The Yellow Hoard

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The building was narrow, four stories tall, and of old brick. It was like most buildings around Washington Square — tall and narrow, once the residence of a rich man, now made over into apartments.

There was no hint of deadliness in the building. There was no hint of deadliness anywhere in the lower New York neighborhood, for that matter.

Kids skated on the curving walks. Nurses wheeled babies and stopped to talk to policemen. Nobody looked at the building at all.

Least of all did a man walking west on the upper end of the square notice it. He didn’t have buildings anywhere, of any kind, on his mind. He was going to the Sixth Avenue drugstore of a friend of his named MacMurdie.

The man walking on the upper end of the square was enormous. He was six feet nine and weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds, and none of it was fat. He was fifty-three inches around the chest and wore a size nineteen collar. When he walked, his arms hung crooked at his sides. There was too much lumped muscle under them to allow them to hang straight.

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