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 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: