Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

touched Arnold Cameron’s shoulder. His hand moved on to the knife hilt in Cameron’s back. The F. B. I. man was still breathing, but he’d never had a chance to phone.

Duncan Maclain had no time now to help him. Indeed, he had no time at all, yet he went back up the front stairs slowly, and slowly walked to the other end of the hall. There, in the servant’s wing, another flight led down. He took it, and, knowing that avoiding squeaks meant life, he kept his feet pressed close on each step to the angle of tread and wall.

At the bottom he stopped again and the grandfather’s clock ticked off six hundred seconds as he opened another door. His hand went through before him to find another switch and tell him that the lights were out in the armory hall. He crossed it in the darkness, found the other door he was seeking, and descended the basement stairs.

A chain clanked in a corner. Maclain spat out a single word, and Dreist was silent without a warning growl.

When he came back up the stairs again, he was on his own, for Dreist, wearing Schnucke’s brace, was beside him; and Dreist could not guide him. In his other hand, the Captain held a ball of heavy twine. Step by step he ascended, paying out cord behind him. He had attached the other end of the cord to the handle of the main light switch at the foot of the stairs, so that every light in The Crags could be put out with a single pull.

At the top, with Dreist leading, he stepped into the hall. With the basement door almost closed behind him, he reached through with one arm, pulled the slack cord tight, and deftly tied it around the knob on the basement side of the door. He put the remainder of the ball down on the floor so that it held the door ajar.

Cold air struck against his face as he stepped inside Thad’s theater. He stood at the back with Dreist’s powerful body shivering beside him. He had intended to go outside through the back of the stage and put Dreist on that trail wiped out of the snow by the dragging Christmas tree—the trail of Thaddeus Tredwill’s girl; but someone had been in the theater before him and opened that backstage door. Someone was in there now.

“Steady, Dreist,” the Captain whispered, but his words were lost, for Dreist had gone, obeying the training so carefully instilled in him, to attack without warning when an adversary of Duncan Maclain showed a gun.

The Captain heard the rush of feet down the aisle, followed by Dreist’s snarl, and saved his life by dropping to the floor. The sound of the report which would normally have served him as a target proved confusing, for caught up in the acoustics of the theater it echoed hollowly.

Thinking with split-second speed, the Captain judged that whoever had fired the shot must be standing in the center aisle. Lying full length behind the last row of seats, he reached around and shot upward down the center aisle three times, resting his gun on the floor. Someone fell with a groan.

Maclain said, “The dog will tear you to pieces if you try to shoot again. You’d better stay where you are. Guard!” he ordered Dreist, and, standing up, felt his way toward the stage by the seat backs until his foot encountered clothing.

Bending over, he touched closed eyes, a straight nose, and a close-clipped mustache.

“Al Rutgers,” he muttered. “At least you feel that way from the description I’ve had of you. Come, Dreist,” he said aloud, “that’s one more out of the way, thanks to you.”

He slipped the gun into his overcoat pocket, and holding tight to the police dog’s brace turned to the rear of the theater and stepped through the door into the armory hall.

Upstairs he could hear someone pounding vigorously on a door.

“Pierce!” Maclain called.

An almost muffled voice answered him some distance down the armory hall. “He’s locked in, Captain Maclain. There isn’t much use in calling.”

The Captain went after his gun and swung himself aside, saving his life by inches for the second time within ten minutes. The ancient battleax hurtling toward him, instead of crushing his chest, struck a glancing blow on his arm. He staggered back under the impact and his gun dropped to the floor, irretrievably gone. The light ax swished on by to crash behind him against the wall.

Near him, Dreist whimpered. The dog had the bravest heart in the canine world, but something was approaching which he had never met before, something inhuman; a faceless being, neither man nor woman—a terrible machine.

“Get it, Dreist!”

The Captain’s words had the sting of a whiplash, and their heat fused anger into the dog’s quick fear. Dreist seldom barked, but when he did his bark spelled murder. With a three-foot leap he left his place beside Maclain and drove in sideways for the kill.

“I can’t control him,” the Captain said quietly, “if you don’t lie down and stay still.”

A laugh, metallic and hollow, was followed by the clank of teeth on metal and the scrape of Dreist’s claws. The Captain realized that the lights had been turned on while he was in the theater; no ax hurled at him in the dark could have come so near. At the same time, he recognized that he must have darkness to defeat the death approaching him down the hall. To reach the switch meant walking into the swing of a halberd or a broadax similar to the one which had beheaded Bella. He was facing a new kind of foe; one who had watched him come up from the cellar with Dreist and refrained from shooting him then because of the knowledge that Dreist would attack without warning at the sight of a gun; a clever foe who had taken steps that would insure safety against the vicious police dog’s skill. The Captain had stepped