at opening, still
discernible to her straining eyes, beckoned her, lured her. Better to...

Pinkie had halted again. She bumped into him. And then she felt his lips
press against her ear.

"Here we are!" he breathed. "They got the end room on the right, so's
they could get in an' out with out bein' seen, an so's even Charlie'd
swear they was here all the time. You're too old a bird to fall down,
Nan. If the door's locked, knock--an' give 'em any old kind of a song
an' dance till you gets 'em off their guard. The Pug an' me 'll see you
through. Go it!"

Before Rhoda Gray could reply, Pinkie had stepped suddenly to one
side. A door in front of her, a sliding door it seemed to be, opened
noiselessly, and she could see a faintly lighted, narrow, and very short
passage ahead of her. It appeared to make a right-angled turn just a few
yards in, and what light there was seemed to filter in from around the
corner. And on each side of the passage, before it made the turn, there
was a door, and from the one on the right, through a cracked panel, a
tiny thread of light seeped out.

Her lips moved silently. After all, it was not so perilous. Nobody would
be hurt. Pinkie and the Pug would cover those two men in there--and take
the money--and run for it--and...

The Pug gave her an encouraging push from behind.

She moved forward mechanically. There were many sounds now, but they
came muffled and indeterminate from around that corner ahead--all save
a low murmuring of voices from the door with the cracked panel on the
right.

It was only a few feet. She found herself crouched before the door--but
she did not knock upon it. Instead, her blood seemed suddenly to run
cold in her veins, and she beckoned frantically to her two companions.
She could see through the crack in the panel. There were two men in
there, French Pete and Marny Day undoubtedly, and they sat on opposite
sides of a table, and a lamp burned on the table, and one of the men
was counting out a sheaf of crisp yellow-back banknotes--but the other,
while apparently engrossed in the first man's occupation, and while he
leaned forward in apparent eagerness, was edging one hand stealthily
toward the lamp, and his other hand, hidden from his companion's view
by the table, was just drawing a revolver from his pocket. There was no
mistaking the man's murderous intentions. A dull horror, that numbed her
brain, seized upon Rhoda Gray; the low-type brutal faces under the rays