Chapter V: Part 5

Here, as he could see, there was a curious mingling of the Old West and the New: men, whose attire would have created no remark, say, even in New York; others, booted and spurred, cartridge-belted and pistolled—but all, as he noticed, with, for headgear, the inevitable Stetson.

Once in his room, and the door locked and bolted, he busied himself for a moment with a sheaf of papers, several of them adorned with a huge, official seal; they crackled as he put them in an inner pocket. Then, dressed as he was, he lay down upon the bed, but not to sleep.

It was late—hard upon midnight—when the sound for which he had waited came with the soft _whirring_ of the window-weights. The sound was not loud; it would not have awakened him had he been asleep; but Annister could hear it plainly enough.

He had removed his shoes upon retiring. Now, in his stocking-feet, he approached the window, a black, glimmering oblong against the windy night without. As he watched, the faint _whirring_ ceased; a pair of hands appeared suddenly out of the darkness, fingers hooked into the window-sill.

Annister drew a faint, hissing breath. In the star-shine, for there was no moon, the fingers showed in a luminous grayness against the sill, clawlike, malformed, like the talons of a beast, which in effect they were.

Annister knew them upon the instant, for, in far-off Java, for instance, he had seen those hands, or, rather, the same and yet not the same. And in that instant he had acted.

Both hands upon the window-sash, he brought it down with a crash upon those fingers; there followed a yelp of pain, inhuman, doglike—a groaning curse—the slam of a falling ladder—a heavy thud—silence.

Annister smiled grimly in the darkness. Whoever it was, the intruder would never be certain as to whether that window had crashed downward of its own accord, or not. And leaning in the window, Annister raised it cautiously again after a moment. He heard presently the slow drag of retreating footsteps; after all, it had not been much of a drop.

Closing and bolting the window, he undressed in the darkness, and with the facility of an old campaigner was asleep and snoring beneath the blankets between two ticks of the watch.

But in the morning a surprise awaited him.

Always an early riser, he was breakfasting alone in the empty dining-room when the waitress brought him a note. Beyond noting that she was pretty, and that she did not look like a waitress, Annister, somewhat engrossed in the business in hand, for a moment stared at the envelope with unseeing eyes.

Then, ripping it open, he took in its contents in one swift, flashing glance:

_“My dear Mr. Annister_:

_“I would be very glad to see you at my office at ten this
morning—if you are able to be there.”_

It was signed simply: “Hamilton Rook.”

Annister grinned fleetingly in answer.

“Well—it’s not another warning, at any rate,” he said, half aloud, turning to the consideration of his breakfast bacon. Then, at a low voice at his back, he turned:

“Did you—say your coffee needed warming, sir?”

It was the waitress.

Annister had turned the note, face downward, on the table, with a quick flirt of his thumb. How long she had been there behind him he could not tell, for he had heard no sound.

“Thanks—no,” he said shortly, his hard eyes boring into hers with an almost insolent appraisal.

Yes—she was pretty, and more than that, her violet eyes darkening now under his abrupt, almost savage scrutiny. And her voice—it was like a bell just trembling out of silence. Annister spoke:

“Have you been here long—in Dry Bone, I mean?” he asked.

The waitress smiled, and it was not the smile of a waitress, Annister was convinced. Now, with a girl like that for a partner—was his unspoken thought—he could—well....

“N-no, sir,” the girl made answer, with a sudden affectation of primness. “I came in yesterday, sir—on the same train with you, sir. I—I’ve just been—engaged.”

Annister repressed an absurd prompting to ask her how many times she had been engaged before, and to whom and at what. Her eyes were assuredly hypnotic, with lashes long and delicately fine.

“_Umm_,” he rumbled in answer.

Was it possible, after all, that she had been the girl in the crimson toque? And, with the card in his pocket, for a moment he was tempted to show it to her. Instead:

“Well—I hope you like it here,” he said. “You’ll know me—the next time?”

And for a moment he could have sworn that in the face of the girl there had come all at once a curious, almost a baffling look, at once enigmatic and self-revealing. But the entrance of the vanguard of breakfasters interrupted.

