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 the _Durango 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:
Travis Annister Still Strangely Missing—Retired Capitalist Gone
Since January—Foul Play Feared
And, separated from it by the width of a single column, he read:
Retired Banker Disappears—Newbold Humiston a Suicide?—Friends
Fear for Safety
But it was at a third item, tucked away in an obscure corner that
Annister stifled a quick word in his throat. Newbold Humiston had been a
friend of his father’s; it was an odd coincidence, to say the least of
it. And the story went on to say that three other men, all nationally
known, had, so to speak, between suns, disappeared as completely as if
the earth had opened and swallowed them.
And that third news item, irrelevant as it might have been, told of an
incident, odd and unusual enough; it had happened in Palos Verde, distant
from Dry Bone a long twenty miles of hazardous mountain trail:
A man had come in, in rags and tatters; at first they had thought him
a desert rat, a prospector, light-headed from starvation, for his
incoherent babble had proclaimed him no less a personage than Rodman
Axworthy, prominent banker of Mojave. The sheriff of Palos Verde, on the
off chance, had wired Mojave, and the word had come back that Axworthy
had been missing; they were sending a man.
With the arrival of this man, however, the mystery deepened, for it
appeared that the derelict was indeed Axworthy, and yet not Axworthy at
all, for whereas the true Axworthy had had a high, aquiline nose and a
wide, generous mouth, the derelict was snub-nosed, swarthy, where the
banker had been fair; he was, simply, another man.
But there had been this about it: on the banker’s left forearm,
underneath, there had been a curious birth-mark; the derelict had
spoken of it, but upon examination the arm showed smooth and bare. The
investigator from Mojave had been obviously skeptical until, abruptly,
the ragged claimant had taken from his pocket a curious, removable
bridge; a dentist in Mojave who had made it, he said, could identify it.
It fitted perfectly.
This looked like proof, but the thing was obviously impossible. And then,
as “Axworthy” was being taken back to Mojave, he went suddenly stark,
staring crazy, repeating over and over, with reference to the bridge:
“It’s the one thing they didn’t get—the one thing....”
And there the matter rested, save that, upon arrival in Mojave, the
bridge was found to be missing. The emissary from Mojave seemed to
remember a dark-faced stranger who had been seated opposite them in the
train, but that was all; the man had jostled against his charge upon
alighting; the last proof, if indeed it might be called a proof, was gone.
Annister frowned thoughtfully, his mind upon that canceled check in
his pocket. And he was remembering one other thing, and that was the
square of paper which he had found among his father’s effects, for on
it had been a name, or, rather, two: the name of Hamilton Rook, and
of another, unknown to Annister. And as to that Axworthy case, it was
common knowledge that lunatics, for instance, entertained frequently the
delusion that they were people of importance. There was nothing new in
that.
Somehow, it seemed to him that he held in his hands the pieces of a
jig-saw puzzle that, even if put together, made but a patchwork of
motives and design, which yet, if he could but find the key, would be as
clear as crystal.
That paper found in his father’s office; the interview with Childers, at
Washington; the long trip westward; the warning message on the train;
the big man with the ice-blue eye and the square jaw of a fighter; the
attack in the hotel; the meeting with Rook, and the meeting with the
girl; the finding of that canceled check—and, last, the matter of those
queerly related news items just under his hand—these made a pattern to be
unraveled only by the warp and woof of Fate.
And the chance meeting with the bearded stranger at the corner of the
street: consider how he would, Annister’s mind kept turning backward to
that meeting and those eyes that were like the eyes of a damned soul,
malignant, cold, in their abysmal, cold cruelty of discarnate Evil.
Discarnate! That was it; that would express it; for the man, as he
recalled him, seemed somehow less than human; there had been about him
an aura, an emanation, that was like a tide rising from the depths, from
darkness unto darkness....
Annister was scarcely superstitious, but he was again conscious of that
icy chill; he shivered, as a man is said to shiver when, according to an
ancient superstition, someone is said to be walking over his grave.
He rose, walking to the window, to peer outward into the sunwashed
street. The coil was tightening; he felt it; and he was but one man
against many. And knowing what he knew, or suspecting what he suspected,
it seemed to him all at once that the sunlight had flattened to a
heatless flaming of pale radiance; there seemed a menace in it, even as
there seemed a menace in the very air, a waiting, a tension, like a fine
wire drawn and singing at a pitch too low for sound.
Abruptly he heard a sound; it was like the scratching of a rat in the
wainscot, faint and thin. His door was locked.
Now, looking at it, the knob turned, slowly, stealthily. He could see it
turning.
Then, faint but unmistakable, came a knock.
_CHAPTER SEVEN_