Big Slim turned a sharp angle and disappeared from view; but Scanlon stood looking down the hall, and thinking. The corridor was low ceilinged and narrow; the lights were dim and the doors ran in an unbroken line on either side, each with a black number upon it.
"Nice," pronounced Bat, "every thing clean and orderly. The old Swiss is there with the soap and dust brush. I'll hand it to him for that. But——"
He paused and a wrinkle appeared between his eyes. Yes, the place was much better than he had expected—that is, as far as he could see. But sometimes there were things not to be seen; if you were aware of them at all, you felt them. And as Bat Scanlon stood looking down the dim hall with its two rows of expressionless doors, he was aware of a peculiar something from which his mind drew back. Rising from an invisible source, much as a miasma arises from a marsh, there came a subtle quality—an impression of evil; it seemed to creep by and around him; silently, insidiously, poisonously.
The big man stepped into his room and quietly closed the door. Then, grimly, he slipped a huge Colt's revolver from a holster hooked under the left armhole of his vest; with a snap he threw it open, and the ejector threw the black, oily, murderous looking cartridges upon the table with a rattle. Bat inspected and tested the working parts of the weapon; satisfied that all was right, he replaced the cartridges with practiced fingers.
"I only had that feeling once before in my life," said he, "and that was the night in Dacy's place at Holdover when the four 'breeds' were waiting for me in the dark room." He put the Colt back in its holster, and stood ruminating. "What was it the burglar fellow said about the skipper of this outfit? 'He's in on more than anybody would think.' Well, I'd better watch myself," and Bat smiled, though his eyes narrowed at the same time; "for when a bald-headed old simp with a flute is on the cross, he's sure to be the limit. The surprise kind of crook always is."
He walked the floor for a few moments, then he shot the bolt on the door and stretched himself across the low iron cot, with the light turned off. Bat Scanlon's mind was not a particularly imaginative one; but at the same time it possessed one of the attributes of the imaginative type: and that was the mental antennæ which felt things while they were still in the distance. As he lay there upon the hard bed in the closet-like room, he kept sensing something, but could get no clear idea of its shape.
"That's where Kirk pins on the medal," spoke Bat. "These things never come to him done up in fogs; they are always pretty clear pictures and have a definite meaning."
However, vague as the premonition was, Bat was confident of one thing; that was: whatever shape the thing took, it would have something to do with the affair at Stanwick.
"Maybe I believe it because I've got a mind full of the Stanwick thing," Scanlon told himself; "a fellow does fool himself that way sometimes. But this time ain't one of them. Before I get out of this phony hotel I'm going to get another little jolt."
Another jolt! Bat whistled between his teeth in dismay. Were there not jolts enough in the thing already? One by one, as he lay there, he marshaled his impressions in his mind, in the order in which they had occurred. When Nora first called him on the telephone there had unquestionably been a note of fear in her voice. In her dread of the police, as afterward shown, he fancied he recalled something more than the shrinking of a sensitive nature. And her eagerness to know what was going forward at Stanwick was—well, it was curious.