He watched her for a little as with a swaying, lilting step she moved off to minister to the late-comers, his eyes speculative. Then, turning once more to the letter, he re-read it as a man reading a cipher:

“_If you are able to be there._” Could there be a double meaning in that? For if Rook had sent that midnight visitor, then there were no lengths indeed to which he might go—for the hand, like a beast’s paw, upon the window-sill, had been, as Annister had known upon the instant, the hand of the Thug, the Dacoit, the Strangler.

Warnings, thrice repeated; a hand in the dark; a waitress who was not all she seemed; an invitation, suave, and, as Annister conceived it, ironic—it was a situation not without its possibilities for action.

And Black Steve Annister loved action. Perhaps, after all, he was to have it now, whether he would or no.

Rook he had known aforetime, but he was convinced that the latter would not recognize him save as Black Steve Annister, wastrel of the wide world, gentleman adventurer-in-waiting to the High Gods of Adventure and Derring-do, knight-errant of the highways and byways of Criminopolis, scarce a black sheep, indeed, but a wolf of the long trail and of the night.

Rook had known him as such in the days when, as jackal for certain vested interests, the black-bearded lawyer had run foul of young Annister, just then beginning a hectic career of spending which, but three years in the past, had abruptly terminated with Annister’s complete disappearance from joyous jazz-palace and discreetly gilded temple of high hazard.

For he had dropped out of sight, lost, as a stone is lost, in the sea-green waters of oblivion, save for an occasional ripple thereafter which proclaimed him blacksander, beachcomber, _chevalier d’industrie_, until one memorable evening a twelve-month gone ... but Rook would be knowing nothing of that.

Annister had come home from the South Seas to find his father gone, and a note: “_Do not look for me, for you are not my son._” And an exhaustive inquiry had failed even to suggest the slightest clue.

The elder Annister could have written his check for seven figures, and it appeared, following his disappearance, that he had done so; they had come in from North and South and East and West, steadily, and, as it seemed, with purpose. But as a clue to his whereabouts they had been unavailing.

But, from the moment of his discovery of that note, Black Steve Annister, visiting a certain office in a certain side-street not far distant from the Capitol, had surprised its guardian with a terse:

“That offer of yours, Childers—I’ve come to take it up.”

The man called Childers had bent a keen look upon his visitor; another might have described it as unpleasant, stern.

“Well, you know just what that means, eh?” he had said. “You’ll be merely a cog, a link—remember that!”

“Yes,” Annister had answered, and there the interview had ended.

And so Black Steve Annister, serving two masters, had come to Dry Bone, and the end, as it might chance, of the long trail leading Westward into the setting sun.

He rose from the table now, going out into the pale Spring sunshine on his way to the office of Hamilton Rook. He found the building presently; it was the court-house; there was a figure of Blind Justice with her scales just over the entrance. Annister reflected sardonically that, here, in Carter County, distant from a civilization at present as remote as the moon, she was probably also deaf—and dumb. And presently, at the head of a dark flight, there was the office, with the legend:

HAMILTON ROOK

ATTORNEY AND
COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW

There was a small sign at the corner of the door; in obedience to its invitation to “Walk In,” Annister, his hand upon the knob in a noiseless pressure, abruptly flung it wide.

A split second before the opening of that door, and while his hand was on the knob, Annister had seen, or thought that he had seen, a swift shadow pass suddenly across the ground-glass panel; there was the grating sound of a chair being moved backward.

Then, standing in the doorway, Annister’s eyes narrowed; he stood rigid, tense.

For the man facing him across the stained and battered desk, lean head like a vulture’s set upon wide shoulders; mouth like a straight gash with its thin, bloodless lips; cold eyes fixed upon him in a silent, ophidian brightness—was—the “third light,” as he had called him—the man whom he had met for a moment back there in the smoker of the Transcontinental.

_CHAPTER THREE_

BEHIND THE ARRAS

“Mister Annister,” greeted the man at the desk. “You didn’t know me, eh? Well—it’s a long time—three years—and my beard—” he passed a bony hand across his chin—“I sacrificed that long ago; it is scarcely the fashion. Now—” he waved a hand, indicating a chair at his left—“sit down, won’t you? We can—talk better so.”

