Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/81

80 "No shooting, you fool! Th' Big Gun says—"

The rest was lost as the pistol clattered to the cobbles. The center of a whirling tangle of fist and foot, to Quarrier it seemed that he fought in a nightmare that would have no end. He had gone to one knee under the impact of a swinging blow, when, from the far distance, there sounded the rolling rattle of a night-stick, with the clangor of the patrol.

Something gripped his ankle—something at once soft and hard. He lunged, full length, as a football player at the last desperate urge of his spent strength. Then he was on his feet, running, sidestepping, circling with the skill and desperate effort of a plunging half-back, stiff-arming the opposition to the right and left.

Just ahead, the black maw of an alley, a deeper blot of blackness, loomed. In its heart, like a witch-fire, there swam upward a nebulous, faint glow as from the pit; out of the tail of his eye he saw it: The dim loom of a house, and an open door.

He reached the turn—and a figure uprose before him, even in that darkness brutish, broad, thewed like a grizzly. The great arm rose, once; it fell, like the hammer of Thor.

Quarrier lurched, stiffened, buckling inward at the knees in a loose-jointed, slumping fall.

UARRIER came to himself, all his faculties at full tide.

It was smothering dark—a darkness not merely of the night but of a prison-house, silent, musty with the stale odor of decay and death. Near at hand, after a moment, he heard a slow, ceaseless dripping, like the beating of a heart, or the slow drip-drip of a life that was running out, drop by single drop.

The fancy seemed logical enough; there seemed nothing of the fantastic in it; Quarrier waited, there in the smothering dark, for the quick knife-thrust that would mean the end—or the deadening impact of the slung-shot.

But, unimaginative as he was, like a man who has but lately undergone the surgeon's scalpel he feared to move, to feel, even while he assured himself that he was unhurt save for the throbbing in his temples, and the very bruises that he felt upon him, but would not touch.

But there was something else. After a little his hesitant, exploring fingers found it. The length of line bent in a sort of running bowline about his shoulders and arms. And behind him, from a staple in the wall, it hung, sliding like a snake in the thick darkness.

He moved his head, slowly, carefully, like a man testing himself for an invisible hurt. And then—

"Ha!' he breathed, deep in his throat, the shadow of a cry. For moving an inch further to the right, it would have been a noose, tightening as he moved, strangling him there, choking him out of sound and sense.

Brave as he was, Quarrier shivered, his shoulder twitching with the thought. And it was not cold. Moving with an infinite caution, he ran his exploring fingers along the hempen strands.

Whoever had devised that noose had been a sailor. And only a sailor could undo it.

And there in the dark, trussed as he was, at the mercy of what other peril he knew not. Quarrier permitted himself the ghost of a grin. His hand went up, slowly, carefully, the fingers busy with the rope; there came a tug, and, coiling at his feet like a snake, the noose slid slithering along the stones.

Quarrier was not a praying man, in the ordinary sense, but now he sent heavenward a silent aspiration of gratitude for the impulse which, years previous, had prompted his signing on as a foremast hand in the China seas. And the long hours in the doldrums, below the line, had, as it proved, been anything but wasted.

Now easing his cramped muscles in a preliminary stretching, he rose gingerly to his feet, moving with the stealth and caution of an Indian. He