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  The girl gave him no rest. The syllables came from her lips in a torrent, and her voice went abruptly high and sharp. Despite his unfamiliarity with the language, Phil felt his pulse drumming under the beat of her tone. Mikhail’s shoulders swayed slowly and a white froth appeared in the corners of his mouth. Then his face lost every human quality. A metallic snarl rasped from deep in his chest. Without turning, without looking, he sprang upon the man who had killed his brother. There was no interval the eye could discern. He was standing, swaying, looking at the floor with bulging, bloodshot eyes. Then he was upon Kapaloff and they were rolling on the floor. There was no appreciable passage!

  Kapaloff discharged his pistol once, but Phil could not see where the bullet hit. Over and over they rolled—Mikhail a brute gone mad, blindly fumbling for a grip on his enemy’s throat; Kapaloff fighting with every trick in his cool head, and as little disturbed as if it were a game. His eyes met Phil’s over Mikhail’s shoulder, and he made a grimace of distaste. Then Kapaloff twisted free, whirled to his feet, dashed a foot into the face of his rising assailant, and vanished into the dark of the hall. The kick carried Mikhail over backward, but he was up immediately, bellowing and plunging after Kapaloff.

  Phil picked up the weapon Kapaloff had dropped—the revolver he had taken from Phil—and turned to the girl. Her hands were over her face and she was trembling violently. He shook her.

  “Where’s the phone?”

  She tried twice, and finally spoke: “In the next room.”

  He patted her cheek. “You phone the police and wait for me here.”

  She clung to him protestingly for a moment, then pulled herself together, smiled with a great show of courage, and went into the next room.

  Phil moved to the hall door and listened. A scuffling sound and Kapaloff’s mocking chuckle came from somewhere on the stairs. A shot thundered. Mikhail bellowed. Phil felt his way to the foot of the stairs and started up. From above came the noise of a struggle, and Mikhail’s rasping breath. Two shots. A body fell, sliding down the steps. Phil had gained the second floor and was climbing toward the third. The sliding body came toward him. He recognized it as Mikhail by the gibbering snarls it emitted. Kapaloff’s laugh came from the head of the stairs. As he braced his legs to halt Mikhail’s descent, Phil raised his revolver and fired into the darkness above. Streaks of orange flame darted down at him; a bullet burned his cheek; others hit around him. Then the man at his feet was dragging him down with grim fingers that felt for his throat. He screamed into Mikhail’s ear, trying to bring comprehension to the man that his enemy was above, that he was attacking an ally. But the crushing fingers felt their way higher and higher up Phil’s chest, closed about his throat. He felt his breath going. With a desperate summoning of his failing strength he drove his pistol into the face he could not see in the dark, and wrenched himself away. The fingers slipped, clutched at him, missed, and Phil was stumbling up the steps ahead of something that had been a man, but was now a rabid thing clambering through the night, with death in its heart and no understanding of the difference between friend and enemy.

  Phil reached the top of the stairs and, not knowing it in the dark, reached for the next step, stumbled, and fell forward in the hall. As he fell Kapaloff’s pistol spat, bringing down a shower of plaster. At the head of the stairs Mikhail was snarling. Phil rolled, jerking himself to one side, and pressed against the wainscoting, just in time to let the madman charge past. Two more shots rang out, but Mikhail’s broad body held all but a feeble reflection of the flashes from Phil. Then a bestial voice rose in a bellow of insane triumph, a scuffle, a groan so faint that it might have been a sigh, heavy bodies falling . . . silence.

  Phil got to his feet and advanced warily up the hall. His legs touched a body. Something liquid, warm and sticky, was under his bare feet. He stumbled on and opened the first door he reached. He found the light button and pressed it. Then he turned and looked down the hall in the light that came through the open doorway . . .

  He closed his eyes and groped his way to the stairs, down to the room where he had left the girl.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Death Letter

  The girl ran to him. “Your face! You are hurt!”

  “Just a scratch. I had forgotten it.”

  She drew his head down and dabbed at this tom cheek with a handkerchief.

  “The others?” she asked.

  “Dead! Did you get the police?”

  She said, “Yes,” and then could no longer withstand the weakness that tugged at her. She drooped into his arms, sobbing. He carried her to a couch and knelt beside her, stroking her hands and soothing her.

  When she had mastered her weakness sufficiently to sit up, he asked her, more to take her mind from the gruesome termination of the affair than because his curiosity was so pressing, “Now, what’s this all about?”

  As she talked she gradually regained her composure, and the dread that the night’s events had stirred within her subsided. Her voice grew steadier, her words more coherent, and some measure of color returned to her cheeks.