Annister seated himself, his eyes upon the cold eyes just across. That the man who sat there had inspired those warnings he had little doubt; that he had sent that midnight assassin against him, he was convinced. And yet—he was at a loss to find the reason.

Rook was not aware, could not be aware, of a certain fact known only to himself, Annister, and a certain man just then twenty-five hundred miles distant in that dim office hard by the Capitol; it was beyond the bounds of possibility. No—it could scarcely be that, he told himself.

And of a sudden a cold rage shook him so that he trembled; his hands, flat upon the desk-top, balled suddenly into fists. This man—this suave, secret knave with the eyes of ice, and the implacable, grim mouth—sat there now, removed from him merely by the width of the narrow desk. And if it were true, that which he suspected, then this man, this jackal, this Prince of Plunder with the heart of a hyena and the conscience of a wolf—why, he had earned his quittance a hundred times over.

The flat black shape of the automatic hung in a sling under his left arm-pit—Annister had forgotten that. He knew merely that he was face to face with the man whom he had come twenty-five hundred long miles to meet; he saw him now as through a crimson mist. And for the moment the careful plan that he had made—that, too, was forgotten, lost in the almost overmastering impulse to drive his fist into that face so close to his, the cold eyes, the pallid, sneering mouth....

Something of this must have showed in his face, plainly visible to the man who faced him across the desk.

There was a semi-twilight in the room even by day. Now the lean head thrust forward like a striking snake; there came a sudden, brief explosion of movement, a darkening flash, as the hand, holding the heavy automatic, swung upward level with his visitor, point-blank.

At such a distance it would be impossible to miss.

There was a curtain just behind him; Annister had noticed it upon entering. Now at his back it rippled suddenly along its length as if at the passage of a heavy body just behind. The lawyer smiled thinly.

“Ah, my friend,” he said, “it is so easy to be indiscreet! And one must meet force with force. This—it is theatrical, if you like—but—it is just a little demonstration of my—preparedness. I thought—you see....”

There came a sardonic flicker in the nearset eyes; the voice purred now in the semi-darkness like a cat’s:

“I must protect myself.... There are—reasons.... You see, I thought, for a moment, that you—ah—meditated a resort to—violence. And violence is something that I deplore, my friend; and here I am surrounded by violent men, ‘sudden and quick in quarrel,’ as the poet has it; sometimes they are difficult to control.”

Annister had himself in hand. The veiled threat with which the lawyer had ended bothered him not at all. Now, casually as it seemed, but with the lightning riposte of a duellist, his hand reached out; there came a sudden wrench, a twist, a snarling oath from Rook; and Annister, pocketing the pistol, smiled grimly now in answer.

“Now—‘we can talk better so’!” he mocked. “The balance of power, ha? Now, let me tell you something: You left the big town—for your health; that was three years ago, wasn’t it? I didn’t recognize you, but it was a pretty close shave, at that!”

He laughed, but there was a ring of menace in it. His hard eyes held the pale ones of the lawyer with a chill malevolence.

“Rook,” he said, low, “you’re as crooked as a ram’s-horn; you’re a bent twig; I wouldn’t trust you this side of hell further than I could see you, and not even then. Now—” his voice cracked suddenly in the thick silence like the cracking of a whip—“you had the infernal gall to send me—here—_after_ you’d have accounted for me—_by the left hand_, ha?

“I left that window open, because, if you want to know, I was expecting something of the sort. And now—”

The hand holding the pistol became rigid as a rock.

“—I want the reason _why_—in a holy minute, Mister Hamilton Rook—or else—”

For a heart-beat the face of the lawyer seemed swollen to a poisonous whiteness; the veins in his neck and temples stood out in ridges. Then—the long, spatulate fingers spread wide with a curious, flicking motion, thumbs downward; the curtain bellied outward suddenly as if in answer.

Abruptly Annister felt for a heart-beat a something that was like a cold wind blowing upon the back of his neck, and it was a wind of death. Something slid past his shoulder with the speed of light; talons of steel, thumbs downward, pressing at the base of his brain. He heard a hoarse, whistling croak—a sound that was nothing human. Then—

There is but one answer to that strangler’s grip, and it is a secret known only to a few. Annister had learned it, no matter where, and in the learning he had paid....

