Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/264

 "It's you this time!" she moaned, as she stared helplessly about her.

Kestner laughed, hysterically, foolishly. It seemed life again, that plunge into action after such aeons of silence and waiting.

"Killed him?" he cried as he stooped forward and slapped about the inert hip of the stunned man. "I ought to have killed him," he added as he drew Carlesi's revolver from its hidden pocket.

"Is he dead?" she quavered. Her hand was groping blindly about until it rested on one of the carbine-cases.

"He's no more dead than he was when Lambert said you'd shot him. And we know how dead that was!"

Kestner had already dropped to his knees and was busily engaged in unlacing the unconscious Italian's shoes. But his glance wandered to the white-faced woman, and still again there swept over him the ineffaceable conviction of her bodily beauty, the sense of that inapposite fineness of fibre which unfitted her for such scenes as this, just as it had unfitted her for the ways of the underworld into which she had been thrust.

"But what does it all mean?" she asked as she stared at Kestner's stooping figure.

"It means that Lambert tipped this man off to act just as he's acted. And it means, now, we both know who Lambert is and what he is."

She had dropped into a wooden chair on the far aide of the hand-press and was mopping her stained mouth with a foolishly small handkerchief. She stared at him a little vacantly as he quickly pulled on