The Lone Wolf Returns

by Louis Joseph Vance

He would be in time—perhaps. If so, with none to spare. He pelted madly toward the veranda, took its steps at a stride and, with calculated intent to make all the noise he could and bring the household down about his ears and that other's, battered a shoulder like a ram against the joint in the middle of the nearest window.

It gave with an ease he hadn't discounted, its wings flew open with a sounding crash; and tripping on the sill Lanyard tumbled in on all fours, while the walls bellowed with the report of a pistol, and broken glass showered about him, tinkling and clashing.

Instantly he reared up on his knees, as a man will when mortally hit, flopped to one side, out of that too exposed position in front of the window, and lay very still, his own pistol ready, his vision probing the obscurity for some sign of stir.

The electric torch defeated that effort. It had been dropped with switch set, at the instant of Lanyard's violent entrance, and now lay at some distance in from the windows, its beam steadfast to the front of an opened safe; manufacturing a wide patch of vivid colour that made the encompassing mirk more dense, too dense for penetration by merely mortal eyes. Lanyard, at least, could see nothing else; and though he distinctly heard the pile of a rug whisper to a movement of sly feet, it passed his perceptions to determine the quarter in which that rustle had its rise. It ceased of a sudden, and he heard nothing more, other than the swish and flap of the curtain bellying in from the shattered window.

The burglar hadn't left by way of any window, he was certain; therefore was still in the room, waiting like Lanyard for some incautious sign to guide his aim. But to play a waiting game with him would be intolerable, and too apt, as well, to end in precisely that which Lanyard was bent on preventing, the intrusion of some member of the household to draw the marauder's fire. The raving of the wind in the trees made it impossible to distinguish lesser sounds from beyond those four walls; but it was hardly conceivable that the rending crash with which the window had admitted Lanyard, the shot that had followed, and that loud rain of splintered glass, should have failed to alarm every inmate of the house.

Lanyard conjured up to the eye of his mind the plot of the library he had studied at Morphew's instance. According to it—as memory served—the window he had broken through was the one nearest a wall in which (close by Lanyard's head it ought to be) a double doorway opened in from the main hall of the house, with a switch for the ceiling light conveniently at hand.

Gathering himself together, Lanyard rose in a reckless bound and lunged blindly toward the door, found it where he had thought it ought to be, and began to grope for the switch.

His first fumblings were wide of their mark, but he persevered, heart in mouth, expecting every moment to see the black backwards of the room stabbed by a jet of crimson and orange flame—perhaps to be lucky enough to hear the accompanying blast But the other held his fire, no doubt shrewdly guessing what Lanyard was up to and reckoning it the part of wisdom to wait for the light to make his aim sure; the advantage would be all to him when it came, for he would know approximately where to look for Lanyard, whereas the latter had no clue whatsoever to the whereabouts of his adversary.

His fingers at length hit on the switch, a great central chandelier sprayed the room with radiance.

Lanyard occupied it alone, at least seemed to: the library was over-furnished with huge, old-fashioned pieces, any one of which might easily have been serving the safe-breaker as a temporary screen, from behind any one of which Lanyard had to look for his coup-de-grâce to come at any instant. . . . Or, he dared not be unmindful, that might come through one of the windows. Doubt of his temper could now no longer exist in Morphew's intelligence. The one slender chance Lanyard had of eluding a bullet from either the outlaw in the room or the assassins outside lay in keeping constantly on the move.