Marston was the “Big Gun”, of course. Quarrier had never doubted it; but hitherto the President of Intervale Steel had conducted his brokerage business, on the surface at any rate, without resort to open violence. And Intervale Steel—You knew really nothing about it until you took a flyer in it; then, as it might chance, you knew enough and more than enough.
Quarrier, glancing at the unconscious man and pocketing the pistol, departed without more ado; proceeding along the hall, he found, with no further adventure, a narrow door, and the pale stars, winking at him from, he judged, a midnight horizon.
But a glance at his watch told him that it was but nine-thirty; there was yet time to get to the hiding-place of those documents ahead of Marston, if, as he was now convinced, it had been Marston’s thugs who had ambushed him.
Plunging along the shadowy alley, after five minutes’ walk, made at a racing gait, he found a main-traveled avenue and an owl taxi, whose driver, leaning outward, crooked a finger in invitation to this obvious fare, appearing out of the dark.
Quarrier did not hesitate. The fellow might be a gunman or worse; he must take his chance of that.
“Twenty-three Jones!” he called crisply, with the words diving into the cab’s interior; then, his head out of the window, as the taxi turned outward from the curb:
“And drive as if all hell were after you!”
III.
The Shape Invisible.
QUARRIER reached his destination without incident, but as he went up the winding stairway of the office building to his private sanctum he was oppressed by an uneasy sense that all was not as it should be. Those elevators—they were seldom out of order. Perhaps....
But, panting a little from his climb, he found his floor, and the door of his private office.