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_