"Go on!" she commanded in menacing accents.
He pulled the door open, flung out into the hallway, paused again at
the mouth of the back pit of the stairway.
Behind him the woman snapped a switch; an electric bulb glared out of
the darkness. And P. Sybarite, peering down, started back with a gasp
of amazement that was echoed in his ear.
On the stairs, halfway down, a man was crouching in a posture of
frozen consternation: a small electric pocket-lamp burning brilliantly
in one hand, the other, lifted, grasping a weapon of some curious
sort, in the eyes of P. Sybarite more than anything else like, a small
black cannon: a hatless man in evening clothes, his face half blotted
out by a black mask that, enhancing the brightness of startled eyes
gleaming through its peepholes, left uncovered only his angular
muscular jaw and ugly, twisted mouth.
For a full minute (it seemed) not one of the three so much as drew
breath; while through the haze of dumfounderment in P. Sybarite's
brain there loomed the fact that once again _Kismet_ had played into
his hands to save his face in thus lending material body and substance
to the burglar of his desperate invention.
And then, as if from a heart of agony, the woman at his side breathed
a broken and tortured cry:
"You dog! So it's come to murder, has it?"
As if electrified by that ejaculation, P. Sybarite whipped up
Penfield's revolver and levelled it at the man on the stairs.
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