After a time he turned and walked slowly back toward the business section of town. He took his way leisurely. He had nothing to do but turn in at his lodging place, and the night was still young. Out in the open it was pleasanter than in a stuffy room, eight by eight.
The buildings had been put up in a haphazard fashion without much regard to the street frontage, entirely as the fancy of the owners had dictated. Hugh came to one abutting on the alley. It was a storage warehouse, and it projected almost into the street. In the lee of it the young man stopped to light a cigarette.
Something whizzed past his ear and stuck quivering in the wooden wall. In the darkness streaks of fire flamed—one, two, three. The roar of the shots, pent in the alleyway, boomed like those of a howitzer. With one swift dive of his lithe body Hugh found cover behind a dry-goods box. In transit his revolver leaped to air.
But he did not fire. He lay, crouched close against the box, listening with taut nerves for any sound that might betray the position of his enemy.
None came. Presently he peered round the corner of the box. The darkness was Stygian. The blackness of the night was emphasized by the narrowness of the alley. Somewhere in that dark pit before him the ambusher lay, unless he had crept noiselessly away.
Protected by the box, Hugh might have crawled to the corner of the building, turned it, and so escaped. But he had no thought of doing this. He meant to find out if possible who this expert knife thrower was. If he had in town an enemy who hated him enough to lie in wait to do murder it was his business to discover who the man was. First, he wanted to get the ruffian lying thirty or forty feet from him. Next, he meant to try to gain possession of the knife sticking in the wall.
The second hand of his watch ticked away the minutes. The large hand moved from the figures III to IV, crept on to V, passed the half-hour mark. Hugh did not know how long he lay there. His guess would have been hours. He began to think that the other man had made an escape.
On hands and knees, the barrel of his revolver clenched between his strong white teeth, McClintock crawled round the box, hugging the wall closely as he moved. His advance was noiseless, slow, so careful that it was punctuated with a dozen stops to listen. Someone was beating a drum down the street and the sound of it deadened any closer stir. He calculated that this was an advantage as well as a drawback. If he could not hear the other man, then it followed that the other man could not hear him.
Plank by plank he followed the wall, each motion forecast and executed so deliberately that it could not betray him. In the dense darkness he could see nothing, but he estimated he must be close to the knife in the wall.
He rose to his knees, still without a sound. His hand groped for the hilt of the bowie. It closed on—a thick hairy wrist.