Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/153

 cleared. That was simple; why, the bird without no hands, to be sure. How dumb he had been not to think of that!

Well, he knew where lived, at all events. A visit down there might do no harm, though one had better be careful how he prowled around in that neighborhood. Though, come to think of it, that was rather a glorious fight they had had there earlier in the evening. Eddie’s eyes brightened. There was much in this affair he could not understand, but a fight was a fight in any language, and there were few people who enjoyed one better than he. Now, if a man was looking for a fight, where was a better place to go than to the house of Ignace Teck?

Closing the door behind him, Eddie made his way softly downstairs and entered his car. As silently as his engine would permit, he swung out into the center of the roadway and hit the dust for the corner. At the corner he swung the nose of his car downtown, in the direction of the residence of Ignace Teck.

Dawn was beginning to break over the sleeping city as Eddie Hughes sped downtown in his employer’s roadster. In black, bold relief, like the background of an etching, the houses to the east stood out against the slowly rising light. Suddenly the street lamps went out, leaving the city in a tenebrous, gray light that peopled the disappearing shadows with velvet darkness.

The city began to awake. There was the clank of the milkman’s bottles, and the clang of the street cleaner’s cart. To the east the roar of the elevated railway punctuated hoarsely the sleep of those within range. Newsdealers appeared on the street comers with the morning edition of some papers and the after-