IT WAS well after two, in the dullest ebb of earth's deadest hour, when Benson lifted the portiere and stepped into my room.

   I put down the book at which my brain had been scratching like a dog scratching at a closed door.

   I looked up at my servant a little listlessly and yet a little puzzled by what was plainly a studied calmness of appearance.

   "Benson, why aren't you in bed?"

   "If you'll pardon me, sir," began the intruder, "I've a gentleman here."

   He was so extraordinarily cool about it that I rose like a fish at the flash of something unusual.

   "At this time of the night?" I inquired.

   "Yes, sir."

   "But what kind of gentleman, Benson?"

   Benson hesitated: it was the sort of hesitation that is able to translate silence into an apology.

   "I think, sir, it's a burglar."

   "A what?" I demanded, incredulous.

   "The fact is, sir, I 'appened to hear him at the lock. When he forced the door, sir, not being able to work the lock, I was waiting for him."

   "This sounds rather interesting, Benson. Be so good as to show the gentleman up."

   I sat down, with a second look at the dragging hands of the French clock. But Benson still seemed a trifle ill at ease.

   "I — I took the liberty of tying him up a bit, sir," explained the servant, "being compelled, as it were, to use a bit of force."

   "Of course. Then untie him as much as necessary and fetch him here. And you might bring up a bottle of La Fitte and a bite to eat. For two, if you please, Benson!"

   "Yes, sir," he answered. But still he hesitated.

   "The revolver, sir, is in the cabinet drawer on your left, sir."

   "We won't need the revolver, Benson. What I most need. I fancy, is amusement, distraction, excitement, anything — anything to get me through this endless hades of a night!"

   I could feel my voice rise on the closing words, like the uprear of a terrified race horse. It was not a good sign. I got up and paced the rug, like a cast-away pacing some barren and empty island. But here, I told myself, was a timely footprint. I waited, as breathless as a Crusoe awaiting his Friday.

   I waited so long that I was beginning to dread some mishap. Then the portieres parted for the second time, and Benson led the burglar into the room.

   I experienced, as I looked at him, a distinct sense of disappointment. He was not at all what I expected. The thing that that impressed me was his slenderness, an almost feline sort of slenderness. The thing I next remarked was that he was very badly frightened, so frightened, in fact, that his face was the tint of a rather soiled white glove. He stood before me for all the world as though a hospital interne had been practicing abstruse bandaging feats on his body, so neatly and yet so firmly had the redoubtable Benson hobbled him and swathed his arms in half dozen of my best Irish linen table napkins. Over these again, had been wound and buckled a trunk strap. Benson had not skimped his job.

   My hope for any diverting talk along the more picaresque avenues of life was depressingly short-lived. The man remained both sullen and silent. Blood still dripped slowly down the back of his soiled collar, where Benson's neat welt had abraded the scalp.

   Yet his eyes, all the time, were alert enough. To fire questions at him was as futile as throwing pebbles at an alligator. He had determined, apparently not to open his lips; though his glance, all this time, was never an idle or empty one. I gave up with a touch of anger.

   "Frisk him," I told the waiting Benson. "See if he's carrying a gun. Search his pockets — every one of them."

   This Benson did, with an engaging mixture of muffled caution and open repugnance.

   The result of that search was quite encouraging. From one pocket came an ugly, short-barreled Colt. From another came two skeleton keys and a few inches of copper wire bent into a coil. From still another came a small electric flashlight. Under our burglar's coat, with one end resting in his left-hand waistcoat pocket, was a twenty-inch steel jimmy. It was a very attractive tool, not unlike a long and extremely slender stove lifter, with a tip-tilted end. I found it suggestive of tremendous leverage power, tempting one to test its strength.

   From the right-hand waistcoat pocket Benson produced a lady's gold watch, two tiger rings, a gold barette, and a foot or two of old-fashioned locket chain of solid gold. There was nothing to show who the owner of this jewelry might be.

   "I suppose you just bought this at Tiffany's?" I inquired. His passivity was beginning to get on my nerves. He might have been a wax figure in the Eden Musee, were it not for those reptiliously alert and ever-exasperating eyes. I stood up and confronted him.

