Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 6 (1926-06).djvu/13

himself out of bed. Then suddenly he realized that the numbing fumes were real; that his room fairly reeked with them. In an instant he was before the open window, gulping great lungfuls of the air. It was daylight; the sun was beginning to gild the tops of the highest buildings; already it had rolled back the fog which blankets San Francisco for the night. The fresh morning air chilled him and awoke all his senses.

Chloroform! That was the smell! He remembered a brief stay in a hospital and——— But whence did it come? His first thought was that perhaps he had been drugged and robbed, but investigation proved that his room had not been entered. Then he located the origin of the odor; it penetrated around the door between his room and the next to the right.

"Suicide!" John Powell forced himself to consider the idea. Perhaps. Again, it might bo some fumigant which he detected, or some insomnia victim seeking easy sleep. He checked his impulse to telephone for the house detective, and knocked loudly on the door to the next room. There was no response. He knocked louder. Still no sign of life. A moment more he hesitated, then he walked to the room telephone.

"Who's in Room 710?" he asked.

"Mr. Hubbard and Miss Hubbard have rooms 710 and 712," came the quick response. "Shall I have the operator ring them?"

"No thanks, not now." Powell wanted time to think, to decide how far he should allow suspicion to carry him.

He tried the door again; it was bolted on the other side. "Curiosity, thy name is John Powell!" he murmured, stepping back from the door, preparatory to charging it.

Powell had learned line-bucking under the tutelage of one Coach Yost; he hit the door low and hard, then grimaced as he rubbed a bruised shoulder and contemplated the unmoved door. He placed a pillow on his shoulder for a pad, crossed the room and took a running start. But for all its grained veneer the door was steel, set in a steel frame.

"Third down and nothing gained," Powell muttered. "Try a forward pass!"

He hastily donned trousers and coat, then went to the window. By clinging tightly to the right edge of his own window frame he was able to swing his feet across to the sill of room 710. He contorted and twisted, but couldn't balance his body, and hung dangling eighty feet above the sidewalk. Cautiously he released one hand from the frame behind him, grasped the brick-edge ahead and swung across, feeling one dangerous second of flight through space.

Immediately all thought of past peril left him, for through the closed window he saw a man's body sprawled grotesquely on the floor, blankets around his feet, his arms warped behind him. Glass tinkled on the pavement below as John Powell threw himself through the windows. Fumes, the sickish, sweet odor of chloroform smote him, almost drove him back, but he ran across the room and opened the door into the hall. Drafts of fresh air were established, carrying away the deadening fumes. Powell lifted the man from the floor and carried him to the window. There he flexed the inert body. It was several minutes before the man began to gulp the air.

"June!" he cried. "June!"

John Powell held a glass of water to Mr. Hubbard's blue lips. At last the older man spoke, rapidly, incoherently. Piece by piece Powell grasped the story, the sudden night attack, the conviction that his daughter had been stolen, the experience of the previous afternoon,—these Mr.