rway, close the door softly, and move toward the stairs.

He paused in front of the door behind which Jim Wilson and Minna were no
doubt sleeping. He stared at it wistfully. It certainly would not be a
mark of cowardice to get Jim Wilson up under circumstances such as
these. In fact, he would be a fool not to do so.

Stubbornness forbade such a move, however. He walked softly toward the
place where the hallway dead-ended and became a cross-corridor. He made
the turn carefully, pressed against one wall. There was no one in sight.
He got to the stairway and started down.

His muscles and nerves tightened with each step. When he reached the
lobby he was ready to jump sky-high at the drop of a pin.

But no one dropped any pins, and he reached the modernistic glass
doorway to the drugstore with only silence screaming in his ears. The
door was unlocked. One hinge squeaked slightly as he pushed the door
inward.

It was in the drugstore that Frank found signs of the fourth-floor
intruder. An inside counter near the prescription department was red
with blood. Bandages and first-aid supplies had been unboxed and thrown
around with abandon. Here the man had no doubt administered to his
smashed hand.

But where had he gone? Asleep, probably, in one of the rooms upstairs.
Frank wished fervently for a weapon. Beyond doubt there was not a gun
left in the Loop.

A gun was not the only weapon ever created, though, and Frank searched
the store and found a line of pocket knives still in neat boxes near the
perfume counter.

He picked four of the largest and found, also, a wooden-handled,
lead-tipped bludgeon, used evidently for cracking ice.

Thus armed, he went out through the revolving door. He walked through
streets that were like death under the climbing sun. Through streets and
canyons of dead buildings upon which the new daylight had failed to shed
life or diminish the terror of the night past.

At Dearborn he found the door to the Tribune Public Service Building
locked. He used the ice breaker to smash a glass door panel. The crash
of the glass on the cement was an explosion in the screaming silence. He
went inside. Here the sense of desolation was complete; brought sharply
to focus, probably, by the pigeon holes filled with letters behind the
want-ad counter. Answers to a thousand and one queries, waiting
patiently for someone to come after them.

Before going to the basement and the back files of the Chicago Tribune,