   I want to know where this stuff came from."

   The white-faced burglar still looked at me out of those sullen and rebellious eyes. But not a word passed his lips.

   "Then we'll investigate a little further," I said, eyeing his somewhat protuberant breastbone. "Go on with the search, Benson, and get everything." For it was plain that our visitor, before honoring us that night, had called at other homes.

   I watched Benson with increasing interest as his fastidiously exploring hand went down inside the burglar's opened waistcoat. I saw him feel about there, and as he did so I caught a change of expression on our prisoner's face. The man was not snakelike. He was like a cornered rat. Rat seemed written all over him.

   But at that moment my eyes went back to Benson, for I had seen his hand bring away a small vase partly wrapped in a pocket handkerchief. This handkerchief was extremely dirty.

   I took the vase from his hand, drawing away the rag that screened it. Only by an effort, as I did so, was I able to conceal my surprise.

   For one glance at that slender little column of sang-de-boeuf porcelain told me what it was. There was no possibility of mistake. One glimpse was enough. It was from the Gubtill collection. For once before my fingers had caressed the same glaze and the same tender contours. Once before, and under vastly different circumstances, I had weighed that delicate tube of porcelain in my contemplative hands.

   I sat back and looked at it more carefully. Then I looked back at the delicate lip, the lip that once had been injured and artfully banded with a ring of gold. It was a vase of the K'anghsi period, a rare and beautiful specimen among the Yang Lao monochromes. And history said that thirty years before it had been purchased from the sixth Prince of Pekin, and had always been known as "The Flame."

   Both Anthony Gubtill and I had bid for that vase. But an inexplicably reckless mood had overtaken that parsimonious old collector, and he had won. The day after the Graves sale I had been a member of that decorously appreciative dinner party which had witnessed the vase's installation between a rather valuable peachbloom amphora of haricot red groundwork with rose spots accentuated by the usual clouds of apple green, and a taller, and, to my mind, much more valuable ashes-of-roses cylindrical Yang Lao with a carved ivory base. We had looked on the occasion as somewhat of an event, for such things naturally are not picked up every day. And now the mere sight of the vase took me back to the Gubtill home, to that rich and spacious house on lower Fifth Avenue where I had spent not a few happy evenings.

   I put the vase down on my table and turned away from it, not caring to betray my interest in it, or to give to the ratlike eyes still watching me any inkling of my true feelings.

   I turned and looked the criminal up and down. I noticed, for the first time, that his face was beaded with sweat.

   "Might I inquire just what you intend doing with this?" I asked, gazing back, against ray will, at that fragile little treasure known as "The Flame."

   The man moved uneasily, for the first time. For the first time, too, he spoke.

   "Give it to its owner," he said.

   "And who is its owner?"

   He looked from me to the vase and then back again.

   "It belongs to a pal o' mine, over on Fifth Avenue."

   "And where did you get it?"

   "Out o' hock."

   I could not restrain a touch of anger as my glance fell on the all too eloquent implements of burglary.

   "And you expect me to swallow this?" I demanded.

   "I don't give a damn what you swallow. I know the trut' when I'm sayin' it."

   "And you're telling me the truth?" I found it hard to keep my anger within bounds.

   "Sure!" was his curt answer.

   "That's a cowardly lie," I cried out at him. "You're a coward and a liar, like all your sneaking kind that skulk about in the dark corners and crawl under beds and arm yourself to the teeth and stand ready to murder innocent women, to strike them down in the dark, rather than be found out! It's cowardice, the lowest and meanest kind of cowardice!"

   The sweat stood out on his face in glistening drops.

   "What's eatin' you, anyway?" he demanded. "What've I done?"

   I pushed the cluster of women's jewelry closer to him. "You've done some of the meanest and dirtiest work a man can stoop to. You've skulked and crawled and slunk through the dark to rob women and children!"

   "Who's given you a license to call me a coward?"

   "Do you dare to intimate there's anything but low and arrant cowardice in work like this?"

   "Just try it!" he said, with a grin that made his face hideous.

   "Why should I try it?" I demanded. "Do you suppose because I don't carry a jimmy and a gun that I can't face honest danger when I need to?"

