A Powerful Novel of Sinister Madmen That Mounts To An Astounding ClimaxThe Jailer of SoulsComplete In This IssueByHAMILTON CRAIGIE
A Powerful Novel of Sinister Madmen That Mounts To An Astounding Climax
Complete In This Issue
ByHAMILTON CRAIGIE
All the way Westward in the smoker the man in the high-crowned, black Stetson had taken no part in the conversation. He had appeared to doze, slumping in the high-backed seat as the train rushed onward into the golden afternoon.
The three men at his back had been busy with an interminable round of poker: draw, jack-pot, and stud; deuces wild, and seven-card peak. They moved across the aisle now, as the long train slowed for the brief stop at Two-Horse Canyon, facing him obliquely and a little to his left.
Twice or thrice they had essayed to draw him into the talk, but the man in the black Stetson had been oblivious; he had continued taciturn—morose, almost, one might have said. But he had not been asleep; rather, he had listened with all his ears as their voices had reached him between hands:
“... Yes—Dry Bone—been there myself—they run things pretty much to suitthemselves.... Wide-open.... Sure.... You might call it a deadopen-and-shut proposition, I’ll tell a man!”
The laugh that followed had come to the man in the black Stetson with a curious, grating note:
“Sure-thing gamblers; con-men—it’s a regular crook’s paradise.... And there’s that fellow, Rook....”
The eyes of the man in the black Stetson narrowed abruptly at the corners; for a moment, as a curtain is drawn swiftly from right to left, something arose to peer out of those eyes, glowing, deep-down, like a still, festering flame. But it was gone upon the instant—
“... And there’s that fellow, Rook....” the man had said.
Of a sudden he had stopped short as if he had been muzzled; presently his voice had come again, dry, matter-of-fact:
“I’ll see that raise, Carpenter, and it’ll cost you just twenty iron men to call....”
Plainly, that name, “Rook,” had been taboo; the speaker had been silently reminded of it.
The man in the black Stetson—he had been known as Black Steve Annister in the back blocks at Wooloomooloof before he had made of that name a by-word in the honkatonks and the gambling-hells from San Francisco northward to the Wind River country, and beyond it—Black Steve Annister was sitting upright now, but he had retired behind a wide-spread copy of theDurango County Gazette. He was not reading it, however, although he was looking through it—at the three men just across the aisle, studying them through the pin-pricks he had made in it, himself unseen.
Annister had arrived in New York only the week previous from Sourabaya, Java, and he had not waited even overnight before he had begun the long journey, broken at Washington for half a day, which had taken him now half way southwestward across the State of Texas. Presently the long train would cross the Pecos, beyond it the serrated ramparts of the Guadalupes; Dry Bone was just between.
Annister, studying the men, frowned abruptly, yawning behind his hand. Two of the men he put down for ranchers—sheep men, probably; there was about them none of the glamor of that West which lingers even now in the person of a cattleman; and these men were negligible.
But the third man would have been noticeable anywhere. He was a bull’s bulk of a man, hard-featured, mouth a straight gash above a heavy chin barbered to the blood; the observer across the aisle would have said “cowman,” and registered a bull’s eye with it, point-blank.
The two who were with him, evidently with interests in common, were scarcely friendly with the cowman, if such he was; it was evident in their attitude, the constraint which had fallen upon them following that mention of “Rook.”
But the man in the black Stetson continued to study the big fellow through the holes in his newspaper: the hard face, tanned a rich saddle color; the nose, flattened to a smudge of flaring nostril; the cauliflower ear.
He had heard the name, “Ellison” once or twice; somewhere, deep down, it had set vibrating a chord of memory that brought with it, incongruously enough, an altogether different setting: a padded ring under twin, blazing arcs; the thud and shuffle of sliding feet; a man, huge, brutish, broad, fists like stone mauls, yet, for all his bulk, a very cat for quickness....
He put down his paper now—to find those hard eyes boring into his. Ellison, or whatever the man’s name was, had shifted in his seat; the glance that he turned now upon the stranger in the black Stetson was searching, probing. There was a truculence in it, a fierce, bright, avid staring, like an animal’s, savage in its very directness, like a challenge—which in effect it was.
