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They disappeared, swallowed up in the sinister light of a beguiling doorway. He stared for a moment stupidly, then turned and fled, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He realized now that he had reached the heights of bitterest ecstasy and the depths of profound humiliation. Storch was alone, bending close to the lamp, reading, when Fred Starratt broke in upon him.
Storch clambered along a beaten trail and presently he leaped toward the broader confines of a street which opened its arms abruptly to receive them. Fred followed.
He tried to brush his weather-beaten clothes into decency with a stump of a whisk broom and to wipe the dust of the highroad from his almost spent shoes. But, somehow, these feeble attempts at gentility seemed to increase his forlorn appearance. He went over and straightened out the bedcoverings. At least he would leave the couch in some semblance of order. What did Storch expect him to do?
"Let me see if I've got everything straight. To-morrow at eleven o'clock I am to see Hilmer and tell him to postpone the launching. And to watch at the north gate for a man with a kodak... And then?" He reached for his hat. "If you do not hear from me you might come and look me up. I'll be at Storch cottage on Rincon Hill ... at the foot of Second Street.
And have the approaches to the shipyards combed for radicals... Let them watch particularly for a man with a kodak on the roof of the stores opposite the north gate." She picked up her hat quickly. "I'll go out now and warn the police ... indirectly. I have ways, you know." He put out a restraining hand. "No ... that's risky. My friend Storch has spies everywhere.
Presently he heard Storch's voice coming to his ears out of a friendly dusk: "It's nine-thirty...I guess we had better be moving." He did not stir at first...he merely sat staring at Storch, very much as a man waking suddenly and not yet alive to the precise details of his environment. "Moving...where?" he finally inquired. Storch crumpled the newspaper in his hand viciously.
He had never been wrapped in a more exquisite melancholy not even during the rain-raked days at Fairview. He knew that Storch was by his side, but, for the moment, this sinister personality seemed to lose its power and he felt Monet near him. It was as it had been during those days upon Storch's couch with death beckoning the nearer he approached the dead line, the more distinctly he saw Monet.
He felt at that moment the same triumph as when Storch had turned the key in its lock... Hilmer always did walk directly to his objective ... but there were times when subtleties had more power. He remembered the quiet thrust of his own voice measuring his adversary's expectancy: "A man in my situation needs nothing, Hilmer ... least of all money!"
The city seemed like a frozen bit of loveliness, waiting to be melted to fluid beauty by the fires of morning. He must leave Storch at once, forever! He turned for a backward glimpse of the house that had sheltered and almost entrapped him. A figure darted in front of the lone street lamp and retreated instantly. Shadowed! Storch was right!
Some morning we shall wake to find murder done." "How quickly you are learning," Storch answered, flinging his coat aside. "Are you fair?" Fred went on, passionately. "If you have your convictions, why not risk your own hide to prove them? Why make cats'-paws of the others?" Storch took out his pipe and lighted it deliberately. "Prospective martyrs are as plentiful as fish in a net," he answered.
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