   I glanced round at my den walls, studded with trophies as they were, from the bull-moose antlers over the fireplace to the leopard pelt under my heels. The other man followed my glance, but with a lip-curl of contempt.

   "Bah," he said, apparently glad to crowd me off into some less personal side issue "That's all play actin'! Get up against what I have, and you'd tone down your squeal! Then you'd walk into the real thing!"

   "The real thing, black-jacking chambermaids and running like a pelted cur at the sight of a brass button!"

   I could see his sudden wince, and that it took an effort for him to speak.

   "You'd find it took nerve, all right, all right," he retorted.

   My movement of contempt brought him a step or two nearer. But it was Benson who spoke first.

   "Hadn't we better have the police, sir?" he suggested. The burglar, with his eyes on my face, stepped still closer, as though to shoulder any such suggestion as Benson's out of the issue.

   "You just go out in the middle of the night," he went on with derisive volubility. "Go out at night and look at a house. Stand off and look at it good and plenty. Then ask yourself who's inside, and what's doin' behind them brick walls, and who's awake, and where a shot's goin' to come from, and what chances of a get-away you'll have, and the size of the bit you'll get if you're pinched! Just stand there and tell yourself you've got to get inside that house and make your haul and get away with the goods — that you've got to do it, or go with empty guts! Try it, and see if it takes nerve!"

   I must have touched his professional pride. I had trifled with that ethical totem pole that is known as honor among thieves.

   "All right," I said, suddenly turning on him as the inspiration came to me. "We'll try it, and we'll try it together. For I'm going to make you take this stuff back, and take it back tonight."

   I could see his face cloud. Then a second change came over it. His ratlike eyes actually began to twinkle.

   "I think we ought to have the police, sir," reiterated Benson, remembering, doubtless, his encounter below stairs. "He's an uncommon tricky one, sir."

   I saw, on more sober second thought, that it would be giving my friend too much rope, too many chances for treachery. And he would not be over nice in his methods, I knew, now that I had him cornered. A second idea occurred to me, a rather intoxicating one.

   "Benson," I said. "I'm going to leave this worthy gentleman here with you. And while you look after him, I'm going to return this peachbloom vase to its owner."

   "He ain't in town tonight," broke in my troubled burglar.

   "And to demonstrate to his somewhat cynical cast of mind that there's nothing extraordinary in his particular line of activity. I propose to return it in the same manner that it was taken."

   Benson looked troubled.

   "You will make yourself comfortable here with this gallant gentleman of the blackjack — and keep this handsome Colt of his quite close about you while you're doing it. For I'm going to take this piece of porcelain back where it belongs, even though I have to face a dozen lap-dogs and frighten every housemaid of the neighborhood of Twelfth Street into hysterics!"

   I might have waited decorously until daylight, or I might have quietly ascended the wide stone steps and continued to ring the electric pushbell until a sleepy servant answered it. But that, after all, seemed absurdly tame and commonplace. It was without the slightest tang of drama. And I was as waywardly impatient to try that enticing tip-tilted instrument of steel on an opposing door as a boy with a new knife is to whittle on the nursery woodwork.

   I could no longer deny that it took a certain crude form of nerve. I was convinced of this, indeed, as I saw the approaching figure of a patrolman on his rounds.

   I experienced a distinct glow of satisfaction as the patroling footsteps passed northward up the quietness of the avenue.

   But the house itself seemed as impregnable as a fortress. It disheartened me a little to find that not even a basement grill had been disturbed. I turned and sauntered slowly toward Sixth Avenue. As I swung eastward again I found that the last house on the side street, the house abutting the Fifth Avenue mansion which was the object of my attack, stood vacant. Of that there could be no doubt. Its doors and windows were sealed with neatly painted shutters. This, it occurred to me, might mark a possible line of approach. But here again I faced what seemed an impregnable position. I was backing away a little, studying that boarded and coffinlike front, when my heel grated against the iron covering of a coal shute. This coal shute stood midway between the curb and the area railing. I looked down at it for a moment or two. Something prompted me to test its edge with the toe of my shoe. Then, making quite sure that the street was empty. I stooped down and clutched at the edge of the iron disk. It was quite heavy. But one tug at it showed me that its lock chain had been forced apart.

