Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/216

 cided to save it to the end—to play his trump only if necessary. At present, whatever Teck was saying, he seemed harmless enough, in spite of his great weight and strength. A man with no hands cannot do much upon the offence, quoth Val to himself.

And yet, this man had an uncanny way of doing things that you might scarcely have thought possible. Val was practically certain that it was Teck himself who had struck him down in the vestibule of Jessica’s house; though he had no actual proof, he was equally certain that it was Teck who had done poor old Mat Masterson to death. It was the kind of job that he believed Teck himself would do.

How were these things done? Val gave it up for the moment, yet he promised himself that these were things he would find out, riddles he would unravel before he and this giant monstrosity were through with each other. This man was a power for evil in the life of Jessica; even if it had not been for the personal assaults committed on his person by Teck and his men, Val would have felt privileged to interfere. His love for Jessica gave him that right. He intended to settle with Teck for good—and he intended to do that in the immediate future.

That was his reason for not handing over the man to the police. There were too many loose ends. There were things he had to discover; unexplained incidents that he wished to explain to his own satisfaction before he took such a decisive action. He wished, for instance, to know why the books were so important. He wanted to find out their secret from Teck—the secret that made even murder seem justifiable to the handless one. What was it these books held? Was it the secret to the treasure? Perhaps—but Val had