The lowermost girder of the "L" was
immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung
clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.
Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved
his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which
was at this hour dark and untenanted.
In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol
shots woke scandalised echoes.
Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside
the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of
Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through
this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an
iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.
Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in
evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a
disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.
In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up
meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.
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