   It took but a moment to lift the metal shield to one side of the shute head. It took but another moment to lower myself to work the iron disk back over the opening. It also required many strange contortions of the body to worm my way down into that narrow and dirty tunnel.

   My rather peremptory advent into the coal bin resulted in a startling amount of noise, noise enough to wake the soundest of sleepers. So I crouched there for several seconds, inhaling dust and listening and wondering whether or not the walls above me harbored a caretaker. Then I took out the pocket searchlight and with the pressure of a finger directed my ray of illumination against a wooden partition bisected by a painted wooden door.

   A distinct sense of disappointment swept through me as I stooped down to examine this door and found that it had already been forced open. I knew, however, that I was following in the footsteps of my more experienced predecessor. Then came a storeroom, and then a laundry room, with another jimmied door at the head of the stairway leading to the first floor.

   Here I stood waiting and listening for some time. But still again nothing but darkness and silence and that musty aroma peculiar to unoccupied houses surrounded me. I felt more at home by this time, and was more leisurely in my survey of the passage upward. I began to admire my friend the burglar's astuteness In choosing so circuitous and yet so protected a path. There was almost genius in it. His advance, I felt sure, was toward the roof. As I had expected, I found the scuttle open. The lock, I could see, had been quite cleverly picked. And so far there had not been a mishap.

   Once out on the housetop, however, I foresaw that I would have to be more careful. As I clambered up to the higher coping tiles that marked the line or the next roof I knew that I had actually broken into the enemy's lines. Yet the way still seemed clear enough. For as I came to the root scuttle of the second house I found that it, too, remained unlocked. My predecessor had made things almost disappointingly easy for me. Yet in other ways he had left things doubly dangerous. I had to bear the brunt of any misstep he might have made. I was being called to face the responsibility of both his intrusion and my own.

   So it was with infinite precaution that I lifted the scuttle and leaned over that little well of darkness, inhaling the warmer air that seeped up in my face.

   It began to dawn on me, as I groped lower and lower down through the darkness, that a burglar's calling was not all beer and skittles. I began to feel a little ashamed of my heroics of an hour before.

   Then I drew up, suddenly, for a sound had crept to my ears. The tingle that ran through my body was not wholly one of fright. Yet as I stood there in the darkness with one hand against the wall, I caught the rhythm of a slow and muffled snoring.

   I was no longer a prey to any feeling of hesitancy. I was already too deep in the woods to think of turning back. My one mission now was to complete the circuit, and emerge on the other side.

   I began to wonder, as I felt for the stair banister and groped my cautious way down the treads, just how the burglar himself had effected that final exit from the house. And the sooner I got away from the sleeping quarters, I felt, the safer I would be. The utter darkness and silence of the lower halls were beginning to get on my nerves. I was glad to feel the newel post, which assured me that I had reached the last step in my descent. I was relieved to be able to turn carefully and silently about to the left, to grope toward a door which I knew stood before me in the gloom, and then cautiously to turn the knob and step inside.

   I knew at once, even before I took the flashlight from my pocket, that I was in the library. And the room that opened off this, I remembered, half cabinet-lined study and half informal exhibition room, was the chamber wherein Anthony Gubtill treasured his curios. It would take but a minute or two, I knew, to replace his priceless little porcelain. And another minute or two, I felt, ought to see me safely out and on my way home.

   I stood with my back to the door, determined that no untimely blunder should mar the end of my adventure. My first precaution was to thrust out my flashlight and make sure of my path. I let the incandescent ray linger interrogatively about the massively furnished room, resting for a moment on marble and metal and glass-fronted bookshelf.

   I let the wavering light travel toward the end of the glimmering and dark-wood reading table. I stood there, picking out remembered object after object, remarking them with singular detachment of mind as my light continued to circle the end of the room.

   Then I quietly made my way to the open door in the rear, and bisecting that second room with my spear of light, satisfied myself that the space between the peachbloom amphora and the ashes-of-roses Yang Lao with the ivory base was indeed empty.