Now, an infinitesimal split second before the beast paws had encircled his throat, his forefinger and thumb had flashed upward, hooked, as steel gaff is hooked, between those fingers and his throat.

There followed a straining heave; a cry, inhuman, beastlike, like the mewing of a cat. Annister, rising to his feet, leaned abruptly to the left—straightened, with one quick, explosive heave of his powerful shoulder-muscles—and the body of his antagonist catapulted over his head.

Flung clear of the desk, he landed, heavily, on one shoulder-point, twitched a moment, lay still. It was the “flying-mare,” and none but a master could have summoned it.

Annister turned the unconscious man over with his foot.

“_Jivero!_” he muttered, between set teeth.

He shivered slightly in the humid air of the warm room. For the man was an Ecuadorian savage—a jungle-beast; once, in Quito, Annister had seen two or three: flat-faced, rather handsome savages; how or where Rook had acquired the fellow only the lawyer could have said.

According to his savage code, he had been faithful—as a tiger is faithful to his trainer, his keeper. Annister, brave as he was, would have preferred a rattler, a fer-de-lance, for company. He turned now with an abrupt movement to Rook, who, slumped in his chair, sat staring at the huddled figure of the Indian where he had fallen.

“Now,” said Annister, “I’ve a notion, Mister Hamilton Rook, to shoot first, and ask questions afterward.... However, I confess I’m still a trifle curious as to your motive—more so, since this second pleasant little interlude with your man Friday here. Now—may I ask you—_why_?”

The lawyer’s lips were moving, fumbling together, without sound. Fingers trembling, like a man in a fit, at length he lifted dull eyes to his interrogator:

“This,” he enunciated thickly, gesturing toward the huddled figure on the carpet. “It was to save my—life—that is the truth, Annister—you must—believe. The reason—for the others.... I did not know it was you there in the smoker; I thought—that is—” he appeared to breathe of a sudden like a man who had been running—“we had a report—that you were quite another man—one who was—ah—would be antagonistic, in fact, to certain operations—and so—”

He spread his hands wide with a little, flicking gesture.

“—That is why—but now, of course, you will understand—?”

“Yes,” answered Annister, bluntly. “I understand. You thought I was—an operative, ha? Well—I’m not—that kind of an operative. But—” his manner became all at once sharp, incisive; the gaze that he bent upon Rook was the shrewd look of a man who sees his opportunity ready to his hand. Cunning was in that look, and an infinite guile; the lawyer did not miss it.

Here was something that he could deal with. He had known of Annister’s reputation as of old; it had been none of the best, certainly, and with that knowledge now there came a measure of reassurance. And if he was any judge of men, here was one whom he could use: the acquisitive gleaming in the eyes; the hard, incisive mouth, the predatory, forward-thrusting tilt of the head—if he, Rook, was any judge of men, here was a man whom he could use.

Old Travis Annister had disinherited him: the son who had been a waster in the far places of the earth—that was an added reason. And at the thought there came a pale gleaming in the lawyer’s close-set eyes, like the sun on water. Travis Annister ... and Travis Annister had disappeared ... well, of course, he had heard of it. His voice reached the younger man in a purring whisper:

“As I have hinted, Mr. Annister, I am interested in—certain operations; shall we call them—speculative? For some time now I have been in need of a sort of silent partner, or, rather, the Doctor—”

He caught himself with a _click_ of his strong, white, even teeth. Annister’s face continued impassive, save for the keen eyes, veiled now under lowered lids. Rook continued:

“Annister,” he said suddenly, as if he had abruptly come to a decision, “I’ll lay my cards on the table with you: I need a man, and he can not afford to be too—scrupulous, do you understand? The—the doctor tells me I have been overdoing it.” He gave a faint, wintry smile. “We are—out of the beaten track here—southwest of the law, as you might call it....”

He lowered his voice to a faint, hissing sibilance:

“I will expect you to ask no questions. You have been a cow-man; there are certain interests to the north and the north-east of us; I am naming no names, understand? There is a good deal of range left, as you know, and—now, listen to me....”

