“They may try to get me for it, Mr. Annister,” he said, “but I’m no man’s man; well, not Rook’s, and you can lay to that! Bristow and his friends kept out of it, you noticed? Bristow’ll do nothing, now; not yet a while, at any rate, but—mebbe they sort of savvied me a-watchin’ t’ see they didn’t run no whizzer on you!”
He lifted the heavy Colt, where it had lain hidden by the bar-rail, thrusting it in its scabbard with a grin.
“Well, sir, I aimed t’ see that they was sittin’ close, an’ quiet, Mr. Annister,” he said.
“Thanks, old timer,” said Annister. “I’ll not forget.”
But as he went outward into the waning afternoon he was thinking of that rendezvous of the night. For Rook would be there, and it had been Rook, he was certain, who had engineered that ambush in the Mansion House bar.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BATTLE IN THE “CLUB”
The time was nearly ripe. The clue of those newspaper items; the canceled check; the somewhat repellant evidence of the battered piece of goldwork picked up in the corridor of the Mansion House—Annister had been able to put two and two together, to find a sum as strange, as odd, say, as five, or seven, or even one.
But that name that had trembled on the lips of Rook’s secretary remained a secret; with it, Annister was convinced, he would be able to pull those threads together with a single jerk, to find them—one.
He had had news from Mojave: the dentist had identified the insane man as his patient by means of his chart, but, with that face, the man could not be Banker Axworthy—it simply could not be. And yet he was!
It was something of a riddle, and more, even, than that, for the thing savored of the supernatural, of necromancy, of a black art that might, say, have had for its practitioner a certain personage with the eyes of a damned soul and a black, forking beard, curled, like Mephisto’s; Annister thought that it might.