’ve done a bit,” said the Major modestly. “Amateur stuff. But we had some good boys in our crowd. Lefty Cusins, Patsy Williams.”
    “Patsy—! Oh boy, what a dancer! You oughter watch his footwork. I heard he was finished with fighting, now.”
    This was an understatement, seeing Patsy had left his right foot behind in Sicily. However, the Major merely nodded. He was watching the boy’s face.
    “Lefty—I never knew him. I knew his big brother—I was glove boy to him once—”
    He broke off.
    The Major prodded the conversation into life again.
    “Where did you learn to box?” he asked. “At school – or picking fights in the street?”
    The Demon Child seemed to take more offence at the first suggestion than at the second. “School,” he said in tones of the deepest disgust. “I never went to no—school.”
    The Major was not a very imaginative man. But he had a curious little gift of seeing things objectively rather than logically, which was probably why he was a good soldier and only a very second-class business man.
    Looking at the creature standing beside him he saw suddenly, quite clearly, what he was up against. He, and a great many other law-abiding citizens. He saw the qualities and the defects, set opposite to each other in the plainest black and white. He saw the guts and the courage and the quite considerable perseverance – he saw the shallowness of purpose, the streak of natural cruelty, and the dreadful sterilising selfishness. He saw, though yet in embryo, the perfectly natural criminal. After his men had come to know McCann, and on occasions when their mouths had been unbuttoned by drink or the imminence of danger, they had talked quite freely to him about their homes and background.
    So he knew things which he might not otherwise have known. He knew that it was still possible, in London or Liverpool, or Glasgow, for a boy to live the seventeenth-century life. If he once did go to school the school system probably kept him there – but if he never went at all, particularly if his parents had thoughtfully refrained from registering his birth into this world – well. School Inspectors were hard-worked men, and no system is infallible. He himself personally knew of one man who was still “off the record” since the day when he had deserted from the army in the 1914-18 war.
    The unconscious object of these thoughts was now standing quietly, with his head bent forward. He seemed to be listening.
    Downstairs a door shut.
    Then came the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.
    McCann waited with the greatest interest to see who would come through the door. So far he had observed no one but his present gaoler with any clearness, and it occurred to him that it might be useful, if dangerous, to be