   Then, of a sudden, I stopped breathing. Automatically I let my thumb lift from the current spring of my storage lamp. The light at once went out. I stood there, with every nerve of my body on edge. I crouched forward, tingling and peering into the darkness before me. For I had suddenly discovered that I was not alone in the room.

   There, facing me, picked out as distinctly as a baby spot-light picks out an actor's face. I had seen the owner of the house himself, not ten paces from me. He was sitting in a high-backed armchair of green leather. He must have been watching me from the first, every moment and every movement. He had made no effort to interrupt or intercept me. He had been too sure of his position.

   I waited for what seemed an interminable length of time. But not a sound, beyond the querulous tick of the clock, came to my ears.

   The undefined menace of this silence was too much for me. I moved away, involuntarily, wondering what I should say, and after what fashion I should begin my foolish explanation, I fell slowly back, pawing frenziedly about me for some sustaining tangibility to which to cling. As I did so my body came in contact with some article of furniture — just what, I could not tell. But I shied away from it in a panic, as a colt shies at a fallen newspaper.

   My second movement threw over a second piece of furniture. It must have been some sort of collapsible screen, for it fell to the floor with an echoing crash. I waited, holding my breath, with horripilations of fear nettling every limb of my body, knowing only too well that this must indeed mark the end.

   But there was no movement, no spoken word, no slightest sound. I stared through the darkness, still half expectant. Then the tension became more than I could endure. I actually crept forward a step or two, still peering blindly through the darkness, still listening and waiting.

   Then I caught my breath with a sudden new suspicion, with a quick fear that crashed bulletlike through the film of consciousness. It was followed by a sickening sense of shock, amounting almost to physical nausea.

   I once more raised the flashlight. This time my hand shook perceptibly as I turned the electric ray directly in front of me. I let the minute circle of illumination arrow through the darkness, direct to the white face that seemed to be awaiting it. Then I let it come to a rest.

   I remember falling back a step or two. I may have called out, but of that I am not sure. Yet of one thing I was only too certain. There before me sat Anthony Gubtill. He was quite dead.

   My first feeling was not altogether one of terror. It was accompanied by a surge of indignation at the injustice, at the brutality, of it all.

   I moved toward the dead man, fortified by the knowledge of a vast new obligation. It was only after I had examined the face for the second time and seen how death had been caused by a cruelly heavy blow dealt by some blunt instrument, that the enormity of my own intrusion into that house of horror came home to me. I felt a sudden need for light, for sobering and rationalizing light. Even the ticking from the brazen-faced clock had become something phantasmal and unnerving.

   I groped feverishly and blindly about in search of an electric switch button. Then, of a sudden, I stopped again, my movement arrested by a sound.

   I knew, as I stood and listened, that it was only the purr of an automobile, faint and muffled, from the street outside. But it suddenly brought home to me the awkwardness of my own position. To be found in that house, or even to be seen leaving it, was no longer a desirable thing. And thought came back at a bound to the porcelain in my pocket. I recalled the old-time rivalry between the dead man and myself for "The Flame." I recalled the details of my advent between those walls where I stood. And my blood went cold. It was not a matter of awkwardness, it was a matter of peril. For who, I again asked myself, would believe a story so absurd, or accept an excuse so extravagant?

   The clock ticked on accusingly. The sound of the automobile stopped. I had just noticed this, with much relief, when the thud of a quietly closed door came to my startled ears. Then came the murmur of voices. There was no longer any doubt about the matter. A motor had come to the door and from it certain persons had entered the house.

   I crept to the library and listened. Then I tiptoed back and closed the door of the inner room. I felt more secure with even a half-inch panel between me and what that inner room held.

   Then I listened. I began to hear the padded tread of feet. Then came the sound of another opened door and then the snap of a light switch. There was nothing secret about the new invasion. I knew, as I shrank behind a high-backed library chair, that the front of the house was already illuminated.

   Then came the sound of a calling voice, apparently from the head of the stairs. It was a cautious and carefully modulated voice: I took it for that of a young man of about twenty.

   "Is that you, Caddy?"

