Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/235

 Kestner threw down a quarter and picked up a rifle. As he took deliberate aim at one of the moving white ducks he noticed that a door in the side-wall to the left had opened and another man had stepped into the room. And Kestner's interest in that gallery immediately increased.

He fired and saw a duck go down. Then he turned and glanced sleepily at the newcomer. It would have taken a keen eye to discern any interest or any alteration in that look. The change was there, however, for at a glance the man in the rusty brown clothes had realised that the intruder was not Carlesi.

Yet this intruder was not without his points of interest. He appeared to be a rotund and square-shouldered and small-eyed man of about forty-five, with a skin so oddly weather-reddened that its colour seemed to have been deepened with brick-dust. His wide-brimmed Stetson hat was stained with sweat, and from one corner of the full-blooded thick lips drooped a green Havana cheroot.

Kestner, as he tried for another duck and sent it over, conceded there was both audacity and authority in that figure with the brick-dust skin and the alert little eyes. And Kestner, as he aimed for a bull's-eye and missed by a bare inch, wondered just what that picturesque newcomer's business could be, and just what connection he could have with Carlesi and a bundle of bond-paper.

But curiosity did not deter Kestner from his target practice. He remembered, as he tried again for the nearest bull's-eye and rang the bell, his long months of rifle and revolver work, his early pistol-drill as a police