Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/249

 away, and get me away without any waiting," retorted the impatient voice of Lambert. Kestner, behind his thin screen of matched pine, remembered that he was within twenty feet of the man who had murdered Morello.

"Then the thing for you to do," said the heavier voice of the man called Burke, "is to get down to Tompkinsville and slip aboard the Laminian. You'll be all right there for a couple o' days. Then I'll push things through and get off by Friday noon."

"But I've got that paper to gather up. And it amounts to over three millions. We'll need that, no matter which side of the Equator we're on!"

There was a change, Kestner realised, in the voice of Lambert. It seemed the voice of a nervous and harried man uncertain of the future. It had lost its oldtime placid sense of power, its full-throated resonance. It seemed now to hold something not unlike a touch of pleading, an undertone of plaintiveness.

"Well, why not do your gatherin' to-day?" demanded Burke.

"But I can't do it. That stuff is consigned to a man named Morello."

"Then what's the matter with an order from Morello?"

"I can't get one."

"Why?"

There was a moment of silence.

"Morello's where he can't be reached."

"Then why not work the wharf people?"

"I took the risk and went to the Brooklyn pier. They telephoned somewhere to verify my statement.