Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/32

 "Keudell!" was the chief's answer.

Kestner's hand dropped to the desk-top. "Keudell?" he echoed, a trifle vacuously, as he took up the picture and searched through its serried faces with a narrowing eye.

"Then you've heard the name?" inquired the chief.

"Yes, I've heard the name," was Kestner's slowly enunciated answer. "And even Wilsnach here will recognize the face, I imagine."

"You mean you know the man?"

"Do we know him, Wilsnach?" Kestner asked, turning to his colleague, bent low over the photograph.

"That's Keudell," cried out the younger man. "I'd swear it."

"And what do you know about him?" asked Blynn, turning back to Kestner.

"For one thing, that I hate him the same as a woman hates a snake."

"Why?"

Kestner's answer was neither so prompt nor so direct as it might have been. "Because embodied in him is everything about this life that made it, and still makes it, odious to me."