"Honest to God, Cap'n, I don't know. I never tried. I gave just one look through it, and—" He broke off with a shudder.
"Get a ladder," I commanded. "I want to see that skylight."
While he was gone on his errand to the shed, I investigated the outer walls of the study with the torch, hunting some break in their solidity. They were concrete; a hair-crack would have been visible in the electric glow; there was no break. Then, as he placed the ladder against the coping, I climbed to the roof and stepped across its firmness to the skylight. I looked down.
Worth, kneeling on the hearth, was laying a fire in the corner grate. As he did not glance up, I knew he had not heard me. Evidently the study had been built to resist the disturbance of sound from without. That meant that the report of the revolver inside had not been heard by any one outside the walls.
Directly below me was the library table and upon its top a blue desk blotter; a silver filagreed inkstand stood open; penholders, pencils, paper knife were on a tray beside it, one pen lying separate from the others with a ruler, upon the blotting pad; books and a magazine neatly in a pile. The walls, as I circled them with my eyes, were book-lined everywhere except for the grate and the two doors.
Then I inspected the skylight, frame and glass, feeling it over with my hands. There was no entrance here. Even should a pane of glass be removable—all seemingly solid and tight—the frame between and the sash were of steel, and the panes were too small for the passage of a man. I crept back to the ladder as Worth was striking a match to light the pitch-pine kindling.
"What about this Vandeman chink?" I asked of Hughes as I rejoined him at the foot of the ladder. "Does he hang around here much?"
"Him and Chung visit back and forth a bit. I hear 'em talkin' hy-lee hy-lo sometimes when I go by the kitchen."
"Take me over there," I said.
The fog was beginning to blow away in threads; moonlight somewhere back of it made a queer, gray, glimmering world around us. We circled the garden by the path, passing a sort of gardener's tool shed where Hughes left the ladder, and from which I judged Worth had brought the bar he pried the door planks off with, to find a gap in a hedge between this place and the next.