Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/275

 noiseless tool he was to cut out a square of the flooring big enough to admit a man's body. Through that hole they were to carry off Lambert and his illicit paper, leaving him aboard the Laminian before daylight crept over the lower Bay.

But Romano and his three federal confederates had been tipped off as to Whitey's intentions. They were to shadow that gang of wharf-rats and at the right moment intercept them and hold them, awaiting Kestner's. instructions. And Romano could be depended on.

Romano had to be depended on, for just before the ponderous doors of the Saltus wharf-shed had swung shut for the night a "gay-cat" acting for Lambert had appeared with the forged order from the Saltus offices in Bowling Green. There had been a dispute between this gay-cat and the thick-headed watchman, ending in an angry visit to the telephone in the little pier-office. The watchman had triumphed and the gay-cat had promptly taken his departure. Yet the manœuvre had proved successful, for in the meantime Lambert himself had slipped quietly into the wharf-shed and secreted himself in its shadowy recesses.

Three minutes later a trucking team had thundered in over the worn planking. From the truck itself a piano-crate—duly labelled and consigned for foreign parts—had been promptly dumped beside a pile of lemon-crates from Sicily. There had been some words between the watchman and the truck-driver, the former announcing his intention of not waiting all night before locking up. So the team