Part 11

The huddled figure on the carpet had disappeared. There had been no sound, no sign. The Indian had vanished.

_CHAPTER FOUR_

THE FACE IN THE MOONLIGHT

Annister had thrown in with Rook, but he trusted him no further than he would have trusted a cougar, a mountain cat.

At the club, as the afternoon wore on to evening, he had met four or five men: Beaton, the county judge, a red-faced tippler with, on the surface, a heartiness that was repellant; Lunn, the hotel proprietor, a vast, asthmatic man with a small, porcine eye; Daventry, the Land Commissioner, whose British accent, Annister noticed, would on occasion flatten to a high, nasal whining that was reminiscent of Sag Harbor or Buzzards Bay.

The rest, hard-faced, typical of their environment, Annister put down for the usual lesser fry; hangers-on, jackals, as it might chance, “house-men,” in the parlance of the “poker-room”—Annister knew the type well enough.

They seemed hospitable, but once or twice Annister had thought to detect in their glances a grimly curious look: of appraisal, and of something more.

There had been a game going, but he had not sat in, nor had the lawyer invited him. The visit had been meant, plainly enough, as a sort of introduction.

“We’re all here,” Rook had said.

But it was apparent, too, that there were one or two others who were absent; Annister heard several references to “Bull”; but for the most part there was a silence, beneath which Annister could feel the tension; it was like a fine wire, vibrating, deep-down; almost, he might have said, a certain grimly quiet anticipation of that which was to come.

Presently the telephone tinkled, loud in the sudden stillness; Annister could hear the voice at the other end: harsh, strident, with a bestial growl that penetrated outward into the close room.

“He can’t come,” came from the man at the telephone. “Bull—yeah—an’ I reckon he seems some disappointed.”

Annister noticed that the tension had all at once relaxed, and with it, as he could see, there was plainly visible in the faces about him a certain disappointment. It was as if they had been waiting for something—something, well, that had not materialized. There was a laugh or two; a word stifled in utterance; one or two of the men, glancing at Annister and away, gave an almost imperceptible head-shake. Even Rook, as Annister could tell, appeared relieved as the newcomer rose, turning to the company with a conventional good-night.

For just a split second it seemed to Annister that something _was_ about to happen; for a moment he saw, or fancied that he saw, a quick, silent signal flash, then, from eye to eye; Lunn, the hotel man, had half risen in his chair; out of the tail of his eye, as he was turning toward the door, Annister was aware of a quick ripple, a movement, the shadow of a sound, like the movement of a conjuror manipulating his cards, white hands flashing in a bewildering passade.

But nothing happened.

Leaving, he had walked slowly toward the hotel, turning over in his mind the story that had been told him by the lawyer. And there was one more question he wanted to ask him: a question that had to do with a square of paper that he had come upon among his father’s papers in New York, for it had been this chance discovery that had sent him, post-haste, to Dry Bone, and the lawyer’s office.

Thinking these things, he was turning the corner to the hotel when, out of nowhere as it seemed, a man had passed him, walking with a peculiar, dragging shuffle. Seen under the moon for a moment, this man’s face had impressed itself upon Annister: it was dark and foreign, with high cheek-bones, and—what seemed curiously out of place in Dry Bone—a black moustache and professional Van Dyke.

Annister, watching the man, saw him turn into the doorway he had just quitted; it was the entrance to the “club”—two rooms above a saddler’s shop at the corner of the street.

Halting a moment to look after the man, Annister was wondering idly who he might be—certainly not the man called “Bull,” if there was anything in a name. And then, abruptly, he was remembering what the lawyer had let fall about the “doctor”; perhaps that was who he was; he had had a distinctly professional air.

The man’s eyes had lingered upon Annister for a moment, and for a moment the latter had been conscious of a curious shock. For it had been as if the man had looked _through_ rather than at him; those eyes had glowed suddenly in the darkness, gray-green like a cat’s, in an abrupt, ferocious, basilisk stare.

Annister, in his day, had seen some queer corners and some tight places; in Rangoon, for example, he had penetrated to a certain dark house in a dim backwater stinking and dark with the darkness of midnight even at high noon.

And it was there, in that dark house, with shuttered windows like blind eyes to the night, that he had seen that which it is not good for any white man to have seen: the rite of the Suttee; the blood-stone of Siva, the Destroyer, reeking with the sacrifice—ay—and more.

And something now, at that time half-perceived and dimly understood, came again with the sight of the dark face with its high cheek-bones, and black, forking beard; for he had seen a creature with a face and yet without a face, mewling and mowing like a cat, now come from horrors, and the practitioner had been—

The man who but just now passed him at the corner of the street, the man with the dark, foreign visage, and the eyes of death.

