Explore "Elusive Isabel" by Jacques Futrelle on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A room, low-ceilinged, dim, gloomy, sinister as an inquisition chamber; a single large table in the center, holding a kerosene lamp, writing materials and a metal spheroid a shade larger than a one-pound shell; and around it a semicircle of silent, masked and cowled figures. There were twelve of them, eleven men and a woman. In the shadows, which grew denser at the far end of the room, was a squat, globular object, a massive, smooth-sided, black, threatening thing of iron.
One of the men glanced at his watch -- it was just two o'clock -- then rose and took a position beside the table, facing the semicircle. He placed the timepiece on the table in front of him.