  Her father had been a Russian nobleman, her mother an American woman. Her mother had died when she was still a child. Later the little girl had been sent to a convent in the United States, in accordance with her mother’s desire. When the war broke out in Europe she had returned to Russia, despite her father’s orders, with the childish thought that she would be near him. She had seen him twice before his death. He was reported “killed in action” shortly before the revolution. His brother Boris had been appointed her guardian and administrator of the estate. Then the revolution came. Her uncle had foreseen the uprising and had converted much of the girl’s wealth—he had no personal means—into money, which he had deposited in English and French banks. When they were forced to leave their native land they had considerable wealth at their disposal. For the next few years they had moved from place to place. Her uncle had seemed filled with a strange uneasiness, and would seldom stay long in one city or country. He had taken the name of Kapaloff and had persuaded the girl to do likewise, though he had given no reason for the change. Finally they came to the United States, lived in various cities, and then came to

  Burlingame. Since their departure from Russia her uncle had been withdrawing more and more from society, and frowning upon Romaine’s desire for friends. In the United States she had made no new acquaintances. He had selected the most isolated house he could find in Burlingame and had had the windows fitted with heavy shutters, and massive doors and bolts installed. She had wondered at the change in him but had never questioned him. His manner toward her was, as always, affectionate, protecting and generous. Except in the matter of making new acquaintances—and he was not crudely insistent there—he allowed her to indulge every whim.

  Then, late the preceding Monday night, she had found the letter that was in the bag. She had found it on the library floor, had picked it up carelessly to lay it on the table, from which she supposed it had blown. Her eyes had fallen upon the word murder, in Russian, heavily underscored. She had read the next few words, and then feverishly read the letter from beginning to end. It had been written to her uncle by someone who apparently had been very intimate with him in Russia, and boldly threatened that unless Boris paid the money he had promised the truth about his brother’s murder would be published.

  She could not miss the import of the letter. It could mean but one thing: that Boris, whose own means had been dissipated, had had his brother killed that he might gain control of the estate until the child became of age. Dazed and bewildered, she went to her room, carrying the letter with her, and threw herself across the bed. But she had something to do. She knew of but one person to whom she could turn: a prominent Los Angeles attorney, the father of one of her schoolmates. She took what money she had, left the house, got in her roadster, and started for the city, intending to take the first train to Los Angeles. But she had wasted too much time. Her uncle had missed the letter and, fearing the wo
rst, had gone to her room.

  Not finding her there, he had come downstairs just as she drove away. He had sent Mikhail and Serge in another machine to bring her back. They had done so, but the bag had been lost in the scuffle on Washington Street.

  She had been imprisoned in her room until the afternoon, when she was taken to call on Phil. Her uncle had coached her carefully and she feared him too much to risk open defiance, but she had mastered her fright sufficiently to drop her purse and signal Phil. Then she had been brought back to the house and locked in. She had made one attempt to escape but had been caught at the window.

  Phil tried to keep his mind on her story but he missed great stretches of it, watching her face, which, with youthful resilience, was regaining its bloom. The shadows that lingered under the eyes enhanced their beauty.

  When she had finished they were silent for a moment. Phil wondered how much of the story he had missed. He cleared his throat and said, “You’ll probably have to stay in Burlingame for a day or two until the police get through with their investigating. But if you’ll give me that fellow’s address—the Los Angeles lawyer—I’ll wire him to come up if he can and take you back with him when it’s all over.”

  She looked puzzled. “But everything is all right now. I won’t have to bother him.”

  “You’ll need him. There’ll be lots of trouble straightening out your affairs and your uncle’s; and you’ll have to have somebody to take care of you.”

  “But you are—” She stopped and the blood flooded her face.

  Phil shook his head emphatically. “Listen! I would—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. “We are going to do this different. You are going to have this lawyer made your legal guardian. If you don’t, the courts will probably appoint some old bum who happens to be a friend of the judge’s. Then I’m going to convince him that I’m—that I’m not too tough an egg. And then we’ll see.”

  A strange speech for one whose creed was: When your luck runs good, force it!

  The girl frowned. “But—”

  “Now don’t argue! I haven’t got what you might call a spotless record. Nothing so terrible, maybe, but plenty that’s bad enough. And another thing: you’ve got money, and I—well, when the cards run right I have enough to eat regular; when they run wrong . . . Anyway, we’ll see. I’ll do my talking to this lawyer fellow after he’s made your guardian.”

  The doorbell forestalled the girl’s answer. Phil went to the door, where four uniformed policemen stood, using their nightsticks to keep the hounds at bay. Phil led them back to the room where the girl was waiting and told his story briefly. The grizzled sergeant in charge stared with round eyes from the girl to the youth with bloodstained bare feet, but he made no comment. Leaving one man with Phil and Romaine, he led the others upstairs.

  Fifteen minutes later he returned.

  “I thought you said the dead men were in the hall?”

  “That’s right,” Phil said.

  The sergeant shook his head. “They’re both dead, all right; and one of ’em is in the hall with half a dozen bullets in him. But we found the other one in one of the rooms—all mangled up—leaning over a sort of desk, with this under his arm.”

