Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/279

 floor-planking and would be in touch with Lambert.

Kestner thought quickly. He was not afraid of those newcomers. He could, in a way, handle them one by one as they came up through the floor. But that could not be done silently. That would betray his position. It would give an advantage to his enemy. And Kestner's one fear now was that Lambert might get away, that something might intervene between him and the fugitive and his capture. And it was too late to waste energy on interlopers, and too late to be sidetracked from his one end in life.

Kestner's first move was as odd as it was prompt. He drew out his revolver, feeling with his left hand along the plank-face for that ever-turning point of steel. When he had found it he caught his fire-arm by the barrel and the grip, holding it horizontally and pressing heavily down on the point where the auger was emerging from the pierced wood. He held the hardened metal of the stock firmly against the cutting edge of that revolving auger, knowing that a few turns would blunt the edge beyond repair. But he made sure of his job; he wanted that bit so that it could never again eat its way through four inches of oak.

Then he sat back, trying to place his position in the wharf-shed. He guardedly felt the seams of the floor, reviewed each movement he had made during his last advance, and concluded he had progressed some twenty or thirty feet towards the water-front end of the pier. At the other end, he knew, stood the small office-room with the telephone. And Kestner felt that