His voice went on. For perhaps five minutes Annister listened in a heavy silence. And all that time, although the lawyer had not once called a spade a spade, the thing that he had unfolded was clear enough:

It was the old story; with something of a novel twist. First, there were the outfits scattered north and north-east, as Rook had said. The running off of a few cows, for instance, re-branding, and the rest of it—it was an old story to Annister—but there was something more. Annister, as he listened, realized that the thing was big, worthy, indeed, of the keen, devising brain that had evolved it.

A good many of the ranches had, for some time past, been owned and operated by the packers themselves; three of these: the Bar T, the Cross Circle L, the Flying U, were northward from Dry Bone scarce a hundred miles. But there were still other outfits. And, as Annister listened, he was hearing again a name, or, rather, a symbol, the name and the symbol of masked and hooded violence, and it was “S. S. S.”

Rook, it appeared, was the moving spirit of it, in Dry Bone, at any rate, but as the tale unfolded Annister, putting two and two together, supplied for that cryptic symbol a name, nation-wide and respected: the name of a great Company, an Octopus indeed, which, with Hamilton Rook as its agent, planned nothing less than the ruthless despoiling of those independent cattle men who, out of a desert of sand and sage, had won a living for their stock and for themselves, the rear guard of the order, now, as it seemed, indeed, caught in the far-flung tentacles of a monster, unscrupulous and without soul.

Annister’s part in it was to be simple. He was to do nothing as yet until the lawyer should give the word. But a man was wanted: a gun-fighter; a man bred to violence who would not consider too closely the method or the means. For, as Rook had said, his eyes upon Annister in a sudden, biting scrutiny:

“If, as a first step, say, the owners of these outfits should—ah—disappear....”

There was to be no outright violence, it appeared; murder—that was an ugly word; but it was of course possible that there might be—resistance. But—there would be a fortune in it.

Annister’s part would be comparatively simple. He would merely carry out his orders. Rook, eying him now in a close-lipped silence, watched as a spider watches from his ambush. Annister would be needing money; if the lawyer knew his man, and he thought that he did, here was something that would be a lever, and a powerful one.

Annister lifted his head, then he brought his hand, palm downward, to the desk-top. It was a movement, slow, even, controlled.

“I’m with you,” he said.

“Good!” exclaimed the lawyer. “Now—I want you to go over to the club; there are a few men there I’d like you to meet. _Ha!_”

At his exclamation Annister, turning, followed his rigid, pointing finger.

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.

Annister had wasted no time. But, for a heart-beat, as he raced backward along the hall, his eye was caught and held by the quick glint of metal from the carpet at his feet. Stooping as he ran, he swept up the object, possibly an empty shell; then, on the threshold of his room, recoiled with a gasping oath.

For the girl had vanished!

Stunned, Annister stood silent, mechanically unclosing his stiff fingers upon the object which they held. He stared at it now, rigid with remembrance, and a growing fear.

Oddly twisted and distorted, its dull gold surface glinting dully under the light, the thing that he had found lay on his open palm.

_It was a dentist’s bridge._

_CHAPTER EIGHT_

ODDS—AND THE MAN

Annister had been absent from that room not longer than ten racing seconds. It was unthinkable that the girl had vanished of her own volition, even had it been physically possible.

Glancing around the room, he saw that the windows were closed and bolted; the flooring was solid, substantial; there could be no ingress save by the door through which he had just come.

There was another door; it led to the next room; but Annister, with a habit of inbred caution, had tried it, and found it locked. Now, in two swift strides, he had covered the space between, had tried that door, setting his weight against it as he turned the knob.

Under his weight it gave outward with a sudden slatting clatter. They, whoever they might be, had unlocked it; it had been through this adjoining room that they had taken the girl.

Annister, glancing swiftly around this room, saw that it was obviously unoccupied; the bed had been made up; there was no sort of clue that he could see. The invisible assassin had had a key; that was it, of course.

But as to the rest of it, Annister could only speculate. It was an impasse, and a mystery.