  He held out a sheet of notepaper to Phil. In a small, firm, regular handwriting, but thickly besmeared with blood, was written:

  My dear Romaine—

  Leaving you, I want to extend to both you and your new-found champion my heartiest wish that joy and happiness attend you.

  My only regret is that so little of your heritage remains—but I was always careless with money! I advise you to cling to Mr. Truax—never have I seen a more promising young man. And he has at least three hundred and fifty dollars!

  There is much that I would write, but my strength is going and I fear that my pen will waver. And I who have never shown a sign of weakness in my life am vain enough to desire that I leave this gentle world with that record intact.

  Affectionately,

  UNCLE BORIS.

  THE SECOND STORY ANGEL

  Carter Brigham—Carter Webright Brigham in the tables of contents of various popular magazines—woke with a start, passing from unconsciousness into full awareness too suddenly to doubt that his sleep had been disturbed by something external.

  The moon was not up and his apartment was on the opposite side of the building from the street—lights; the blackness about him was complete—he could not see so far as the foot of his bed.

  Holding his breath, not moving after that first awakening start, he lay with straining eyes and ears. Almost at once a sound—perhaps a repetition of the one that had aroused him—came from the adjoining room: the furtive shuffling of feet across the wooden floor. A moment of silence, and a chair grated on the floor, as if dislodged by a careless shin. Then silence again, and a faint rustling as of a body scraping against the rough paper of the wall.

  Now Carter Brigham was neither a hero nor a coward, and he was not armed. There was nothing in his rooms more deadly than a pair of candlesticks, and they—not despicable weapons in an emergency—were on the far side of the room from which the sounds came.

  If he had been awakened to hear very faint and not often repeated noises in the other room—such rustlings as even the most adept burglar might not avoid—the probabilities are that Carter would have been content to remain in his bed and try to frighten the burglar away by yelling at him. He would not have disregarded the fact that in an encounter at close quarters under these conditions every advantage would lie on the side of the prowler.

  But this particular prowler had made quite a lot of noise, had even stumbled against a chair, had shown himself a poor hand at stealthiness. That an inexpert burglar might easily be as dangerous as an adept did not occur to the man in the bed.

  Perhaps it was that in the many crook stories he had written, deadliness had always been wedded to skill and the bunglers had always been comparatively harmless and easily overcome, and that he had come to accept this theory as a truth. After all, if a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.

  Anyhow, Carter Brigham slid his not unmuscular body gently out from between the sheets and crept on silent bare feet toward the open doorway of the room from which the sounds had come. He passed from his bed to a position inside the next room, his back against the wall beside the door during an interlude of silence on the intruder’s part.

  The room in which Carter now stood was every bit as black as the one he had left; so he stood motionless, waiting for the prowler to betray his position.

  His patience was not taxed. Very soon the burglar moved again, audibly; and then against the rectangle of a window—scarcely lighter than the rest of the room—Carter discerned a man−shaped shadow just a shade darker coming toward him. The shadow passed the window and was lost in the enveloping darkness.

  Carter, his body tensed, did not move until he thought the burglar had had time to reach a spot where no furniture intervened. Then, with clutching hands thrown out on wide—spread arms, Carter hurled himself forward.

  His shoulder struck the intruder and they both crashed to the floor. A forearm came up across Carter’s throat, pressing into it. He tore it away and felt a blow on his cheek. He wound one arm around the burglar’s body, and with the other fist struck back. They rolled over and over across the floor until they were stopped by the legs of a massive table, the burglar uppermost.

  With savage exultance in his own strength, which the struggle thus far had shown to be easily superior to the other’s, Carter twisted his body, smashing his adversary into the heavy table. Then he drove a fist into the body he had just shaken off and scrambled to his knees, feeling for a grip on the burglar’s throat. When he had secured it he found that the prowler was lying motionless, unresisting. Laughing triumphantly, Carter got to his feet and switched on the lights.

  The girl on the floor did not move.

  Half lying, half hunched against the
table where he had hurled her, she was inanimate. A still, twisted figure in an austerely tailored black suit—one sleeve of which had been torn from the shoulder—with an unended confusion of short chestnut hair above a face that was linen−white except where blows had reddened it. Her eyes were closed. One arm was outflung across the floor, the other lay limply at her side; one silken leg was extended, the other folded under her.

  Into a corner of the room her hat, a small black toque, had rolled; not far from the hat lay a very small pinch−bar, the jimmy with which she had forced an entrance.

  The window over the fire escape—always locked at night—was wide−open. Its catch hung crookedly.

  Mechanically, methodically—because he had been until recently a reporter on a morning paper, and the lessons of years are not unlearned in a few weeks—Carter’s eyes picked up these details and communicated them to his brain while he strove to conquer his bewilderment.