He put his thumb upon the button and held it there....
From the bottom of the twelve-story well a faint, shrill tintinnabulation echoed up to him. But that was all. The car itself never stirred.
Infuriated, he left off that profitless employment and threw himself down the stairs, descending in great bounds from landing to landing, more like a tennis ball than a fairly intelligent specimen of mature humanity in control of his own actions.
Expecting to be met by the ascending car before halfway to the bottom, he came to the final flight not only breathless but in a towering rage—contemplating nothing less than a murderous assault as soon as he might be able to lay hands upon the hallboys—hoping to find them together that he might batter their heads one against the other.
But he gained the ground-floor lobby to find it as empty as his own astonishment—its doors wide to the cold air of dawn, its lights dimmed to the likeness of smouldering embers by the stark refulgence of day; but nowhere a sign of a hallboy or anything else in human guise.
As he paused to make sure of the reality of this phenomenon, and incidentally to regain his breath, there sounded from a distance down the street a noise the like of which he had never before heard: a noise resembling more than anything else the almost simultaneous detonations of something like half a dozen firecrackers of sub-cannon calibre.
Without understanding this or even being aware that he had willed his limbs to action, P. Sybarite found himself in the street.
At the curb his hired car waited, its motor purring sweetly but its chauffeur missing.
Subjectively he was aware that the sun was up and high enough to throw a sanguinary glare upon the upper stories of the row of garages across the street—those same from whose number he had chartered his touring car. And momentarily he surmised that perhaps the chauffeur had strolled over to the garage on some idle errand.
But no sooner had this thought enhanced his irritation than he had its refutation in the discovery of the chauffeur affectionately embracing a lamp-post three or four doors away, toward Sixth Avenue; and so singular seemed this sight that P. Sybarite wondered if, by any chance, the fellow had found time to get drunk during so brief a wait.