The doctor came running into the moonlit room, but not for a minute; it
looked as though he had run out first into the road. In the room he lit
the gas, and Pocket saw him have a look in all the corners, but hardly
the look of a seeker who expects to find. Some long moments he stood
out horribly at the open window, gazing straight at the spot where the
fugitive crouched a few inches out of the moonlight and hugged the
revolver in his pocket. He seemed to see nothing to bring him out that
way, for he closed that window and put out the gas. The trembling
watcher heard the front door shut soon after, and saw another light in
Baumgartner’s room the minute after that, and the blind drawn down. But
on the blind there lagged a cloud-capped shadow till the doctor’s pipe
was well in blast.
There were no more shadows after that. The moon moved round to the
right, and set behind the next house. The sky grew pale, and the
lighted blind paler still, until Baumgartner drew it up before putting
out his light. Pocket was now too stiff to stir; but it was not
necessary; the doctor had scarcely looked out. There was a twitter of
sparrows all down the road, garden answering to garden. The sun came up
behind Pocket’s wall, behind the taller houses further back. And
Baumgartner reappeared at his window for one instant in his cap.
The front door shut again.
Down the garden ran Pocket without the least precaution now. There was
a gravel passage between the tradesmen’s entrance, on the detached side
of the house, and the garden wall. This passage was closed by a gate,
and the gate was locked, but Pocket threw himself over it almost in his
stride and darted over into the open road.
Just then it was a perfectly empty road, but for a gaunt black figure
stalking away in the distance. An overwhelming curiosity urged the boy
to follow, but an equal dread of detection kept him cowering in
gateways, until Baumgartner took the turning past the shops without a
backward glance. Pocket promptly raced to that corner, and got another
glimpse of his leader before he vanished round the next. So the
spasmodic chase continued over a zigzag course; but at every turn the
distance between them was a little less. Neither looked round, and once
the boy’s feet were actually on the man’s shadow; for half the streets
were raked with level sunlight, but the other half were ladders of
dusk with rungs of light at the gaps between the houses. All were
dustier, dirtier, and emptier than is ever the case by night or day,
because this was neither one nor the other, though the sun was up to
make the most of dust, dirt, and emptiness. It was before even the
cleansing hour of the scavenger and the water-cart. A dead cat was
sprawling horribly in one deserted reach of wood-paving. And a
motor-car at full speed in a thoroughfare calling itself King’s Road,
which Pocket was about to cross, had at all events the excuse of a
visible mile of asphalt to itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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