Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/85

 forehead and to the roots of his hair was an ugly scar, slightly red, looking a little like a jagged streak of lightning which impresses itself on the vision in the fraction of a second before it disappears. He was dressed well and quietly, in the best of taste, and his voice, if unpleasant, was soft and well bred. The pupils of his eyes were little more than pinpoints, and the small lines around the corners of his mouth indicated a hard, determined, unscrupulous disposition, a will that would stop at nothing, that would consider no means too terrible for a desired end. All this Val noticed in an instant, before replying as he halted, one foot on the step of his car. A dangerous man, he remarked to himself. Yet how could a man with no hands be dangerous physically? he argued with himself. Val did not know, but he felt that it was possible. He was not squeamish, yet there was a physical repulsion produced in him vaguely by this man—the same sort of electric repulsion that cats produced in Val—a feeling of potential treachery.

Val decided that his age was somewhere between forty and forty-five or -six, yet he had the athletic bearing of a younger man, the upright shoulders and languid strength of an athlete in condition—or a jaguar, lazy with sleep, in the daytime. That was it—the cat family. Val definitely placed him now; the suggestion of the cat was in him, with all the cruelly latent strength and all the treachery of the cat.

“I beg your pardon?” he said coldly, a note of inquiry in his well modulated voice. “I haven’t the honor⸺”

“I know you haven’t, my young friend,” broke in the older man, a little patronizingly, it seemed to Val. “You have seen me before, however, and it⸺”