The Fear Merchants

HIGH UP, on the fourteenth floor of the big warehouse that faced the river, four men stole forward with the swift, silent steps of stalking ghouls. A wide corridor stretched before them, murky with night shadows, and dank with the dampness of neglect. The certainty of their movements as they passed along was grim proof that what they did had been carefully rehearsed.

At the corridor’s farther end, a high window rose. The leader of the quartet stopped abruptly when he came to this. He was a big man, ruggedly built, with features that suggested cubist art. His head was almost square. His mouth was a straight line across a square-cut jaw. His eyebrows formed a higher line set at right angles to the jutting down sweep of his nose.

The others saw his profile outlined dimly against the faint glow that crept up from the street factory building that lay dark and still below. They watched as he softly raised the sash. They saw For seconds he peered at this, eyes squinted up, and he poked his head cautiously into the chill night air face stonily intent. Then he pulled himself in and stared down three stories to the roof of the turned. There was a faint click as his electric flash went on. Holding the light cupped deftly in the palm of his big hand, he let its beam fall on the features of his companions, studying each as he had studied the roof below.

Two were young, hard-bitten like himself; men with the steely eyes and the grim mouths of fighters; men picked for physical courage and mental poise–operatives of the Bates Detective Agency, one of the most efficient private crime-fighting organizations in the city.

The third man looked strange by contrast. Trampish, elderly, unkempt, his gray hair wisped down over a seamed old face. Rumpled and faded clothing hung on a body that seemed to have lost the limberness of youth. He stood with drooping shoulders, staring listlessly at the floor.

The holder of the flashlight scowled. “You’d better wait here, Peaselee.”

The shabby man shook his head, “No, Mr. Bates, I will make it. Mr.