Annister returned the look, eye for eye, with a bitter, brooding insolence in which there was apparent a certain mockery, his eyes in a veiled gleaming, like the sun on water. For a long moment their glances engaged, in a silent duel, like rapier points; then the giant with the cauliflower ear vented a sound between a grunt and a snort, turning to the window, his gaze outward across the flat levels of the adjacent prairie in a kind of sightless stare.
There had been no reason in it—no logic—that Annister could see, but for the moment he had owned to a sudden sense of crisis; it had seemed to him for a moment that in the giant’s eyes there had been almost a knowing, an understanding look. But the man could have no business with him—of that he was certain.
The fellow was just a bully, probably, a big, hulking lump of beef who resented, as it might chance, Annister’s undeniably cosmopolitan air; the sardonic flicker in the gray-green eyes; the cool, contemptuous appraisal. But, after all, it had been the giant who had begun it.
And yet, somehow, Annister was thinking that he had seen him before, and, oddly, illogically enough, he found himself liking the man—why, he could not have told.
Black Steve Annister, “with the heart of a cougar and the conscience of a wolf,” as a disgruntled enemy had at one time phrased it, could have sat into that game had he been so minded, with profit to himself, pecuniary and otherwise, but he had preferred to play the hand that had been dealt him. Later, at Dry Bone, that would be another matter.
Now, his lean, strong, hawklike face darkened abruptly with the thought behind his eyes, and then—for Annister had eyes in the back of his head—he was suddenly aware that the conductor was advancing along the aisle.
The three men opposite had ceased their conversation as if at an order. Two or three of the remaining passengers stared curiously, after the manner of their kind (they were small tradesmen, merchants, going on beyond the border to Tucson), as the conductor halted at Annister’s elbow.
“Excuse me, Mister—Mister—” he began.
“—Annister!” The answer was low, even, controlled, but beneath the silken tone there ran a hint of iron.
“Mister Annister,” repeated the conductor. “Will you—just a moment, please?”
Annister rose, following the official outward toward the vestibule. And as he went he could feel those eyes, avid, curious, boring into his back. He permitted himself the ghost of a cold grin as the conductor, turning in the entry, laid a respectful hand upon his sleeve.
“I’m—sorry, sir,” he said, low. “You getting off at Dry Bone, aren’t you?”
The words were less a question than a statement of fact. Annister nodded. The conductor, a tall, bronzed man who might have been an old-time line rider, shot a quick glance over his shoulder. Then he said, his tone even, matter-of-fact:
“I—wouldn’t—if I was you.”
Annister stared. Then, producing his cigar-case, lighting a long, black invincible, the twin to which the conductor had selected, he remarked casually:
“They’re good cigars.... In the trenches we smoked ‘Woodbines’—a cross between tar-heel and alfalfa; you have a lot of alfalfa out here, eh? And the ‘third light,’ as we used to call it, most always got his—three men lighting up from the same match, you know.”
His tone abruptly hardened; the glance that he turned upon the conductor now was like a lance of flame.
“Well—I’m not superstitious—but—will you tell mewhy?”
It is significant that the conductor was breaking a rigid Company rule by joining Annister in a surreptitious cigar. Now he turned guiltily as a voice sounded from the corridor at his back:
“Ex-cuse me—but could I trouble you for a light?”
The third man, as Annister could see, was tall and heavily built, with broad shoulders and a curiously small head. He had a sharp, acquisitive nose, and a mouth tight-lipped and thin. Annister, versed in reading men, was abruptly conscious of an instinctive and overmastering repugnance. For the man’s eyes were cold and cruel, sleepy-lidded, like a snake’s, roving between Annister and the conductor in a furtive scrutiny.
The match was still alight. Annister, his hand steady as a rock, extended it to the newcomer, who, with an inarticulate grunt, lighted his cigarette, turning, without further speech, backward along the corridor.
Annister waited a moment until he was certain that the man was out of earshot. Then:
“The ‘third light,’ eh?” he murmured, his tone abruptly hardened. “Well—and why shouldn’t I get off?” he asked, grimly.
The conductor for a moment seemed at a loss.
“It’s like this, Mr. Annister,” he said slowly. “I’m a new man on the S. P., but I’ve been hearing a lot—no gossip, you understand—but a conductor hears a good deal, by and large.... And this is a cow country, or it used to be—pretty wild, in spots. Dry Bone, now—they run things pretty much to suit themselves—”
He paused, in a visible embarrassment.
