Mr. Gubb immediately gave Mr. Medderbrook twenty cents and Mr. Medderbrook kindly allowed him to keep the telegram. Mr. Gubb placed it in the pocket nearest his heart and proceeded to a house on Tenth Street where he had a job of paper-hanging.
At about this same time Smith Wittaker, the Riverbank Marshal—or Chief of Police, as he would have been called in a larger city—knocked the ashes from his pipe against the edge of his much-whittled desk in the dingy Marshal’s room on the ground floor of the City Hall, and grinned at Mr. Griscom, one of Riverbank’s citizens.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said with a grin. “I don’t know but what I’d be glad to be un-burgled like that. I guess it was just somebody playing a joke on you.”
“If it was,” said Mr. Griscom, “I am ready to do a little joking myself. I’m just enough of a joker to want to see whoever it was in jail. My house is my house—it is my castle, as the saying is—and I don’t want strangers wandering in and out of it, whether they come to take away my property, or leave property that is not mine. Is there, or is there not, a law against such things as happened at my house?”
“Oh, there’s a law all right,” said Marshal Wittaker. “It’s burglary, whether the burglar breaks into your house or breaks out of it. How do you know he broke out?”
“Well, my wife and I went to the Riverbank Theater last night,” said Mr. Griscom, “and when I got home and went to put the key in the keyhole, there was another key in it. Here are the two keys.”
Marshal Wittaker took the two keys and examined them. One was an old doorkey, much worn, and the other a new key, evidently the work of an amateur key-maker.
“All right,” said Marshal Wittaker, when he had examined the keys. “This new one was made out of an old spoon. Go ahead.”
“We never had a key like that in the house,” said Mr. Griscom. “But when we reached home last night, this nickel-silver key was sticking in the lock of the front door, on the outside, and the door was unlocked and standing ajar.”