Presently he opened the door again.  A child had crept up to the doorstep and sat prattling to her tattered doll.  He stepped aside so as not to disturb her, shut the door with a sharp bang, and walked swiftly to the edge of the cliff.  But this time he plunged down.  He looked back once.  Not a soul followed him.

CHAPTER XXIV

He was sitting on a pile of lumber when, an hour later, his thoughts began to run in rational channels again.  Before him lay a patch of gray-green bay, flanked on either side by wharves upon which two black-hulled lumber schooners were disgorging their resinous cargo.  The strike of the longshoremen was still in progress and the Embarcadero as good as deserted.  Armed guards paraded before the entrance to the docks and only occasional idlers sunned themselves and viewed the silent and furtive loading of restive craft straining at their moorings.

He began to wonder dimly whether he had left Storch dead or merely stunned, and, granting either alternative, how definitely this circumstance would halt the plot against Hilmer’s life.  It was conceivable to him now that Storch might have provided against the possibility of failure, given the role of assassin into the hands of an understudy, to be exact.  Suppose Ginger should fail in her warning?  Not that he doubted her, but there was a chance that she had been hedged about with all manner of difficulties—­perhaps even death.  Suddenly with an arresting irrelevance he thought of the child upon Storch’s doorstep, hugging her doll close, and as swiftly he remembered the black kodak case upon the center table.  He wondered if the child were still sitting there ...  Perhaps, by this time, a swarm of children were tumbling about the weather-beaten steps.  He asked a passer-by the hour.  Eleven-thirty!  In fifteen more minutes, if the ticking clock within that sinister case performed its function, Storch’s dwelling would be tumbling in upon his prostrate body.  And, in the face of this, children might be prattling before the threshold.  He must go back again!

He jumped to his feet and began to run.  In an instant a conflagration of potential disasters leaped up from the spark of the immediate danger.  He flew along faster, colliding with irate pedestrians, escaping the wheels of skimming automobiles ...  Presently the familiar cliff and the tawny path scaling it loomed ahead.  He began to climb upward, almost on all-fours, digging his finger nails into the yellow clay in an instinctive effort to pull himself forward.  Finally he gained the top ...  The street, somnolent with approaching noon, was deserted—­the child had disappeared.  He recovered his whirling senses and looked again.  This time he saw that the door of the shack stood open.  He took a step forward.  A figure loomed in the doorway.  He shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare and narrowed his lids.  It was a woman!

The unexpectedness of this presence overwhelmed him as completely as if he had seen an apparition.  For an instant he did not grasp its significance.