_CHAPTER FIVE_

PARTNERS OF THE NIGHT

Annister, pausing a moment at the corner of the street, was conscious of a feeling of coldness, like a bleak wind of the spirit, as if death, in passing, had touched him, and gone on.

For the face of the man whom he had seen had been like the face of a damned soul, unhuman, Satanic in its sheer, visible malevolence. So might Satan himself have looked, after the Fall.

Somehow, although the man had looked straight ahead, seeming to see merely with the glazed, indwelling stare of a sleepwalker, Annister had felt those eyes upon him; he was certain that he had been seen—and known. But now he had other things to think about.

He had intended going to the hotel. Now, on an impulse he bent his steps away from it, turning to the building in which were the offices of Rook.

But he did not enter by the main doorway. There was an alley further along; into this he melted with the stealth and caution of an Indian, feeling his way forward in the thick darkness to where, as he had marked it earlier in the day, there was a rusty fire-escape; its rungs ran upward in the darkness; they creaked now under his hand as he went slowly up.

Rook’s office was on the second floor. Annister, reaching the window, found it locked, but in a matter of seconds had it open, with the soft _snick_ of a steel blade between sash and bolt; the thing was done with a professional deftness, as if, say, the man who had opened that window had done that same thing many times before.

Now, crouched in the darkness by that dim square of window, the intruder stood silent, listening, holding his breath. A sound had come to him, faint and thin, as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls; it penetrated outward from the private office, with the snick and slither of rasping steel on steel.

And at the instant that Annister, with a grim smile in the darkness, recognized it for what it was, he knew, too, that someone had been beforehand with him; someone interested, also, in Hamilton Rook; for the sound that he heard now, loud in the singing silence, was the sound of a steel drill upon a safe.

Annister had seen that safe; it was scarcely more than a strong-box, a sheet steel, but thin; a “can-opener” could have ripped it from end to end, easily, in no time at all. Rook must feel secure indeed, he thought, to put his trust in so flimsy a repository unless, perhaps, he had other means. The Indian, for instance; the savage who, but a few hours ago, had missed with his long talons for Annister’s throat by inches.

But somehow Annister did not think that the Jivero would be on guard. There was no burglar-alarm protection; he had made certain of that; but the man who was now busy with that safe must have come up by the stairway; doubtless he was on familiar ground. Perhaps he might be some disgruntled confederate of the lawyer’s; well, he’d have a look-see, at any rate.

Advancing silently, on the balls of his feet, Annister traversed the length of the outer office, peering around the doorway to where, under the dim glow of a single drop-light, a figure, back toward Annister, knelt before the safe.

The drop-light, carefully shaded, would not be visible from without; under its cone-shaped radiance Annister could see merely that the man was wearing a cap, pulled low over his forehead; but something in the attitude of that kneeling figure: the turn of the head, the deft, darting movement of the hand, was strangely familiar.

Annister grinned in the darkness at the same moment that he was aware of a curious contraction of the heart. This lone-hand cracksman worked evidently without confederates, unless, possibly, he might have a lookout posted on the sidewalk below. He spoke, barely above a whisper:

“Hello!” he said. “Pretty careless, aren’t you? Now, do you think it’s—safe?”

The figure whirled; the hand, holding an automatic, came upward with the speed of light; then dropped limply at her side as the girl surveyed him with a stony look.

It was the waitress of the Mansion House.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve caught me, but it looks to me as if I beat you to it, Black Steve Annister.... Oh, I’ve heard of you, Mister Black Steve.... Well, now you’ve caught me, what are you going to do about it?”

The darkly beautiful face was scornful; the violet eyes, under the light, stormy with a something that Annister could not all define.

Annister bit his lip. To find her like this! And, all at once, realization came to him with a sudden tightening of the heart.

This girl, waitress or not, crook or not—he had to confess that, in all his wanderings up and down the earth, he had never met her like. A girl in a thousand, he had decided, back there in the dining-room of the Mansion House. What a partner she would make! Now, with a girl like that for a partner...!

On a sudden impulse he leaned forward, his eyes upon the safe door; it swung outward now; somehow she had opened it.

“Pretty smooth,” he commented. “The combination, after all, ha? You worked it. Now, before _we_ have a look, I want to tell you something. I—I’m looking for a partner, Miss—ah—Miss—”

“—Allerton,” she told him, in her eyes a sudden, leaping spark, the brief, baffling, enigmatic look that he had seen back there in the hotel dining-room. But it was gone again even as she spoke:

“All right—partner!” she said, low. “When do we start?”

“Right now!” answered Annister, his gaze upon the girl frankly admiring. He had expected the usual feminine evasions, a play for time, hesitation—anything but this ready acquiescence in his abrupt proposal.

