The room was brightly lighted. At a long table, midway between door and windows, five men were seated: Lunn, his fat face gray with a sort of eager pallor, was chewing nervously at an unlighted cigar; he glanced up now at Annister’s entrance, turning to a big man on his right. At the head of the table, his veiled glance like the stare of a falcon, sat Rook, but it was upon the big man next to Lunn that Annister’s glance rested with an abrupt interest as the lawyer spoke:
“Welcome to our city, Mr. Annister!” he said, in a voice that reminded Annister of molasses dripping from a barrel. “I want you to meet—Mr. Bull Ellison; he’s been right anxious to meet you, haven’t you, Bull?”
Annister, in the passage of an eye-flash, understood. This was the man whom he had encountered in the vestibule of the smoker, and, of a sudden, memory rose up out of the past, and, with it, a picture: a padded ring under twin, blazing arcs; the thud and shuffle of sliding feet; a man, huge, brutish, broad, fists like stone mauls, yet, for all his bulk, a very cat for quickness.
“Bruiser” Ellison, they had called him then; a heavyweight whose very brute strength had kept him from the championship; that, and a certain easy good nature which was not apparent now in the bleak staring of the eyes turned now upon Annister, remorseless, under lowered brows.
Now, as if at a signal, the men about the table rose; the table was hauled backward to the wall, leaving a wide, sanded space under the lights.
And then, even as Rook spoke, Annister abruptly understood: this gang of thieves, as he knew now—“Plunder, Limited,” as Cleo Ridgley had called them—Annister knew them now, under the leadership of Rook, for an outfit which would stop short of nothing to attain its ends. His eyes, roving the long room up and down, searched now for that dark face, with its black, forking beard, but he was not really expecting to see it, but that, if Rook was the actual leader, Black Beard was “the man higher up,” Annister was, somehow, convinced.
They had failed with Westervelt and his segundo; now, as the man called “Bull” came forward across the floor, Rook spoke:
“Ellison hasn’t forgotten his meeting with you, Annister; he says you played him a dirty trick; hit him when he wasn’t looking; that right, Bull?” he asked, with a certain sly malice directed at the giant with the cauliflower ear.
“And now,” Rook’s purring tones continued, “he wants satisfaction; he’ll get it, won’t he, Mister Annister?”
For a moment, as Annister’s eyes bored into his, the lawyer’s face showed, like an animal’s, in a Rembrandtesque shading of high light and shadow beneath the lights. Stripped of its mask, it was like the face of a devil; now the mouth grinned, but without mirth, the lips drawn backward from the teeth in a soundless snarl. He laughed suddenly, and there was nothing human in it, as Annister, his back to the wall, smiled grimly now in answer.