Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/156

 Binhart flickered a glance at him as he thrust his own right hand down into the hand-bag on his knees.

"I want to show you what you could get out of this," he said, leaning forward a little as he looked up at Blake.

When his exploring right hand was lifted again above the top of the bag Blake firmly expected to see papers of some sort between its fingers. He was astonished to see something metallic, something which glittered bright in the light from the wall lamp. The record of this discovery had scarcely been carried back to his brain, when the silence of the room seemed to explode into a white sting, a puff of noise that felt like a whip lash curling about Blake's leg. It seemed to roll off in a shifting and drifting cloud of smoke.

It so amazed Blake that he fell back against the wall, trying to comprehend it, to decipher the source and meaning of it all. He was still huddled back against the wall when a second surprise came to him. It was the discovery that Binhart had caught up a hat and a coat,