He stepped into the room. It was dark. His fingers groped along the
wall for the button to throw on the light. Before he found it a sound
startled him.

It was the soft faint panting of some one breathing.

He was a man whose nerves were under the best of control, but the cold
feet of mice pattered up and down his spine. Something was wrong. The
sixth sense of danger that comes to some men who live constantly in
peril was warning him.

"Who's there?" he asked sharply.

No voice replied, but there was a faint rustle of some one or some
thing stirring.

He waited, crouched in the darkness.

There came another vague rustle of movement. And presently another,
this time closer. Every sense in him was alert, keyed up to closest
attention. He knew that some one, for some sinister purpose, had come
into this apartment and been trapped here by him.

The moments flew. He thought he could hear his hammering heart. A
stifled gasp, a dozen feet from him, was just audible.

He leaped for the sound. His outflung hand struck an arm and slid down
it, caught at a small wrist, and fastened there. In the fraction of a
second left him he realized, beyond question, that it was a woman he