Her heart was racing furiously. Why had she indulged in such madness? That great dome of the Transportation Building was thronged with people. Any one of these would have offered her protection.
Now here she was in a narrow place of darkness. The door was closed. Had it shut itself? Had the long-eared Chinaman entered to close it behind him?
“He has the three-bladed knife!” she thought with a shudder.
“The three-bladed knife is not for to kill.” The mandarin’s words came back to her. Scant comfort in this. It was sharp enough to kill if the Oriental’s purpose was murder.
She was at the parting of the ways. Above her, a hundred and twenty-five feet from the ground, up that narrow ladder, was the top of the dome. Beneath her, fifty feet down, the good earth and the man she feared.
All this passed through her mind in ten seconds of time. Then, without having truly willed it, she began to climb.
Never before had she climbed so high on a ladder. Now to go higher and higher, feeling her way every step in the dark, thinking of the dizzy depths below, was agony.
But what else was there to be done? All her life she had been frightened by the mysterious silence of Orientals. They moved about with padded footsteps. Their voices were low. She seldom heard them speak.
“That man may be coming,” she told herself, “climbing like a cat—silently.”
Up, up she went. The square of light appeared to grow, to come closer and closer until with a sigh that was half a sob, she tumbled over its brink to fall upon the cold metallic surface of the dome.