He was not entirely sure of her; his admiration for her beauty, her poise, had nothing to do with the cold judgment whispering now that the whole affair might, after all, be a blind, a trap, devious and crooked as the devious and crooked turnings of Hamilton Rook.

But with Annister to decide was to act.

Bending, he swung wide the safe door, groping forward with exploring hand. His back was toward the girl; consequently he did not see the sudden, revealing gleam in the violet eyes, the quick hardening of the mouth. Swinging forward his pocket flash, the light danced, glimmering, upon a packet of papers, a sheaf of documents. Annister, running over them swiftly, gave a quick exclamation, his hand, in a lightning movement, palming something which he secreted in an inner pocket.

He turned sidewise to the girl.

“Lord!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “Nothing but papers! Partner, we’re out of luck!”

Evidently the girl had been oblivious. Now, however, her quick, flashing fingers sorted the contents of that safe as with a practiced hand, to leave them, as had Annister, inviolate, save for that oblong of paper reposing now in the pocket of his coat.

In the shadow of the entrance it was black dark as they parted. The girl did not live in the hotel, she told him; that had been a part of her plan. They would meet again, of course. But once in his room, and with the shades drawn and the door locked and bolted, Annister, taking the paper from his pocket, smoothed it out under the light.

He looked; then looked again, breath indrawn sharply through clenched teeth.

For that paper was a canceled check; it had been drawn to “Cash”; and the signature, in a hand that he knew upon the instant, was the signature of his father, Travis Annister.

_CHAPTER SIX_

THE LIVING GHOST

Annister had heard nothing from Rook other than that he had been again invited to a further session of the “Club” for that evening.

Alone in his room on the morning following his adventure in Rook’s office, his eye had been caught and held by a news item printed on an inside page of the _Durango County Gazette_: he had nearly passed it over; but now the lines leaped out at him as if they had been blazoned across the paper in a double-column spread:

Travis Annister Still Strangely Missing—Retired Capitalist Gone Since January—Foul Play Feared

And, separated from it by the width of a single column, he read:

Retired Banker Disappears—Newbold Humiston a Suicide?—Friends Fear for Safety

But it was at a third item, tucked away in an obscure corner that Annister stifled a quick word in his throat. Newbold Humiston had been a friend of his father’s; it was an odd coincidence, to say the least of it. And the story went on to say that three other men, all nationally known, had, so to speak, between suns, disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.

And that third news item, irrelevant as it might have been, told of an incident, odd and unusual enough; it had happened in Palos Verde, distant from Dry Bone a long twenty miles of hazardous mountain trail:

A man had come in, in rags and tatters; at first they had thought him a desert rat, a prospector, light-headed from starvation, for his incoherent babble had proclaimed him no less a personage than Rodman Axworthy, prominent banker of Mojave. The sheriff of Palos Verde, on the off chance, had wired Mojave, and the word had come back that Axworthy had been missing; they were sending a man.

With the arrival of this man, however, the mystery deepened, for it appeared that the derelict was indeed Axworthy, and yet not Axworthy at all, for whereas the true Axworthy had had a high, aquiline nose and a wide, generous mouth, the derelict was snub-nosed, swarthy, where the banker had been fair; he was, simply, another man.

But there had been this about it: on the banker’s left forearm, underneath, there had been a curious birth-mark; the derelict had spoken of it, but upon examination the arm showed smooth and bare. The investigator from Mojave had been obviously skeptical until, abruptly, the ragged claimant had taken from his pocket a curious, removable bridge; a dentist in Mojave who had made it, he said, could identify it. It fitted perfectly.

This looked like proof, but the thing was obviously impossible. And then, as “Axworthy” was being taken back to Mojave, he went suddenly stark, staring crazy, repeating over and over, with reference to the bridge:

“It’s the one thing they didn’t get—the one thing....”

And there the matter rested, save that, upon arrival in Mojave, the bridge was found to be missing. The emissary from Mojave seemed to remember a dark-faced stranger who had been seated opposite them in the train, but that was all; the man had jostled against his charge upon alighting; the last proof, if indeed it might be called a proof, was gone.

Annister frowned thoughtfully, his mind upon that canceled check in his pocket. And he was remembering one other thing, and that was the square of paper which he had found among his father’s effects, for on it had been a name, or, rather, two: the name of Hamilton Rook, and of another, unknown to Annister. And as to that Axworthy case, it was common knowledge that lunatics, for instance, entertained frequently the delusion that they were people of importance. There was nothing new in that.

Somehow, it seemed to him that he held in his hands the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle that, even if put together, made but a patchwork of motives and design, which yet, if he could but find the key, would be as clear as crystal.

