unbetraying, fighting against a weakness born of great pain and fatigue.

He was keenly conscious of the cab's abrupt stopping, of the passing of
money between MacNutt and the lean and dripping night-hawk holding the
reins, of being half-carried and half-dragged, in the great, bear-like
grasp of his captor, across the wet sidewalk, to the foot of a flight
of brownstone steps. These steps were wide and ponderous, and led up
to an equally wide and ponderous-looking doorway crowned with
ornamental figures of marble on a sandstone background. These carven
figures, wet and glistening in the light of the street-lamps, stood out
incongruously gloomy and ghostly, like the high relief on a sarcophagus.

Instead of mounting the steps, however, MacNutt hauled his captive
limply in under their shadow, to the basement door opening off the
stone-flagged area. There, after fumbling with his keys for a moment
or two, he quietly unlocked the heavy outer grating of twisted ironwork
and then the inner door of oak. Durkin made a mental note of the fact
that both of these doors were in turn locked after them.

The two then made their way through the darkness down what must have
been a long passage. Its floor was padded with carpet, and some
fugitive and indefinable odor seemed to suggest to the prisoner an
atmosphere of well-being, of a house both carefully furnished and
scrupulously managed.

MacNutt softly opened a door on the right, and, after listening for a
cautious moment or two, as softly entered the room into which this door
led. And still again a key was turned and withdrawn from the lock.

Even with his eyes closed Durkin, as he lay there husbanding his
strength, was conscious of the sudden light that flooded the room.
Covertly opening that eye which remained in the heavy shadow,
separating the lashes by little more than the width of a hair, he could
make out a large room, upholstered and carpeted in green, with
green-shaded electroliers above two billiard tables that stood ghastly
and bier-like beneath their blanketing covers of white cotton. Against
the walls stood massive, elephantine club chairs of green fumed oak,
and it was into one of these that MacNutt had dropped the inert and
unresponding Durkin. At the far end of the room the stealthy observer
could make out what was assuredly the entrance to an electric elevator.
In fact, as he looked closer he could see the two mother-of-pearl
buttons which controlled th