Marihuana Read Online Free

gentlemen." That convinced him of who the newcomers were and what they were here for; it sounded like the sort of grudging permission that might be given to detectives forcing their way in. The chains had gone up again. A follow-up tread went by, after the others. The silence fell again.
     
    He couldn't linger. He had to get out, now more than ever. He widened the door, looked out, gun still bare in death's-head fist. Their retreating tread was still vibrating at the upper end of the interminable hall. The lookout seemed to be accompanying them to the front — further evidence, to him, that they were punitive agents — he could see the receding blur of his white shirt dwindling in the gloom.
     
    He was at the door by now, palsied hand to chain. He had to pocket the gun, for the first time since he'd had it, to free both hands. He got one off the groove with little more than a faint clash. Someone gave a hoarse cry of alarm down at the other end — that meant they'd finally discovered her. Then a great welter, a hubbub, of voices sounded. There was a lurking note of the crazed laughter of marihuana somewhere in the bedlam.
     
    The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out, and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet.
     
    Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guardrail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is!" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight.
     
    Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining.
     
    Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs ended. He tore out through a square of blackness at the end of the entrance-hall, and the kindly night took him to itself — along with countless other things that stalk and kill and are dangerous if crossed.
     
    He had no knowledge of where he was; if he'd ever had, he'd lost it long ago. The drums of pursuit were still beating a rolling tattoo inside the tenement. He chose a direction at random, fled down the deserted street, the wand of light from a wan street-lamp flicking him in passing, so fast did he scurry by beneath it.
     
    A corner opened out before him, and he went skidding around it on the sides of his shoes. He was on an avenue now, where there was more light, and instinct warned him not to go so fast for he was automatically inviting pursuit and seizure by whatever passers-by he encountered. A man coming out of a saloon stepped back just in time to avoid being hurled down, and hollered maudlin imprecations after him, any one of which might have elicited sudden lead-spattering death for an answer, had he but known it.
     
    Another corner, and he'd put two bends in the line of direct vision between himself and his pursuers. But he couldn't keep up this pace much longer; his breath was clogging and his heart felt as if it was swelling up like a balloon. He had to put some kind of a barrier around himself, no matter how flimsy, behind which to gain a breathing-spell.
     
    He saw a little candy shop ahead, the kind that the neighborhood kids patronize with their pennies, casting a weak swath of