For the face of the man whom he had seen had been like the face of a damned soul, unhuman, Satanic in its sheer, visible malevolence. So might Satan himself have looked, after the Fall.
Somehow, although the man had looked straight ahead, seeming to see merely with the glazed, indwelling stare of a sleepwalker, Annister had felt those eyes upon him; he was certain that he had been seen—and known. But now he had other things to think about.
He had intended going to the hotel. Now, on an impulse he bent his steps away from it, turning to the building in which were the offices of Rook.
But he did not enter by the main doorway. There was an alley further along; into this he melted with the stealth and caution of an Indian, feeling his way forward in the thick darkness to where, as he had marked it earlier in the day, there was a rusty fire-escape; its rungs ran upward in the darkness; they creaked now under his hand as he went slowly up.
Rook’s office was on the second floor. Annister, reaching the window, found it locked, but in a matter of seconds had it open, with the soft _snick_ of a steel blade between sash and bolt; the thing was done with a professional deftness, as if, say, the man who had opened that window had done that same thing many times before.
Now, crouched in the darkness by that dim square of window, the intruder stood silent, listening, holding his breath. A sound had come to him, faint and thin, as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls; it penetrated outward from the private office, with the snick and slither of rasping steel on steel.
And at the instant that Annister, with a grim smile in the darkness, recognized it for what it was, he knew, too, that someone had been beforehand with him; someone interested, also, in Hamilton Rook; for the sound that he heard now, loud in the singing silence, was the sound of a steel drill upon a safe.
Annister had seen that safe; it was scarcely more than a strong-box, a sheet steel, but thin; a “can-opener” could have ripped it from end to end, easily, in no time at all. Rook must feel secure indeed, he thought, to put his trust in so flimsy a repository unless, perhaps, he had other means. The Indian, for instance; the savage who, but a few hours ago, had missed with his long talons for Annister’s throat by inches.
But somehow Annister did not think that the Jivero would be on guard. There was no burglar-alarm protection; he had made certain of that; but the man who was now busy with that safe must have come up by the stairway; doubtless he was on familiar ground. Perhaps he might be some disgruntled confederate of the lawyer’s; well, he’d have a look-see, at any rate.
Advancing silently, on the balls of his feet, Annister traversed the length of the outer office, peering around the doorway to where, under the dim glow of a single drop-light, a figure, back toward Annister, knelt before the safe.
The drop-light, carefully shaded, would not be visible from without; under its cone-shaped radiance Annister could see merely that the man was wearing a cap, pulled low over his forehead; but something in the attitude of that kneeling figure: the turn of the head, the deft, darting movement of the hand, was strangely familiar.
Annister grinned in the darkness at the same moment that he was aware of a curious contraction of the heart. This lone-hand cracksman worked evidently without confederates, unless, possibly, he might have a lookout posted on the sidewalk below. He spoke, barely above a whisper:
“Hello!” he said. “Pretty careless, aren’t you? Now, do you think it’s—safe?”
The figure whirled; the hand, holding an automatic, came upward with the speed of light; then dropped limply at her side as the girl surveyed him with a stony look.
It was the waitress of the Mansion House.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve caught me, but it looks to me as if I beat you to it, Black Steve Annister.... Oh, I’ve heard of you, Mister Black Steve.... Well, now you’ve caught me, what are you going to do about it?”
The darkly beautiful face was scornful; the violet eyes, under the light, stormy with a something that Annister could not all define.
Annister bit his lip. To find her like this! And, all at once, realization came to him with a sudden tightening of the heart.
This girl, waitress or not, crook or not—he had to confess that, in all his wanderings up and down the earth, he had never met her like. A girl in a thousand, he had decided, back there in the dining-room of the Mansion House. What a partner she would make! Now, with a girl like that for a partner...!
On a sudden impulse he leaned forward, his eyes upon the safe door; it swung outward now; somehow she had opened it.
“Pretty smooth,” he commented. “The combination, after all, ha? You worked it. Now, before _we_ have a look, I want to tell you something. I—I’m looking for a partner, Miss—ah—Miss—”
“—Allerton,” she told him, in her eyes a sudden, leaping spark, the brief, baffling, enigmatic look that he had seen back there in the hotel dining-room. But it was gone again even as she spoke:
“All right—partner!” she said, low. “When do we start?”
“Right now!” answered Annister, his gaze upon the girl frankly admiring. He had expected the usual feminine evasions, a play for time, hesitation—anything but this ready acquiescence in his abrupt proposal.
He was not entirely sure of her; his admiration for her beauty, her poise, had nothing to do with the cold judgment whispering now that the whole affair might, after all, be a blind, a trap, devious and crooked as the devious and crooked turnings of Hamilton Rook.
But with Annister to decide was to act.
Bending, he swung wide the safe door, groping forward with exploring hand. His back was toward the girl; consequently he did not see the sudden, revealing gleam in the violet eyes, the quick hardening of the mouth. Swinging forward his pocket flash, the light danced, glimmering, upon a packet of papers, a sheaf of documents. Annister, running over them swiftly, gave a quick exclamation, his hand, in a lightning movement, palming something which he secreted in an inner pocket.
He turned sidewise to the girl.
“Lord!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “Nothing but papers! Partner, we’re out of luck!”
Evidently the girl had been oblivious. Now, however, her quick, flashing fingers sorted the contents of that safe as with a practiced hand, to leave them, as had Annister, inviolate, save for that oblong of paper reposing now in the pocket of his coat.
In the shadow of the entrance it was black dark as they parted. The girl did not live in the hotel, she told him; that had been a part of her plan. They would meet again, of course. But once in his room, and with the shades drawn and the door locked and bolted, Annister, taking the paper from his pocket, smoothed it out under the light.
He looked; then looked again, breath indrawn sharply through clenched teeth.
For that paper was a canceled check; it had been drawn to “Cash”; and the signature, in a hand that he knew upon the instant, was the signature of his father, Travis Annister.
_CHAPTER SIX_
THE LIVING GHOST
Annister had heard nothing from Rook other than that he had been again invited to a further session of the “Club” for that evening.
Alone in his room on the morning following his adventure in Rook’s office, his eye had been caught and held by a news item printed on an inside page of the _Durango County Gazette_: he had nearly passed it over; but now the lines leaped out at him as if they had been blazoned across the paper in a double-column spread:
Travis Annister Still Strangely Missing—Retired Capitalist Gone Since January—Foul Play Feared
And, separated from it by the width of a single column, he read:
Retired Banker Disappears—Newbold Humiston a Suicide?—Friends Fear for Safety
But it was at a third item, tucked away in an obscure corner that Annister stifled a quick word in his throat. Newbold Humiston had been a friend of his father’s; it was an odd coincidence, to say the least of it. And the story went on to say that three other men, all nationally known, had, so to speak, between suns, disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.
And that third news item, irrelevant as it might have been, told of an incident, odd and unusual enough; it had happened in Palos Verde, distant from Dry Bone a long twenty miles of hazardous mountain trail:
A man had come in, in rags and tatters; at first they had thought him a desert rat, a prospector, light-headed from starvation, for his incoherent babble had proclaimed him no less a personage than Rodman Axworthy, prominent banker of Mojave. The sheriff of Palos Verde, on the off chance, had wired Mojave, and the word had come back that Axworthy had been missing; they were sending a man.
With the arrival of this man, however, the mystery deepened, for it appeared that the derelict was indeed Axworthy, and yet not Axworthy at all, for whereas the true Axworthy had had a high, aquiline nose and a wide, generous mouth, the derelict was snub-nosed, swarthy, where the banker had been fair; he was, simply, another man.