United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With an inarticulate cry, Shaynon's fist shot out as if to strike his persecutor down; but in mid-air P. Sybarite's slim, strong fingers closed round and inflexibly stayed his enemy's wrist, with barely perceptible effort swinging it down and slewing the man off poise, so that perforce he staggered back against the stone of the window's deep embrasure. "Behave!" P. Sybarite counselled evenly.
His jaw dropped and a look of stupefying terror stamped itself upon Shaynon's face. It was the turn of P. Sybarite to laugh. "Well?" he demanded cuttingly. "Are you ready to come to the station-house and make a charge against me? I'll go peaceful as a lamb with the kind cop, if by so doing I can take you with me. But if I do, believe me, you'll never get out without a bondsman."
Escaping the balustrade, it caught a wandering air and drifted indolently down through the darkness of the street, like an errant petal plucked from some strange and sinister bloom of scarlet violence. "And if my face tells you nothing," he added hotly, "perhaps my name will help. It's Sybarite. You may have heard it!" As if from a blow, Shaynon's eyes winced.
And he had held that check in his hand, had memorised its number and repeated it to Marian, had heard it bawled by the carriage porter, had shouted it himself in reply: never for an instant thinking to connect it with the elder Shaynon's parting admonition to the gang leader!
Disappointment, however, lay in ambush for him at his nefarious goal: evidently Western Union had been punctilious about his duty; not even so much as the tip of a corner of yellow envelope peeped from under the door. Not a sound: silence of the grave; the house deathly still. He could hear his own heart drumming; but, from Shaynon's flat, nothing....
Rising, P. Sybarite smiled loftily. "Don't worry about that. If I can't bribe my way past a cordon of mercenary foreign waiters and talk down any other opposition I'm neither as flush as I think nor as Irish." "But what under the sun do you want there?" "To see what's doing find out for myself what devilment Brian Shaynon's hatching.
"Wel-l...." George floundered helplessly for a moment; and fell back again upon an imagination for the time being stimulated to an abnormal degree of inventiveness: "P'raps old Shaynon's double-crossed her somehow we don't know nothin' about. He ain't above it, if all they tell of him's true.
A baleful light informing his eyes, an ominous expression settling about his mouth, he gave the operator the address of Shaynon's town-house; and as the car slipped away from the hotel was sensible of keen regret that he had left at Peter Kenny's, what time he changed his clothing, the pistol given him by Mrs.
"One thing more" Peter Kenny came to the window to advise, as P. Sybarite scrambled out upon the gridiron platform "Shaynon's flat isn't arranged like mine. He's better off than I am, you know can afford more elbow-room. I'm not sure, but I think you'll break in if at all by the dining-room window.... So long. Good luck!"
Word Of The Day