"It's a holdup," said McCarthy sullenly drawing a tablet toward himself, and thrusting the stub of a pencil into his mouth. "A beneficent and just holdup," added Darrow; "the first of its kind in this city." McCarthy glared at him malevolently. "It don't go unless you deliver the goods," he threatened. "Understood," agreed Darrow. "What's his name?" demanded McCarthy, withdrawing the pencil stub, and preparing to write. "His name," answered Darrow, "is John Warford, Junior." McCarthy started to his feet with a bellow of rage, his face turning purple. "Of all the infernal--!" he roared, and stopped, as though stricken dumb. For two or three words further his mouth and throat went through the motions of speech. Then an expression of mingled fear and astonishment overspread his countenance. He sank back into his chair. Percy Darrow nodded twice and smiled. CHAPTER VII A WORLD OF GHOSTS A deathly stillness had all at once fallen like a blanket, blotting out McCarthy's violent speech. The rattling typewriter in the next room was abruptly stilled. The roar of the city died as a living creature is cut by the sword--all at once, without the transitionary running down of most silences. Absolute dense stillness, like that of a sea calm at night, took the place of the customary city noises. In his astonishment McCarthy thrust a heavy inkstand off the edge of his desk. It hit the floor, spilled, rolled away; but noiselessly, as would the inkstand in a moving picture. To have one's world thus suddenly stricken dumb, to be transported orally from the roar of a city to the peace of a woodland or a becalmed sea is certainly astonishing enough. But this silence was particularly terrifying to both McCarthy and Jack Warford, though neither would have been able to analyze the reason for its weirdness. For silence is in reality a composite of many lesser noises. In a woodland almost inaudible insects hum, breezes blow, leaves and grasses rustle; at sea the tiny waves lap the sides and equally tiny breaths of air stir the cordage; within the confines of the human shell the mere physical acts of breathing, swallowing, winking, the mere physical facts of the circulation of the blood, the beating of the heart, produce each its sound. Even a man totally deaf feels the subtle influence of these latter physical phenomena. And underneath all sound, perceptible alike to those who can hear and those who can not, are the vibrations that accompany every activity of nature as the manifestations of motion or of life. An ordinary deep silence is not so much an absence of sound as an absence of accustomed or loud sound. And in that unusual hush often for the first time a man becomes acutely aware of the singing of the blood in his ears. But this silence was absolute. All these minor sounds had been eliminated.