Poinsette found the house without trouble, and stepped lightly to the door. He put the pass-key his landlady had bestowed upon him in the lock, but it would not turn. The bolt would not yield to his wooing. Do all he might, and work he never so wisely, there had sprung up a misunderstanding between key and lock which would not be reconciled. Poinsette could not get “action;” the sullen door still barred him from his bed.
At last Poinsette gave up in despair. He might ring the bell and arouse the house; but he hesitated. It was his first day; the hour needed apology. Poinsette thought it would be better to walk gently to a hotel and abide for the remainder of the night. He would solve this incompatibility of key and lock the next afternoon.
Poinsette turned away and started softly for the street. As he did so a policeman stepped from behind a tree and stopped him. The policeman had been watching Poinsette for five minutes.
“Wot was you a-doin' at the door?” he asked.
Poinsette, in a low, hurried voice, explained. He didn't care to awaken his landlady by a tumult of talk, and have that excellent woman discover him in the hands of the law.
“If your key don't work,” said the policeman, “why don't you ring the bell?”
Poinsette cleared up that mystery. The officer was not satisfied.
“To be free with you, my man,” he said, seizing Poinsette's collar, “I think you're a burglar. If that's your boarding-house you're goin' in. If it isn't, you're goin' to the station.”
Then the policeman, with one hand wound about in Poinsette's neckwear, made trial of the key with the other hand. The effort was futile. The lock was obdurate; the key was stranger to it. Then the blue guardian of the city's slumbers stepped back a pace and took a mighty pull at the door-bell. It was a yank which brought forth a wealth of jingle and ring.
Poinsette was glad of it. He had grown desperate and wanted the thing to end. Bad as it was, it would be better to face his landlady than be locked up in a burglar's cell. Poinsette was resigned, therefore, when a second-story window lifted and a night-capped head was made to overhang the sill and blot its silhouette against the star-lit sky.