Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/174



was less than an hour later when Kestner turned casually in at the Indiana sandstone front of a cheaply ornate house not far from Fifth Avenue, glanced up at its heavily curtained windows, and slipped a pass-key into the lock. Then he swung open the vestibule door, a weighty combination of plate-glass faced by a grill-work of wrought iron and backed by a panel curtain of brocaded red silk. He did this calmly and quietly, yet he breathed a little easier when once he had found the entire front of the house was in darkness.

Once inside, he came to a stop and took out his pocket flash-light. Then he stood for a minute or two, listening intently, with that abnormal nervous perceptivity which is common to the hunted and frequently acquired by the hunter. Once assured by those over-sensitised aural nerves that he was momentarily safe from interruptions, he proceeded to explore his immediate surroundings. He did this cautiously, probing with his narrow light-shaft into the gloom as delicately as a cook's broom-straw probes a rising cake.

Before him, he saw a wide hallway. The back of this hallway was bisected by a proportionately broad stairway, mounting some eighteen or twenty wide steps to a landing. From this landing it branched