His face was
tinged with gray. A physical sickness was creeping stealthily on
him, as his thoughts held insistently to the catastrophe that
threatened. His intelligence was too keen to permit a belief
that Burke's manner of almost fulsome kindliness hid nothing
ominous--ominous with a hint of death for him in return for the
death he had wrought.
Then, terror crystallized. His eyes were caught by a figure, the
figure of Cassidy, advancing there in the corridor. And with the
detective went a man whose gait was slinking, craven. A
cell-door swung open, the prisoner stepped within, the door
clanged to, the bolts shot into their sockets noisily.
Garson sat huddled, stricken--for he had recognized the victim
thrust into the cell before his eyes.... It was Dacey, one of his
own cronies in crime--Dacey, who, the night before, had seen him
kill Eddie Griggs. There was something concretely sinister to
Garson in this fact of Dacey's presence there in the cell.
Of a sudden, the forger cried out raucously:
"Say, Inspector, if you've got anything on me, I--I would----"
The cry dropped into unintelligible mumblings.
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