Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/121

 a huge white bandage, startlingly suggestive of Zuleika's pontifical turban. A diminutive mountain-ridge of court-plaster adhered to his lower lip, and along the point of his right jaw-bone ran still another spur of plaster, to say nothing of divers abrasions about the collarless and bull-like neck. In several places, too, his clothing was plainly torn.

"So they did things to yuh, too!" she announced, as he stood returning her stare of inspection.

Sadie's appreciation of character was quick and instinctive. She knew that Dorgan was no coward, yet she also knew that in some undefined way she was cleverer than this man with the belligerent square jaw and the wiry black hair. She recalled what Wilsnach had already told her about Dorgan being at one time a prize-fighter. She herself, in the days which she kept behind the locked door of her memory, had had occasion to study a prize-ring professional at close range, and her contempt for that gentry was open and unqualified. It left her less afraid of Dorgan. Life's final victories, Sadie had long since learned, were not won by fists.

So as she stared with quiet appraisal at the thick-muscled arms, the significant "mushroom" ear showing below the tilted head-bandage, and the short flat