side wall, so that
his eye commanded the silent trio before him, Frank made a movement to
draw away from Keenan, who stood grotesquely petrified, his lean jaw
fallen, the melancholy Celtic face touched more with wonder than with
fear.

"Don't move!" commanded her husband, as he saw the motion. "Stay where
you are!"

She looked at him, as bewildered as the others.

"That man, you'll find, is armed."

"You lie--you fool!"

"That man, I say, is armed!"

Keenan laughed, scoffingly.

"Take his revolver from him!" commanded Durkin.

A momentary hesitation held her back.

"Take it, I say! And, by God, if he so much as moves a finger, I'll
blow the top of his head off!"

The woman confronted Keenan once more, but he fell back a step or two.

"There's no need of that," he broke in angrily. "If you want the gun,
I'll give it to you!"

And as he spoke his arm swung down and back to his hip pocket.

"Stop that!" cried Durkin sharply, as he saw the movement. "Keep those
hands up, or, by heaven, I'll let you have it!"

His arm, by this time, was tense and rigidly out-stretched, and his
steady pistol-barrel pointed just between the other man's ludicrously
blinking eyes. In the silence that followed the woman reached back,
and without further hesitation drew the revolver from the motionless
man's pocket.

It was a formidable, long-barreled "Colt," which, with one sharp motion
of the fingers, she promptly unlimbered, exposing the breech. In each
cylinder chamber, she saw, lay a loaded cartridge. Once assured of
this, she snapped shut the breech and balanced the gun in the
purposeful embrace of her fingers.

"Now what?" she asked, with her eyes turned to her husband. But the
triumph suddenly died out of her face.

She was only in time to hear Durkin's sharp cry of anger, and to see
his quick spring through the wide door-way, as the guard-door of the
elevator closed and the cage shot up into space.

"We've missed him!" he gasped, with a cry of rage, as he ran to the
door through which MacNutt, in that moment of excitement, had
disappeared.

Frank kept her eyes on Keenan. She, too, began to feel the sense of
some vast finality in their moves and actions that night.

Keenan laughed. It was a dry and joyless laugh, but it was
discouraging.

"What's on the floor above?" demanded Durkin, wheeling on him.

"The floor above," slowly responded the other, "is Richard Penfield's
private offices, where his s