Page:Weird Tales v01n04 (1923-06).djvu/43

42 bored into his; his voice came with a snarling violence:

"Mister Black Steve Annister," he said, without preamble. "I understand you're some wizard with a canister, ha? A bad hombre! Musta been a little bird done told me, an' that bird was sure loco, I'll tell a man! But me—" his tone hardened to a steely rasp—"I'm not thinkin' you're such-a-much!"

It was a trap; Annister knew that now, just as behind the gunman he could almost see the dark face of Rook, with its sneering grin; the lawyer had inspired it.

His automatic hung in a sling under his left arm-pit, but even if he could beat Westervelt to the draw, he knew well enough what the result would be: a shot in the back, say, from the men sitting just behind, or arrest, and the mockery of a trial to follow it. Either way, he was done.

His own eyes held the gunman's now, glancing neither to the right nor to the left. He was conscious of a movement from the three men at the table; Westervelt's companion, a short, bowlegged man, with the pale eyes of an Albino, had stepped backward from the bar; Annister felt rather than saw his hand move even as his own hand came up and outward with lightning speed; flame streaked from his pistol with the motion.

Once in a generation, perhaps, a man arises from the ruck who, by an uncanny dexterity of hand and eye, confounds and dazzles the common run of men. As a conjurer throws his glass balls in air, swifter than eye can follow, so Annister, crouching sidewise from the bar, threw his bullets at Westervelt.

The gunman, bending forward at the hips, crashed to the sawdust in a slumping fall, as the Albino, firing from the hip, whirled sidewise as. Annister's second bullet drilled him through the middle. For the tenth of a second, like the sudden stoppage of a cinematograph, the tableau endured; then Annister, whirling, had covered Bristow where he sat; the two men with him, white-faced, hands pressed flat upon the table-top, stared, silent, as Annister spoke:

"You saw, Bristow," he said, low and even, his eyes upon the cold eyes of the sheriff in a bright, steady, inquiring stare. "Now—what about it?"

For a moment a little silence held; then Bristow, moistening his stiff lips, nodded, his gaze upon Annister in a sudden, dazed, uncomprehending look,

"All right, Mr. Annister," he said heavily. "They came lookin' f'r it, I reckon Well, you were that quick!"

Annister smiled grimly, pocketing his pistol. Westervelt lay where he had fallen, a dead man even as he had gone for his gun, lips still twisted in a sullen pout. The bowlegged man, stiff fingers clutching his heavy pistol, lay, face downward, in the sawdust. The bartender, with an admiring glance at Annister, leaned forward as Bristow and the two men with him went slowly out.

"They may try to get me for it, Mr. Annister," he said, "but I'm no man's man; well, not Rook's, and you can lay to that! Bristow and his friends kept out of it, you noticed? Bristow'll do nothing, now; not yet a while, at any rate, but—mebbe they sort of savvied me a-watchin' t' see they didn't run no whizzer on you!"

He lifted the heavy Colt, where it had lain hidden by the bar-rail, thrusting it in its scabbard with a grin.

"Well, sir, I aimed t' see that they was sittin' close, an' quiet, Mr. Annister," he said.

"Thanks, old timer," said Annister. "I'll not forget."

But as he went outward into the waning afternoon he was thinking of that rendezvous of the night. For Rook would be there, and it had been Rook, he was certain, who had engineered that ambush in the Mansion House bar.

HE TIME was nearly ripe. The clue of those newspaper items; the canceled check; the somewhat repellant evidence of the battered piece of goldwork picked up in the corridor of the Mansion House—Annister had been able to put two and two together, to find a sum as strange, as odd, say, as five, or seven, or even one.

But that name that had trembled on the lips of Rook's secretary remained a secret; with it, Annister was convinced, he would be able to pull those threads together with a single jerk, to find them—one.

He had bad news from Mojave: the dentist had identified the insane man as his patient by means of his chart, but, with that face, the man could not be Banker Axworthy—it simply could not be. And yet he was!

It was something of a riddle, and more, even, than that, for the thing savored of the supernatural, of necromancy, of a black art that might, say, have had for its practitioner a certain personage with the eyes of a damned soul and a black, forking beard, curled, like Mephisto's; Annister thought that it might.

Farther, the conductor of that train had been able to describe, somewhat in detail, the man who had jostled the derelict and his companion; the man had been a stranger to the conductor; he had been tall and thin, with a small, sandy moustache, and a high-arched, broken nose, and he had been wearing the conventional Stetson. The fellow might have been disguised, of course, but if Annister could find the black-bearded man, discover his identity, he was reasonably certain that he would not draw blank.

It was no certainty, of course, but it was worth the risk, he told himself. It would be a desperate hazard that he was about to face, he knew. Thinking of his father, together with the remembrance of that unholy and unspeakable horror that he had witnessed, born of the stinking shadows of that dark street in a city foul and old, its people furtive worshipers of strange gods, Annister felt again that crawling chill which had assailed him with the passing of the tall man with the eyes of death.

With Annister, to decide was to act. Dispatching a brief telegram in code to a certain office in a certain building in Washington, he went now to keep his rendezvous with Rook and the rest. It was yet early, scarce eight in the evening, and the street was full of life and movement, before him, and behind.

And before him and behind, as he went onward, he was conscious that those who walked there walked with him, stride for stride; they kept their distance, moving without speech, as he turned the corner of the dusty street.

If he had had any doubt about it, the doubt became certainty as, wheeling sharply to the left, they kept him company now, still with that grim, daunting silence: a bodyguard, indeed, but a bodyguard that held him prisoner as certainly as if the manacles were on his wrists.

It was not yet dark, but with a rising wind there had come a sky overcast and lowering; low down, upon the horizon's rim to the eastward, the violet blaze of the lightning came and went, with, after a little, the heavy salvos of the thunder, like the marching of an armed host.

But Annister, his gaze set straight ahead, turned inward at the entrance of the saddler's shop, mounting the stairs, as, behind him he heard the heavy door slam shut.

Perhaps it had been the wind, but as Annister went upward he heard, just beyond that door, the murmur of voices; they reached him in a sing-song mutter against the rising of the wind, in a quick, growling chorus.

There had been something in that snarling speech to daunt a man less brave than the man on that narrow stair, but Annister went upward, lightly now,