“There’s a party of four back there in the diner—I couldn’t help overhearing what they were saying, and—well—I’m just repeating what they said, and no offense—”
“That’s all right,” interrupted Annister, evenly. “Go on.”
“Why—they said,” continued the conductor, “that you were an Eastern gambler—a—confidence-man—that you were not wanted here in Dry Bone; that it wouldn’t be exactly healthy for you if you stopped off—that’s all. I thought you’d be wanting to know. And if you’ll take my advice, even if you haven’t asked it, I’d say: go on to Tombstone—you can figure it out from there.”
“Thanks,” answered Annister shortly. “I’m getting off—at Dry Bone. How soon are we due?”
“Fifteen minutes,” replied the conductor, glancing at his watch. “But if I was you, sir, I’d stay aboard; it’s a bad crowd there, as I happen to know, and they’ve got a branch of the S. S. S. there, only they work it to suit themselves: tar-and-feathers is just a picnic with that gang; they’re a stemwinding bunch of assassins, I’ll say! So far they’ve operated under cover, mostly, and down here in the Southwest—well—it ain’t a lot different, in some ways, than it was thirty years ago. You’ll see—because they’re—”
“—Southwest of the Law—is that it?” Annister laughed shortly. “Well—much obliged, old-timer,” he said. “I won’t forget it. But I’m getting off.”
The long train was slowing for the station stop. Annister, striding to his seat, got down his heavy bag. For a moment he stood, considering, his gaze, under lowered lids, upon the long coach and its passengers in a swift, squinting appraisal.
The three men were gone.
Somehow, they had found out who he was. Well—that made little difference, he reflected, grimly, except to force matters to a show-down, and the sooner the better.
For there was a man in Dry Bone; Annister had known him in the old time; and it was with this man, unless he was greatly mistaken, that his business had to do.
He would put it to the touch, then; he would sit into the game, and would come heeled, and they could rib up the deck on him, and welcome.
He was turning to the door when, of a sudden, there came to him a second warning: there was a swish of skirts, a sudden odor of violets. Annister had a glimpse of a blonde head beneath a close-fitting toque, as the girl passed him, disappearing in the doorway.
And there, on the flooring at his feet, was a square of white.
Annister, stooping, retrieved it, holding the card upward to the light:
“Stay on board. Dry Bone is not safe—for you. Be warned—in time.”
“Stay on board. Dry Bone is not safe—for you. Be warned—in time.”
There was no signature. Annister made a little clucking sound with his tongue, his face set like flint. He was alone in the car.
The train had stopped now as, bag in hand, he shouldered through the doorway. And then, abruptly, as if materialized out of the air, a face grinned into his, lips drawn backward from the teeth in a soundless snarl. It was the big man with the cauliflower ear.
“Hombre,” he said, without preamble, in a hoarse, carrying whisper, “take an old-timer’s advice: go back—an’set down—you savvy? This place—it ain’t exactly healthy for a young fellow like you, I’m tellin’ yu! For if you don’t—”
Annister’s cold stare was followed by his voice, low, incisive:
“You’re blocking the doorway,” he said, with a sort of freezing quiet.
The giant’s hard mouth twisted in a sneer; his great paw reaching upward with a clawing motion, blunt fingers upon Annister’s shoulder. Then—what followed happened with the speed of light.
“You can’t get off here, Mister—” the giant was continuing, when the words were blotted out. Annister’s right fist, behind it the full weight of his two hundred pounds of iron-hard muscle, curved in a short arc; there was a spanking thud. The big man, lifted from his feet, crashed into the front door-frame, slumping face downward in an aimless huddle of sprawling limbs.
“The hell you say!” grinned Black Steve Annister, leaping lightly to the platform, with never a backward glance.
Such was the manner of his coming.
The one hotel in Dry Bone was the Mansion House.
Annister, crossing the lobby, was aware of a veiled hostility in the stares directed at him from the group of loungers in the doorway; they gave ground grudgingly, as he came in, with a sort of covert truculence.
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 softwhirringof 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 faintwhirringceased; 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.”
“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 ANDCOUNSELLOR-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.
“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—afteryou’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 reasonwhy—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 aclickof 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.
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 somethingwasabout 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 lookedthroughrather 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.
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 softsnickof 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. Asound 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, beforewehave 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.
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 theDurango 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: