Page:Edgar Wallace - The Green Rust.djvu/140

136 square pasteboard before she returned the box and portfolio to the drawer and locked it.

There was a tap at the door and hastily she replaced the key in her bag.

"Come in," she said.

She recognized the man who stood in the doorway as he who had carried her back to the room.

There was a strangeness in his bearing which made her uneasy, a certain subdued hilarity which suggested drunkenness.

"Don't make a noise," he whispered with a stifled chuckle, "if Gregory hears he'll raise fire."

She saw that the key was in the lock on the outside of the door and this she watched. But he made no attempt to withdraw it and closed the door behind him softly.

"My name is Bridgers," he whispered, "van Heerden has told you about me—Horace Bridgers, do you?" He took a little tortoiseshell box from the pocket of his frayed waistcoat and opened it with a little kick of his middle finger. It was half-full of white powder that glittered in a stray ray of sunlight. "Try a sniff," he begged eagerly, "and all your troubles will go—phutt!"

"Thank you, no"—she shook her head, looking at him with a perplexed smile—"I don't know what it is."

"It's the white terror," he chuckled again, "better than the green—not so horribly musty as the green, eh?"

"I'm not in the mood for terrors of any kind," she said, with a half-smile. She wondered why he had come, and had a momentary hope that he was ignorant of van Heerden's character.

"All right"—he stuffed the box back into his waistcoat pocket—"you're the loser, you'll never find heaven on earth!"

She waited.

All the time he was speaking, it seemed to her that he was on the qui vive for some interruption from below. He would stop in his speech to turn a listening ear to the door. Moreover, she was relieved to see he made no attempt to advance any farther into the room. That he was under the influence of some drug she guessed. His eyes glittered