. . . The wind was against the smoke that day; and his spirits rose, as he walked in the brisk air with the rich sky above him. After all, this venture upon his native purlieus had been fax from fruitless: he could not have expected to do much better. He had made his coup; he knew no other who could have done it. It was a handsome bit of work, in fact, and possible only to a talented native thoroughly sophisticated in certain foreign subtleties. He knew himself for a rare combination.
He had a glimmer of Richard Lindley beginning at the beginning again to build a modest fortune: it was the sort of thing the Richard Lindleys were made for. Corliss was not troubled. Richard had disliked him as a boy; did not like him now; but Corliss had not taken his money out of malice for that. The adventurer was not revengeful; he was merely impervious.
At the hotel, he learned that Moliterno’s cable had not yet arrived; but he went to an agency of one of the steamship lines and reserved his passage, and to a railway ticket office and secured a compartment for himself on an evening train. Then he returned to his room in the hotel.
The mirror over the mantelpiece, in the front room of his suite, showed him a fine figure of a man: hale, deep-chested, handsome, straight and cheerful.
He nodded to it.
“Well, old top,” he said, reviewing and summing up his whole campaign, “not so bad. Not so bad, all in all; not so bad, old top. Well played indeed!”
At a sound of footsteps approaching his door, he turned in casual expectancy, thinking it might be a boy to notify him that Moliterno’s cable had arrived. But there was no knock, and the door was flung wide open.
It was Vilas, and he had his gun with him this time. He had two.
There was a shallow clothes-closet in the wall near the fireplace, and Corliss ran in there; but Vilas began to shoot through the door.
Mutilated, already a dead man, and knowing it, Corliss came out, and tried to run into the bedroom. It was no use.