Excerpt from The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor He must have been seventy years old at least, but, as he sat there dictating his last will and testament, his gray head was erect, his steel-gray eyes never wavered in their fixed gaze, and there was no sign of weakness in his hard, almost cruel, mouth. Only a few wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth betrayed the grim humor that was characteristic of the man - a biting humor which had made many a timid witness wince and the barbed arrows of which had been driven into friend and toe alike and left there, quivering. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.