Going downward to the dining-room, as it was now past noon, he glanced toward the desk, but if he had had any thought of reporting the attack upon the girl, or her disappearance, he thought better of it; he would keep his own counsel; a decision helped by a sight of Lunn, the hotel proprietor, who, lounging at the desk, raised his sleepy-lidded, vulture gaze at Annister as the latter was turning toward the dining-room.

Annister, in that brief glance, thought to detect in those eyes, milky-pale, a veiled, sardonic flicker. If, behind this latest happening, there was the fine, Italian hand of Hamilton Rook, Lunn was in cahoots with the lawyer, of that there could be little doubt. For, as Annister was convinced, there had been a menace in those eyes half turned to his, an insolence, a bright, burning truculence, that, as he turned into the long dining-hall, brought the swift blood to his cheek in a dark tide.

But at his table another surprise awaited him. Mary Allerton was gone. The heavy-handed Swede who served him told him that she had left, suddenly, that morning; a message had come for her, it appeared, but the substitute could tell him nothing further. Annister let it go at that.

Rising from the table, he went outward to the long bar, a cool, pleasant oasis, indeed, in the fierce heat of the drowsy afternoon. He greeted the bartender, a tall man with the wide shoulders of a cowman, with a smile.

The man had been friendly; in fact, he had been the sole friend that Annister appeared to have made since his arrival in Dry Bone. Now the bartender leaned forward, speaking in a whisper behind his hand:

“Watch your step, Mr. Annister,” he said.

Annister gave an almost imperceptible nod. Then, his drink before him upon the stained and battered mahogany, he glanced sidewise along the rail, to where, at the far end, two men stood together, eying him under lowered brows.

To Annister it seemed that there had fallen a sudden quiet. Just prior to his entrance he had heard talk and laughter, the _clink_ of glasses, a thick, turgid oath. Now there appeared to rise and grow a tension, as of something electric in the air; Annister felt it in the white face of the knight of the apron, the sudden silence, the rigid figures of the two men at the end of the long bar.

Behind him, and a little to his left, three men were seated at a table: Bristow, sheriff of Dry Bone, a big man with a bleak, pale eye, and a mouth like a straight gash above a heavy chin barbered to the blood. With him were two others whom he did not know.

Lunn was nowhere in sight.

The taller of the two men standing at the bar turned, and Annister recognized him as Tucson Charlie Westervelt, a gunman with a dangerous record. Westervelt was wearing a high-crowned, white Stetson; Annister marked it at the distance, beneath it the fierce, hawklike face, turned now in his direction, the thin lips set stiffly in a sullen pout.

The old West had passed with the passing of the _remuda_, the trail herd, the mining camps; the wide, free range of the long-horned cattle was no more; but Dry Bone had not changed save that the loading-pens had gone; a cow would be a curiosity. But the lawless spirit of the ancient West remained. “Southwest of the Law,” indeed, Dry Bone was a law unto itself, and now about him Annister felt the menace; it appeared that he had walked into a trap.

The judge, the sheriff—what mockery of law there was—Annister knew that it would be against him, either way, attacking or attacked. He was certain of it as Westervelt, moving slowly along the bar, halted when perhaps three paces distant, elbow raised, right hand extended, clawlike, in a stiff, thrusting gesture above his guns.

It was the gesture of the killer, the preliminary for the lightning down-thrust of the stiff fingers; Annister knew that well enough. Now the gunman’s gaze, sleepy-lidded like a falcon’s, bored into his; his voice came with a snarling violence:

“_Mister_ Black Steve Annister,” he said, without preamble. “I understand you’re some wizard with a canister, ha? A bad hombre! Musta been a little bird done told me, an’ that bird was sure loco, I’ll tell a man! But _me_—” his tone hardened to a steely rasp—“I’m not thinkin’ you’re such-a-much!”

It was a trap; Annister knew that now, just as behind the gunman he could almost see the dark face of Rook, with its sneering grin; the lawyer had inspired it.

His automatic hung in a sling under his left arm-pit, but even if he could beat Westervelt to the draw, he knew well enough what the result would be: a shot in the back, say, from the men sitting just behind, or—arrest, and the mockery of a trial to follow it. Either way, he was done.