“Think I can do it!” The little man winked at Gilead. “Ask a card-sharper if he thinks he could play ‘Old maid’.”
“You know what you’ve got to do, and leave no sign?”
“You,” said Mr Trimmer, “play your part, and I’ll play mine. The gentleman, I understand, guarantees the blunt?”
“Fifty for the attempt, and fifty more if you succeed,” said Gilead, smiling. He vastly preferred this sort of rascal to the Colfox.
Mr Trimmer would condescend to no further discussion of his ways and means.
“I was cracking nuts,” he said to the Superintendent, “before you’d got your milk teeth.”
Bribes, says a French proverb, can get in without knocking. That very night a little monkey-like figure of a man, balancing on a window sill which he had reached from an empty suite of chambers next door, forced a latch and dropped softly into that section of the Queen Street building which contained Mr Colfox’s office. By a very curious coincidence, the caretaker was engaged at the moment, at the hall door down below, in a close discussion with a policeman, who had knocked him up to enquire as to his knowledge or observation of some suspicious characters who had been seen lately hanging about the neighbourhood. While they talked, Mr Trimmer had entered, by means known to himself, the private sanctum of the money-lender, and was proceeding, with swift sure touches, about his business.
“A LITTLE MONKEY-LIKE FIGURE OF A MAN, BALANCING ON A WINDOW-SILL.”
The burglar wore a loose overcoat (or wraprascal, shall we call it?) with surprise pockets. From these he produced a dark-lantern, whose light he exposed and concentrated on a certain spot, and a couple of electric coils, with a quantity of wire and fixings attached. An electric lamp stuck from the wall (as he had ascertained from observant Gilead) within close reach of the embedded safe. Removing the bulb, he applied the long end of his wire, already fitted with an attachment, to the place, rested one of the coils on the floor, and, placing the other handy for the safe, which he had exposed, rapidly switched on the current, and, picking up the second coil with a pair of insulated tongs, applied it to the front of the safe. In a few moments a smell of warming iron pervaded the spot; the coil grew from pink to red, and the heat became excessive. The safe was of a crude discarded pattern, and unpainted, or the essay would have been fruitless. As it was the door became soon too hot to touch with the hand, and Mr Trimmer was satisfied. Secure of his confederate, however, he gave the experiment plenty of time, and only desisted when its success was beyond question. Then, removing his apparatus, and readjusting everything to its former state, he pocketed his belongings and returned as he had come, making all secure behind him. It is true that he did linger, in some doubt and chagrin, while his coil was cooling.