Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/176

 Louisa—Louisa of the Wilhelmstrasse. Capper's heart skipped, and an involuntary impulse crooked his fingers into claws.

The girl was just coming out of a café—the only café aspiring to Parisian smartness Gibraltar boasts. Her head was bare. Under an arm she had tucked a stack of cigar boxes. Had it not been that a steady light from an overhead arc cut her features out of the soft shadow with the fineness of a diamond-pointed tool. Capper would have sworn his eyes were playing him tricks. But Louisa's features were unmistakable, whether in the Lucullian surroundings of a Berlin summer garden or here on a street in Gibraltar. Capper had instinctively crushed himself against the nearest wall on seeing the girl; the crowd had come between himself and her, and she had not seen him. All the weasel instinct of the man came instantly to the fore that second of recognition, and the glint in his eyes and baring of his teeth were flashed from brute instinct—the instinct of the night-prowling meat hunter. All the vicious hate which the soul of Billy Capper could distil flooded to his eyes and