Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/281

 He did not know where, or why—but you never could tell, he told himself. He examined the massed humanity sharply, searching ever for the one face. Teck was large; he should not have been hard to pick out of such a crowd, and Val thought it quite likely that he was there. His fingers itched to be at the big man’s throat; he did not think of him as a cripple, a man without hands. He thought of him as something vicious, something dangerous, something to be shaken like a rat, crushed like a snake.

His eyes were red and bloodshot from lack of sufficient sleep, but they were keen and alert, and his large bulk gained for him ready access into the crowd of people, ready passage through them where a smaller man might have been at a disadvantage. He scrutinized all who came within his vision closely, sharply, but could not see Teck. Once he thought he saw his figure in front of him, looming over the people around. The man’s back was turned, so he could not be sure, and by the time he had forced his way to where he had seen the figure, it had disappeared.

But there were thousands of people there, and it could easily have been that Teck was in the crowd and he had not seen him, Val told himself. The entire population, it seemed to him, of Hampton and Phœbus and a half dozen other smaller towns in the locality, had turned out to the fire, and the crowd was being augmented every minute by arrivals from Newport News and still farther towns that had heard of the fire, and had seen its smoke in the placid Virginia skies.

Once he caught a glimpse of the Rat in the crowd—a few feet ahead of him. He dived for the gangster, plunging through the mass of people, scattering them right and left, but by the time he had arrived at the