Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/90

80 sense of chilliness and the thought of hot coffee was a spur to my steps.

I was almost at the avenue when I became aware of a certain fact. Yet it was not a fact. It was more a surmise, the same as you see a lightning flash with your eyes shut. Some one was following me.

I did not look back until I had dodged a bus and a covey of motor-cars scurrying northward to home and dinner. Then I walked south a block, and turned east again. Then what had at first only been a question grew into a suspicion, and the suspicion merged into a certainty. I was being followed. And the cave-woman who still housed inside my twentieth-century skin sounded a second alarm to me in the shape of a sudden little tingle of nerve-ends.

I stopped and stared up at a house-number. The man who was shadowing me came closer, hesitated for a moment, passed by, and plainly slackened his pace.

I still found it hard to believe that I was his quarry. So, to try him out, I swung about and started in the opposite direction. The moment he saw my move, he did the same. I even crossed the street at the next corner and doubled on my tracks.