Part 27

I led the way with comparative familiarity. It was, you will remember, my third similar excursion. With Sperry behind me I felt confident.

“In case the door is locked, I have a few skeleton keys,” said Sperry.

We had reached the end of the narrow passage, and emerged into the square of brick and grass that lay behind the house. While the night was clear, the place lay in comparative darkness. Sperry stumbled over something, and muttered to himself.

The rear porch lay in deep shadow. We went up the steps together. Then Sperry stopped, and I advanced to the doorway. It was locked.

With my hand on the door-knob, I turned to Sperry. He was struggling violently with a dark figure, and even as I turned they went over with a crash and rolled together down the steps. Only one of them rose.

I was terrified. I confess it. It was impossible to see whether it was Sperry or his assailant. If it was Sperry who lay in a heap on the ground, I felt that I was lost. I could not escape. The way was blocked, and behind me the door, to which I now turned frantically, was a barrier I could not move.

Then, out of the darkness behind me, came Sperry’s familiar, booming bass. “I’ve knocked him out, I’m afraid. Got a match, Horace?”

Much shaken, I went down the steps and gave Sperry a wooden toothpick, under the impression that it was a match. That rectified, we bent over the figure on the bricks.

“Knocked out, for sure,” said Sperry, “but I think it’s not serious. A watchman, I suppose. Poor devil, we’ll have to get him into the house.”

The lock gave way to manipulation at last, and the door swung open. There came to us the heavy odor of all closed houses, a combination of carpets, cooked food, and floor wax. My nerves, now taxed to their utmost, fairly shrank from it, but Sperry was cool.

He bore the brunt of the weight as we carried the watchman in, holding him with his arms dangling, helpless and rather pathetic. Sperry glanced around.

“Into the kitchen,” he said. “We can lock him in.”

We had hardly laid him on the floor when I heard the slow stride of the officer of the beat. He had turned into the paved alley-way, and was advancing with measured, ponderous steps. Fortunately I am an agile man, and thus I was able to get to the outer door, reverse the key and turn it from the inside, before I heard him hailing the watchman.

“Hello there!” he called. “George, I say! George!”

He listened for a moment, then came up and tried the door. I crouched inside, as guilty as the veriest house-breaker in the business. But he had no suspicion, clearly, for he turned and went away, whistling as he went.

Not until we heard him going down the street again, absently running his night-stick along the fence palings, did Sperry or I move.

“A narrow squeak, that,” I said, mopping my face.

“A miss is as good as a mile,” he observed, and there was a sort of exultation in his voice. He is a born adventurer.

He came out into the passage and quickly locked the door behind him.

“Now, friend Horace,” he said, “if you have anything but toothpicks for matches, we will look for the overcoat, and then we will go upstairs.”

“Suppose he wakens and raises an alarm?”

“We’ll be out of luck. That’s all.”

As we had anticipated, there was no overcoat in the library, and after listening a moment at the kitchen door, we ascended a rear staircase to the upper floor. I had, it will be remembered, fallen from a chair on a table in the dressing room, and had left them thus overturned when I charged the third floor. The room, however, was now in perfect order, and when I held my candle to the ceiling, I perceived that the bullet hole had again been repaired, and this time with such skill that I could not even locate it.

“We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry,” I acknowledged.

“And who has more to lose than we have to gain,” he added cheerfully. “Don’t worry about that, Horace. You’re a married man and I’m not. If a woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose a curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in. Not in his dressing-room, eh?”

He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells’s bedroom. Here, however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss, had I not remembered my wife’s custom of folding draperies when we close the house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which cover the various beds.

Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various excursions on my part to listen for the watchman. But he remained quiet below, and finally we found what we were looking for. In the lining of one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged cut had been made.

“Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors,” was Sperry’s comment. “Probably manicure scissors.”