“I have another plan,” he said, watching her intently. “Miss Wallace, it was too much to ask you to come down here. You are ill.”
She was indeed quite pale, as if the excitement had been an overexertion.
“No, indeed,” she persisted. Then, feeling her own weakness, she moved toward the door of Denison’s office where there was a leather couch. “Let me rest here a moment. I do feel queer. I—”
She would have fallen if he had not sprung forward and caught her as she sank to the floor, overcome by the exertion.
Together we carried her in to the couch, and as we did so the comb from her hair clattered to the floor.
Craig threw open the window, and bathed her face with water until there was a faint flutter of the eyelids.
“Walter,” he said, as she began to revive, “I leave her to you. Keep her quiet for a few moments. She has unintentionally given me just the opportunity I want.”
While she was yet hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness on the couch, he had unwrapped the package which he had brought with him. For a moment he held the comb which she had dropped near the radioscope. With a low exclamation of surprise he shoved it into his pocket.
Then from the package he drew a heavy piece of apparatus which looked as if it might be the motor part of an electric fan, only in place of the fan he fitted a long, slim, vicious-looking steel bit. A flexible wire attached the thing to the electric light circuit and I knew that it was an electric drill. With his coat off he tugged at the little radium safe until he had moved it out, then dropped on his knees behind it and switched the current on in the electric drill.
It was a tedious process to drill through the steel of the outer casing of the safe and it was getting late. I shut the door to the office so that Miss Wallace could not see.