   Then came a silence.

   "I say, is that you, Orrie?" was demanded in a somewhat somnolent stage whisper. There was something strangely reassuring in that commonplace boyish voice. Anthony Gubtill, I knew, had no immediate family. I could vaguely remember, however, some talk of Canadian nephew and niece who had at times visited with him.

   "Ssssh!" said a woman's voice from the lower hall. "Don't wake Uncle Anthony."

   "It's an awful hour, isn't it?" asked a second man's voice, from the lower hall. There were sounds that seemed to imply that wraps were being removed.

   "Almost four," came the answer from above. "Have a good time, Caddy?"

   I heard a stifled yawn. "Rather," answered the girl's voice.

   "I say, Orrie, bring up the cigarettes for a puff, will you?" requested the youth from above, still in a stage whisper. "And Caddy, be sure the latch is on."

   "On what?" demanded Orrie.

   "The door, you idiot!" was the sleepily good-natured retort.

   Then I suddenly ducked low behind my chair back, for the young man called Orrie had flung open the library door. He came into the room gropingly, without switching on the electrics. I could see his trim young shoulders and the white blur of his shirt-front. Behind him, framed in the doorway, stood a young girl of about twenty, blond in pale blue, with bare arms and bare shoulders. Her skin looked very soft and baby-like in the strong side light. I could not repress something that was almost a shudder at the thought of this careless gayety and youth so close to the grim tragedy behind me, so unconscious of the awakening that might come to them at any moment.

   "Do hurry!" said the tired girl, as the young man fumbled about the table end. I realized, as I peered out at her, that my first duty would be be to keep those round young eyes from what might confront them in that inner room.

   "I've got 'em!" answered the man. He stood a moment without moving. Then he turned and walked out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

   I emitted a gasp of relief and stood up once more. Nothing alive or dead. I was determined, would now keep me in that house. Yet for all that newborn ecstasy of impatience I was still compelled to wait, for I could hear the occasional sound of feet and a whisper or two from behind the closed door. Then all sound died away; the gloom and silence again ingulfed me.

   I took the Yang Lao porcelain from my pocket, unwrapped it, and crept back to the inner room. I groped along the wall in the darkness, circling wide about the green leather chair in the center. I put the vase back on its cabinet without so much as flashing my light. Then I circled back along the wall, felt for the library door, and groped cautiously across the perilous breadth of the furniture-crowded chamber. It took me several seconds to find the door that opened into the hallway. Once through it and across the hall, I knew, only a spring latch stood between me and the street. So I lost no time as I turned the knob and swung back the door.

   But I did not pass through it. For instead of darkness, I found myself confronted by a blaze of light. In that blaze of light stood three waiting and expectant figures. What mot disturbed me was the fact that the man called Orrie held in his hand a revolver that seemed the size of a toy cannon. This was leveled directly at my blinking eyes. The other youth, in cerise pajamas with orange-colored frogs and a dressing gown tied at the waist with a silk girdle, stood Just behind him. holding an extremely wicked-looking revolver of the magazine make. Behind this youth again, close by the newel post, stood the girl in blue with all the sleepiness gone out of her face.

   The sight of that wide-eyed and eager trio irritated me beyond words. There was no longer any thrill in the thing.

   "We've got him!" cried the youth in the cerise pajamas.

   "Don't move!" commanded the older of the two, wrinkling his brow into a frown of youthful determination.

"Don't move!" commanded the older of the two.

   I had no intention of moving.

   "Watch his hands," prompted the younger man. "He ought to put 'em up."

   "Yes, Orrie, he ought to put them up," echoed the girl by the newel post.

   "Back up through that door!" cried Orrie. "Come on — back up!"

   I wearily obeyed this somewhat equine order. Then he commanded me to hold my hands above my head. I did so without hesitation; I had no wish to argue while that Colt was staring me in the eyes.

   They followed me, Indian file, into the room. It was the girl who closed the door as Orrie switched on the lights. She stood with her back to it, studying my face.

   "Have you anything to say?" demanded Orrie, squaring his shoulders.

