Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1911-02-19

ahead.
She nodded there, her sense of peace pos
sessing all her body. Dimly she thought of
nine o'clock and of work to be done by Jan
and the others, when the trap should close
its Jaws. What need to bother herself?
When that was done, the rest could follow
quickly. And then, if flight by darkness
seemed advisable, bit of sleep to start on
would be well.
She rose, by making an effort, and moved
across to her bed. An hour, at the most,
she might nap serenely, and then-and
then She dropped herself down, or,
rather, dropped, possessed of sudden with
a wild suspicion that something might be
wrong. A flash of vivid, glaring light was
scared across a portion of her brain. Like a
lightning stroke that fails to reach the earth,
the 'zigzag halted in the dullness, shutting
out her intellect and faded on her night.
She tried to rise, to cry to the men
who had gone, as she duly remembered.
She could neither lift the leaden mass of her
shoulders and weighted skull nor utter forth
more than gurgle. The sound she made
was terrible, to Thurley lying there CULVER
ing with life. 1t was such an animal, savage
sound, as of some wild beast that struggled
with suffocating death.
Expecting almost that the creature would
come, staggering possibly, but horribly vital
and stubbornly active in her sinister intent,
Thurley dared not move and dared not re-
main, and held her breath in fearful alarm,
as she listened to hear the lightest tread.
1t did not come: Zagorsky was down, her
brain like blackened frame, where fire.
works, having expended their flare, die sud-
denly with here and there streak or a star
of unattached and meaningless red, glowing
wildly a moment on the velvet gloom that
it's previous brilliance has intensified. Then
oblivion claimed her for its own.
TT was not until nearly half an hour later,
when the woman was breathing with the
stentorian gasps and irregular percussions
of a gasolene engine, that Thurley dared to
move. She rose then cautiously. The house
was still; the silence, save for Zagorsky's
breathing, was intense.
Thurley went to the lamp and turned it
low, then crept to the window and tried to
peer through the snow lighted darkness of
the night. There was nothing to be SEEN
She had no means of determining the time;
but felt it must be fully nine o'clock, when
perhaps deliverance should come.
Once more at that, the clear bright light
of her reason was cast iluminingly upon the
facts. Pelevin was a proved liar. The coffee
that he had promised should be harmless had
been obviously drugged. Undoubtedly all
his sympathy and loyalty had been sham.
New forms of suspicion and dread rose
before her vision, as she thought of the uses
to which her note to Robley might be put.
She was terrified anew by the murky con-
ception of some hideous network of duplicity
and crime, with its meshes about her, vouch-
safed to her wildly working mind.
She must save herself, she realized, or the
blacklist of fates would doubtless be her
portion. Alone with the silence and the
sodden woman laboring in her sleep, she
stood undecided, overwhelmed for a mo-
ment with half-clear glimpse into things
appallingly obscure. Doubts as to where
she really was assailed her, together with
consuming fear of the creatures below.
But to leave this house without the slight
est unnecessary delay was the first demand
of action. Quietly, furtively, she glided
toward the bed catching up the iron chain
that bound her like slave. Her hand ran
past the wire link, in her trembling anxiety
for haste. Then she found it and, moving
to the metal edge employed in the afternoon,
bent the twisted strands upon it and began
to force them down and up by the feeble
glow of the lamp.
1t seemed as if they would never snap, SO
tough was their substance, SO soft her hands, |
and so great was her fear of creating noise
that would rouse Zagorsky from her sleep.
In feyeriSh deSDeratiOn she strained at the |