Page:Keeban (IA keeban00balm).pdf/295

 do, you have to take a chance on whatever it is. So I stood, with Keeban beside me and Christina a few feet away and the eleven normals beyond us and between and I watched the girl on the table breathing.

They watched her, too. Christina, Shirley Scofield,—with what sort of feelings? And the normals about us, what were they thinking, too? I didn't even try to wonder about Jerry who had become Keeban and who was doing this thing.

My hands, tied together, grasped the top of the back of a chair against which I leaned; and my muscles went tight to raise it and, spinning, to swing it upon him and kill him. Yet I knew I would not do that; I might knock him down; that was all. It would not help my girl at all.

She half turned her head toward me and then, quickly, she faced to the ceiling again. She wanted to look at me, I thought; and then she had thought it must seem like an appeal to me, which I could not bear when I could not help her.

I held on to the back of that chair and waited, watching her bosom rise and fall. I kept saying to myself something that Teverson told me. When Costrelman and his butler had been killed