   "Yes, I have a great deal to say," I told him. "But I prefer saying it to you alone." I could see his movement of disdain. "And if you will be so good as to stop poking that pistol into my face," I continued with some heat, "and then send these two children out of the room, I shall say what I have to, and do it very briefly."

   "Children!" came in an indignant gasp from the girl at the door.

   "We'll stick by you, old man," assured the youthful hero in cerise, with his heels well apart.

   "And just why should I closet myself with a burglar?" inquired the astute Orrie, staring at me with the utmost insolence.

   "That's asinine," I retorted. "I'm not a burglar. And you ought to know it."

   To my astonishment, a little tripartite ripple of laughter greeted this statement.

   "Then what are you?" asked the incredulous Orrie.

   "Yes, who are you?" demanded the other youth. He still held the magazine revolver balanced in his right hand. The truth had to come out.

   "I'm Witter Kerfoot, of Gramercy Park West."

   "What number?"

   I gave him the number. The trio exchanged glances. They were plainly glances of amusement.

   "And with that face!" ejaculated the man called Orrie. The quiet contempt of his glance caused me to shift about so I could catch a glimpse of myself in the Venetian mirror between the bookshelves. That glimpse was indeed a startling one. I had quite forgotten the transit through the coal hole. I saw, as I peered into the mirror, only a sickly hued and grimy-looklng footpad with dirty hands and a broken hat. It was no wonder they laughed. I was about to remove my disgracefully disfiguring headgear when the younger man swung about on me with the magazine revolver thrust point blank in my face.

   "Don't try any of that!" he gasped. "You keep up those hands."

   "We've had about enough of this tommy-rot!" I protested.

   "Yes, we'll cut out the tommy-rot and get him tied," proclaimed the man with the Colt.

   "Then search him first," prompted the younger man. "He's sure to have a gun, you know."

   He motioned to the girl at the door.

   "Take Orrie's colt while he goes through him," he commanded in the chest tones of a newly acquired savagery, "and if he tries to move, wing him."

   The girl, wide-eyed and reluctant, took the heavy revolver. Then Orrie advanced on me, though in an altogether guarded and tight-lipped manner. There was nothing to do but submit to the farce.

   I said nothing as he produced the telltale flashlight, I remained silent as he triumphantly unearthed the jimmy and the damnatory skeleton keys. I could see the interchange of exultant glances as these were tossed out on the polished table top.

   "Get the straps from the golf bags," suggested the other youth. I could not help remembering how this scene was paralleling another one of the same nature, and the same night, when Benson and I had been masters of the situation.

   The man called Orrie seemed a little nonplused at the fact that he had found no valuables in my outer pockets. But he did not give up. He grimly ignored my protests as he explored still deeper and dug out my monogrammed wallet and then a gold cigarette case on which my name was duly inscribed. He turned them over in his hand a couple of times. Then a great light seemed to come to him. He succumbed, as even his elders have done, to a sudden sense of drama.

   I saw him dart to the other end of the room and catch up a telephone directory. He riffled through the pages with quick and impatient fingers. Then he strode back and looked me up and down.

   "I know what this man's done," he cried, his eyes alight with conviction.

   "What??" demanded the younger man.

   "He's visited more than this house tonight! He's gone through Witter Kerfoot's as well. He's taken these things from there. And now it is up to us to take him back with them!"

   I could see the sheer theatricality of the situation clutch at his two listeners. I could see them surrender to it, although the girl still seemed to hesitate.

   "Hadn't I better call Uncle Anthony?" she suggested. At one breath her words brought me back to both the tragedy that lay so close at hand and the perilous complexity of my own position.

   "No, that's foolish," cut in Orrie. "The car's still outside. Caddy, I think you'll have to come along. You can sit with Jansen on the driving seat."

   The hero of the maneuver turned back to me. I was thinking mostly of the soft-eyed girl with the baby-white skin and how I could get her safely away.

   "Will you come quietly?" my captor demanded of me.

   "Yes," I answered, without looking up.

   It was the girl's voice, a little shrill with excitement, that next broke the silence.

   "Orrie, he's not a burglar," she cried out in her treble-noted conviction. "He's a gentleman!"

