Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/288

 Had his outstretched fingers suddenly touched a red-hot plate of metal he could not have moved more quickly.

But it was nothing like a plate of metal, that something which he had touched. It was a human hand, like his own. His groping fingers had momentarily become involved with another set of fingers, outstretched like his own. Those distended antennæ had locked together loathsomely, as the feelers of submarine monsters might, had clutched and had suddenly withdrawn, each cluster telegraphing to the brain behind them the imminence of danger, the need for action.

That action, on Kestner's part, became one of uncouth acrobatics. It sent him leaping and side-stepping backwards, in a series of jerks as quick and uncoordinated as the leaps of a beheaded pullet. Then he stood for a second, silent, poised and motionless, bayoneted with a tingle of horripilated nerves.

He seemed to know what was coming. He saw the quick stab of flame at the same moment that the high-roofed building reverberated with the thunder of the revolver-shot. Lambert was using his gun. He was forcing the issue by suddenly raking the silence about him. And he was keeping on the move as he fired, charging from side to side, craftily changing his position after each flash.

Kestner crouched there, watching those flashes, all but deafened by the echoing tumult after so many hours of silence. He wanted Lambert, and he wanted him at any cost. That was the one vague over-tone to all consciousness. Yet his first definite thought