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.