Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/237

 he feared treachery. Then, with equal caution, he peered through the narrow doorway. He stood there for several moments, without moving.

Then he slipped his revolver back into his pocket and stepped into the hut. For there, in one corner of it, lay Binhart. He lay on a bed made of bull-hide stretched across a rough-timbered frame. Yet what Blake looked down on seemed more a shriveled mummy of Binhart than the man himself. A vague trouble took possession of the detective as he blinked calmly down at the glazed and sunken eyes, the gaunt neck, the childishly helpless body. He stood there, waiting until the man on the sagging bull-skin saw him.

"Hello, Jim!" said the sick man, in little more than a whisper.

"Hello, Connie!" was the other's answer. He picked up a palmetto frond and fought away the flies. The uncleanness of the place turned his stomach.

"What 's up, Connie?" he asked, sitting calmly down beside the narrow bed.