   "What makes you think so?" demanded the indifferent Orrie as he motioned me, with a curt movement of his Colt barrel toward the hall door.

   "I know by his nails!" was her inconsequential yet quite definitive reply. Orrie laughed.

   "Then you'd give tea and macaroons to every burglarious barber out of Sing Sing," he scoffed. "And our real answer's waiting for us in Gramercy Square."

   It seemed to take but a minute or two in the car to swing us from Twelfth Street up to Twentieth and then eastward into the stillness of the square. My captors had insisted that I should not talk. "Not a word," commanded Orrie, and I could feel his insolent gun barrel against my ribs as he gave the command for the second time.

   "But this thing can't go on," I persisted. "You're only making a fool of yourself."

   "Shut up!" commanded the other youth. "We know what we're doing."

   "But there's one thing that you've got to be told." I forlornly tried to argue, "that you've both got to face."

   "Not until you face the owner of this Kerfoot house," declared Orrie.

   They alighted, one in front of me and one behind me, still earning their foolish and murderous looking firearms. The girl remained in her seat. Then the three of us grimly ascended my steps.

   "It's needless to ring the bell," I wearily explained. "My pass key will admit you."

   "But I insist on ringing," said Orrie as I fitted the key to the lock.

   "I shall be compelled, in that case, to call the officer who is watching us from the corner," was my quiet response.

   "Call and be hanged, then!" was the younger man's ultimatum.

   One word over their shoulders brought my old friend McCooey, the patrolman, across the corner and up the steps. I swung open the door as he joined us. Then I turned on the hall lamps and faced my two captors.

   "Officer, I want you to look at me very carefully and then assure these gentlemen I am Witter Kerfoot, the owner and occupant of this house."

   "Sure he's Kerfoot," said the imperturbed McCooey. "But what's the trouble this time."

   "Something more serious than these gentlemen dream of." The youth called Orrie had the effrontery to push me aside.

   "But we found this man burglarizing a house," was his heated assertion. "We caught him at it, red-handed!"

   "And whose lead-pipin' was he stealin' this time?" inquired the satiric McCooey.

   "We got him in Anthony Gubtill's library, at 3 o'clock this morning."

   "Did yez, now!" said the quite unmoved officer.

   "If you three gentlemen will only step upstairs with me. I can explain everything. There's —"

   McCooey, from the doorway, cut me short.

   "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't be stayin' to see the joke out. If them two joy riders &$151;"

   "But you've got to stay," I cried, and I caught at his brass-buttoned arm as a drowning man catches at a life buoy.

   "Fact is, sir," he explained in a lowered voice. "Creegan av Headquarters has a Sing Sing lifter bottled up in this block and I'm holdin' wan end av the p'lice lines!"

   "A what?" asked Orrie.

   "A jail breaker from up the river — a tricky wan called Pip Forman the Rat."

   "The Rat!" I echoed, as I remembered the myomorphic face that I had seen beaded with sweat above the stooping shoulder of my man Benson.

   "The same, sir. But the street corner's me place, just at present."

   I held him back.

   "Your place is here!" I cried, dragging him toward the stairs. "And in ten seconds I'll prove it."

   "What are y' takin' me to?" asked McCooey, with sudden solemnity, as we gained the second door and I reached out a hand to push back the portiere.

   "To that!" I answered, as he stepped into the room, followed by the two younger men with their two ridiculous pistols once more at "half arm."

   There before us sat Benson, the ever dependable and vigilant Benson, with an unwavering eye fixed on a second figure tied up in my wide-armed reading chair. And Benson, as I looked at him, for all the world reminded me of a terrier keeping watch over a wary but cornered rat.

   "Why, it's Forman," said the officer of the law, a little weakly. "It's Pip Forman, the man who killed Chinatown Mary!"

   I could see the two-wide eyed youths with the revolvers come to a stop. I even found it hard to keep something that amounted to an incongruous and waywardly vicious satisfaction out of my voice as I said the words that would send, like a ringmaster's whip, their wearily capering ponies of extravagance forever out of the ring.

   "And tonight," I said, "killed Anthony Gubtill. So make sure of your man, McCooey, now you've got him!"

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