Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/204

176 the tobacco warehouse; then to the right, where, close at hand, each truck-load stopped momentarily on a scale platform in front of the low shed which bore the number Dickey indicated in a large white figure.

"Who's that?" asked Trant, as a small figure, hardly five feet tall, cadaverous, beetle-browed, with cold, malignant, red-lidded eyes passed directly under the arc light nearest them.

"Rowan, the dock superintendent!" Dickey whispered.

"I knew he was small," Trant returned with surprise, "but I thought surely he must have some fist to be the terror of these dock laborers."

"Wait!" Rentland, behind them, motioned.

A bloated, menacing figure had suddenly swung clear of the group of dock laborers—a roustabout, goaded to desperation, with a fist raised against his puny superior. But before the blow had fallen another fist, huge and black, struck the man over Rowan's shoulder with a hammer. He fell, and the dock superintendent passed on without a backward glance, the giant negro who had struck the blow following in his footsteps like a dog.

"The black," Rentland explained, "is Rowan's bodyguard. He needs him."

"I see," Trant replied. "And for Miss Rowan's sake I am glad it was that way," he added, enigmatically.

Dickey had quietly opened a door on the opposite side of the shed; the three slipped quickly through it and stepped unobserved around the corner of the coffee warehouse to a long, dark, and narrow space. On