Hawkins crowded the bottle into the side pocket of his coat, passed out through the swinging doors, and resumed his seat on the car. And again the car started forward. But it went faster now. Hawkins' face was flushed; he seemed nervously and excitedly in haste. At the driveway he turned in, garaged his car in an old shed at the rear of one of the houses, locked the shed with a padlock, and, by way of the back door, entered the house that was in front of the shed. It was quite dark inside, but Hawkins had been an inmate of the somewhat seedy rooming-house too many years either to expect that a light should be burning at that hour, or, for that matter, to require any light. He groped his way up a flight of creaking stairs, opened the door of a room, and stepped inside. He shut the door behind him, locked it, and struck a match. A gas-jet wheezed asthmatically, and finally flung a thin and sullen yellow glow about the place. It disclosed a cot bed, a small strip of carpet long since worn bare of nap, a washstand, an old trunk, a battered table, and two chairs. Hawkins, with some difficulty, extricated the bottle from his pocket, and lifted the lid of his trunk. He thrust the bottle inside, and in the act of closing the lid upon it--hesitated. “I--I ain't myself to-night, I ain't,” said Hawkins tremulously. “It's shook me, it has--bad. Just one--so help me God!--just one.” Hawkins sat down at the table with the bottle in front of him. And while Hawkins sat there it grew very late. At intervals Hawkins talked to himself. At times he stared owlishly from a half-emptied bottle to the black square of window pane above the trunk--and once he shook his fist in that direction. “Crang--eh--damn you!” he gritted out. “You think you got her, do you? Some dirty, cunning trick you've played her! But you don't know old Hawkins. Ha, ha! You think he's only a drunken bum!” Hawkins, as it grew later still, became unsteady in his seat. Gradually his head sank down upon the table. “I--hie!--gotta think this--out,” said Hawkins earnestly--and fell asleep. CHAPTER SIX--THE ALIBI |JOHN BRUCE opened his eyes dreamily, unseeingly; and then his eyelids fluttered and closed again. There was an exquisite sense of languor upon him, of cool, comfortable repose; a curious absence of all material things. It seemed as though he were in some suspended state of animation. It was very strange. It wasn't life--not life as he had ever known it. Perhaps it was death. He did not understand.