That paper found in his father’s office; the interview with Childers, at Washington; the long trip westward; the warning message on the train; the big man with the ice-blue eye and the square jaw of a fighter; the attack in the hotel; the meeting with Rook, and the meeting with the girl; the finding of that canceled check—and, last, the matter of those queerly related news items just under his hand—these made a pattern to be unraveled only by the warp and woof of Fate.

And the chance meeting with the bearded stranger at the corner of the street: consider how he would, Annister’s mind kept turning backward to that meeting and those eyes that were like the eyes of a damned soul, malignant, cold, in their abysmal, cold cruelty of discarnate Evil.

Discarnate! That was it; that would express it; for the man, as he recalled him, seemed somehow less than human; there had been about him an aura, an emanation, that was like a tide rising from the depths, from darkness unto darkness....

Annister was scarcely superstitious, but he was again conscious of that icy chill; he shivered, as a man is said to shiver when, according to an ancient superstition, someone is said to be walking over his grave.

He rose, walking to the window, to peer outward into the sunwashed street. The coil was tightening; he felt it; and he was but one man against many. And knowing what he knew, or suspecting what he suspected, it seemed to him all at once that the sunlight had flattened to a heatless flaming of pale radiance; there seemed a menace in it, even as there seemed a menace in the very air, a waiting, a tension, like a fine wire drawn and singing at a pitch too low for sound.

Abruptly he heard a sound; it was like the scratching of a rat in the wainscot, faint and thin. His door was locked.

Now, looking at it, the knob turned, slowly, stealthily. He could see it turning.

Then, faint but unmistakable, came a knock.

_CHAPTER SEVEN_

THROUGH THE DOOR

The knocking was not loud; it was merely a discreet tap; but there was a quality of hurry in it.

Annister, moving without sound on the thick pile of the rug, almost with the same motion turned the key and flung wide the door.

At first he could see nothing. The corridor, thick-piled with shadows even at high noon, showed merely as a darkling glimmer out of which there sprang suddenly a face, like a white, glimmering oval; a voice came, with a quick, hissing sibilance:

“_Ssh!_ Quiet! I must not be seen! Or else he.... Close the door!”

The girl stepped inward swiftly, her white face turned to the man before her in a sort of frozen calm. Annister had a vague impression of having seen her somewhere before: that golden head beneath its close-fitting toque; the faint, remembered odor of fresh violets; the face, with a piquant loveliness just now, however, white and drawn; it was like a strain of music, heard and then forgotten.

Closing the heavy door and locking it, he turned swiftly to the girl.

“Well—?” he said, his gaze upon her in a cold, searching scrutiny. “Isn’t this a trifle—_sudden_?”

But the girl lifted a stony face.

“I have little time,” she said, with a curious, spent breathlessness, as if she had been running. “I am Cleo Ridgley, secretary to Hamilton Rook—that is, I _was_; I am his secretary no longer, but he does not know about it—yet.”

She paused, again with that hard-held breathing, moistening her stiff lips.

“I warned you that day on the train; do you remember? I warned you because I knew Hamilton Rook.... I know him even better now. He meant to kill you, Mr. Annister, and now he schemes—”

“—To use me—is that it?” interrupted Annister dryly; then, at her slow head-shake, he stiffened.

“He would have finished you even after your—agreement—but that is not his way. But he will not make use of you in the way that you think. That careful plan of which he told you—that was just a blind; there are no ranches near enough. The S. S. S.—that, too, was just a part of the story. You see, he wants to keep you here, that is all, until such time as he thinks it necessary to—remove you. But his real motive, his actual plan I know nothing about. I may suspect, but I do not _think_ about it.”

She paused again, her expression rigid, as there sounded a faint, half-audible footfall from the corridor without. It passed.

“He would—kill me—if he knew,” she continued tonelessly. “That warning on the train—I did that at his order. If he could have frightened you off, he would have been satisfied with that, but now, it will be—different, I tell you this on my own account. And now—”she laid a slim hand on his arm—“don’t go to that rendezvous tonight, Mr. Annister. Ellison will be there; you remember him? He was the man who tried to keep you on that train.”

She smiled faintly with her lips, but her eyes were sombre.

“Ellison is Rook’s jackal, just as Rook is—”

The sentence was never completed. There came a coughing grunt from just outside the door, a streak of flame from the half-open transom just above; the girl stiffened, her face went blank; she slid downward to the rug, even as Annister, snapping back the lock, had flung wide the door.

Gun out, he burst into the corridor, as, from the shadows at a far corner, he fancied that he heard the faint echo of a taunting laugh.

But there was no one there.

Rushing to the stair-head, he found nothing, nobody. The man who had fired that shot had used a silencer; he had disappeared, either into one of the bed-chambers to right and left, or down the stair. But it was no time for speculation. The girl would be needing attention, if, indeed, she was not already past all aid.