The Black Star

MP3 Audio CD. The Black Star

CHAPTER I—AN AIDED ESCAPE


Winds whistled up the river, and winds whistled down from the hills,
and they met to swirl and gather fury and rattle the city’s millions
of windowpanes. They carried a mixture of sleet and fine snow, the
first herald of the winter to come. In the business district they
swung signs madly back and forth, and roared around the corners of
high office buildings, and swept madly against struggling trolley
cars. They poured through the man-made cañons; they dashed out the
broad boulevards—and so they came to the attention of Mr. Roger
Verbeck, at about the hour of midnight, as he turned over in his warm
bed and debated whether to rise and lower the window or take a chance
with the rapidly lowering temperature.

“Beastly night!” Verbeck confided to himself, and put his head beneath
the covers.

He slept—and suddenly he awakened. A moment before he had been in the
midst of a pleasant dream; now every sense was alert, and his right
hand, creeping softly under the cover, reached the side of the bed and
grasped an automatic pistol that hung in a rack there.

From the adjoining room—his library—there came no flash of an electric
torch, no footfall, no sound foreign to the apartment, nothing to
indicate the presence of an intruder. Yet Verbeck sensed that an
intruder was there.

He slipped quietly from the bed, shivering a bit because of the cold
wind, put his feet into slippers, and drew on a dressing gown over his
pajamas. Then, his pistol held ready for use in case of emergency, he
started across the bedroom, taking short steps and walking on his
toes.