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," be 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 threafter which proclaimed him blacksander, beachcomber, chevalier dindustrie, 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,
