Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/270

, a deepening inky tide which threatened to solidify and embalm him, struggling for breath, in its Nubian depths. It had merged into something tangible and threatening, something active and assailing, seeming to cannonade the harried sentries of his nervous system with its thunderous volleys of immaterialities.

The silence too was more than oppressive. It had become enervating, exhausting. It lay about him no longer a silence of rhythms, of periodic climaxes and relapses. It was now a dull monotone, a Dead Sea of uninterrupted hush, a cessation of movement and life so complete that it seemed universal, something incredibly diffused and prolonged, a culmination of stillness that assaulted the nerves even as the continued top-most note of a steam calliope might.

Yet somewhere under the arched iron roof of that huge wharf-shed, cathedral-like in its trick of echoing and re-echoing with the slightest movement, waited the enemy he had followed so far and hunted so long. Somewhere within the walls of that water-front warehouse, perhaps not ten spaces from him, waited the leader and the last active member of the Lambert gang.

Just where that enemy waited Kestner could not tell. And in that absence of knowledge lay the core of the Secret Agent's mental unrest, his strain of suspense. They were there, together, in that midnight building. That was all he could be sure of. They were pitted in that abysmal blackness, as men pit game-cocks to fight out their fight to a finish.

Fate had indeed pitted them there, but Fate had