The Secret Fear
(Continued from page 22)
warehouse to draw his revolver, motioning me to remain where I was.
“Stay here,” he said under his breath. “I'll take a look. If it’s a frame-up there’s no need to get anyone else into it. Besides, you’d be more help here.”
He squared his broad shoulders and was swallowed up by the oblong of black, It did not require much urging to persuade me to stay outside. Timidly I peeped through a crack in the warped boarding. The dim ray of light which Kenton cast before him seemed only to accentuate the obscurity.
The light became stationary. I could distinguish Kenton bending over something on the dirt floor not fifteen feet inside the entrance. He looked up and spoke softly.
“Come ahead, Mr. Bowers,” he said. “No joke about this.”
There was a grim edge to his tone. With a shiver, I stepped through the doorway and crossed to where he crouched above a motionless shape huddled against the side of the long loading platform.
The body was that of a man of large stature—more than six feet in height, as nearly as I could judge from the cramped position in which he lay. There were no visible marks of violence, except for a frayed linen collar pulled awry, which dangled by a single buttonhole from the shirt about the powerful, corded neck. But as I bent closer to look at the features, I drew back with a gasp.
The face of the dead man was distorted by an expression of the utmost horror and loathing. Around the dilated pupils of his large, bluish-gray eyes, the ghastly whites showed in a pallid rim of fear. His irregular, reddish features, even in death, seemed fairly to writhe with terror. One long, sinewy arm was thrown up across the lower part of his face, as if to ward off some unseen and terrible menace.
Shuddering, I stared across the body at Kenton’s homely, impassive face.
“In heaven’s name, what happened to him?” I asked.
Kenton’s hands had been moving swiftly over the body. Now he spread them apart in a little puzzled gesture.
“There doesn’t seem to be any wound,” he said. “See if there isn’t a switch around somewhere, Mr. Bowers. There ought to be a way of lighting up here.”
I fumbled along the wall until my fingers encountered the round porcelain knob. A single grimy bulb, pendant from a cobwebbed rafter, threw a dim circle of grewsome yellow light upon the floor of the warehouse.
The body had Iain on its left side, facing the doorway. Kenton methodically turned the corpse upon its face, his searching fingers exploring the back. To me, at least, it was a relief that the staring, terrified eyes were hidden from view, rather than gazing fearfully through the arch of the doorway into the narrow, empty street beyond.
“There’s something queer about this,” said Kenton, “No wound at all, Mr. Bowers, that I can find. No blood—not even a bruise, only this mark at the throat.”
I had not seen the mark before, and even now I had to look closely to find it. It was scarcely more than a discoloration of the skin in a broad band beneath the chin. But there was no abrasion, much less a wound sufficient to cause the death of a powerful men like the one who lay before us.
With a shrug of his shoulders, Kenton rolled the body back to its original position. At once the ghastly eyes renewed their unwinking stare at the empty street.
A SOUND from the doorway caused us both to turn, Only Kenton himself can say what his imagination pictured there. For my part, I owned a feeling of distinct relief at sight of nothing more startling than a pair of ragged-looking men peering in at the open door.
As we looked, a third derelict of the wharves joined them, pressing inquisitively forward toward the body on the floor.
“Whassa trouble here?” asked one, curiously. “Somebody croak a guy?”
“Yes,” said Kenton tersely. “Know him, any of you?”
His companion, who had been staring at the body, suddenly spoke in a startled tone:
“By gorry, it’s Terence McFadden! I’d never have known the boy with that look on his face, except for the scar over his right eye. Look, Jim! Sure, and he looks as if the divil was after him!”
A confirmatory murmur came from the others. The grind of a street car’s wheels on the curve of Washington Avenue cut clearly across the low lapping of the waves against the rotting piles outside the warehouse. The humid air, impregnated with the foul odors of the waterfront, was stifling.
The three men huddled closer, with fearful glances over their shoulders, as if striving to glimpse that which the eyes of the dead man watched. Kenton alone seemed unaffected by the tension.
“Know where he lives?”
“Over on Twenty-fourth Street,” volunteered the third man. ‘‘But he’d been on the Tiger yonder this evening. I saw him go aboard. Why not call Captain Dolan? Him and Terry was pals.”
“What's his name?”
“Dolan—Captain Ira Dolan.”
“Go and get him,” ordered Kenton, removing his cap and mopping his forehead.
The man, not unwillingly, passed out of the circle of light. We heard his footsteps on the planking of the pier, and his hail to the ship anchored there.
Kenton turned to me, a worried look on his face.
“Would you mind going down to Patton’s place on the corner and ’phoning in, Mr, Bowers?” he asked. “I wouldn't ask it, but the captain knows you well. Tell him I’m staying with the body. And ask him to have Doctor Potts come, if he’s there. I'd like to get to the bottom of this.”
I was only too glad to get out of the warehouse, for the eerie atmosphere was beginning to get on my nerves. When I returned, two of the somnolent loafers from Patton’s greasy lunch room, roused by my telephone message to Captain Watters of the fourth princent, followed in my wake, muttering and rubbing their bleared eyes.
Less than ten minutes had passed since we had found the dead man in Kellogg’s old warehouse. Yet now a dozen frowsy wharf-rats fringed the doorway, brought thither by some mysterious telepathic message borne on the murky night air.
“Be here in ten minutes,” I said, nodding to Kenton.
Suddenly a man made his way through the crowd and hastened toward us. His ragged, weather-beaten face took deeper lines from the dim light overhead, its high lights gleaming in the ghastly radiance like pieces of yellowed parchment. Yet there was power in the piercing blue eye, and strength in every line of the tall, gaunt figure, now stooping suddenly over the body of the dead man.
