I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor. She tilted herself towards me on her toes. Then she turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet. She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. You're just a big tease." She put a thumb up and bit it. "A - a - " She tossed her head angrily, and the rich color of it glistened in the rather dim light of the big hall.
"Are you a prizefighter?" she asked, when I didn't. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. "That's a funny name." She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her. Her face lacked color and didn't look too healthy. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pits and as shiny as porcelain. Her eyes were slategray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties. I thought this might be General Sternwood's grandfather. The officer had a neat black Imperial, black mustachios, hot hard coalblack eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with.
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The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war. Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. In the middle of the west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at the corners. They didn't look as if anybody had ever sat in them. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about.
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On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills. Beyond them a large green house with a domed roof. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.
I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN O'CLOCK in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.
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