It was not quite so dark here. The lights from the platform and the yard filtered in through the window in a filmy sort of way; but it was too dark to distinguish objects in anything more than grotesque, shapeless outlines.
The Hawk produced his flashlight, and turned it upon the lock he had just picked. It was a spring lock, opened readily from the inside by the mere turning of the doorhandle. He tried it carefully, assuring himself that it could not be opened from the corridor without a key—and then his light swept around the room. It played in its circuit upon the paymaster's flat-topped desk against the wall, and upon a large safe in the corner, near the window, whose polished nickel dial sent back an answering flash under the darting ray; but the Hawk, for the moment, appeared to be interested in neither desk nor safe. The flashlight was holding in a kind of dogged inquisitiveness upon another door close to the window, and directly opposite the safe.
He stepped without a sound across the room, and, reaching this door, snapped off his flashlight. He tried the door cautiously, found it unlocked, and very softly opened it the space of an inch. He listened attentively. There was no sound. He pushed the door open, switched on his flashlight again, and stepped through the doorway. It appeared to be a clerks' office—for the paymaster's staff, presumably. The Hawk seemed to possess a peculiar penchant for doors. The only thing in the room that apparently held any interest for him now was the door that opened, like the paymaster's, upon the corridor. He slipped quickly across the room, and, as before, examined the lock. Like the other, it was a spring lock; and, like the other, he tested it to make sure it was locked on the outside.
“Ten thousand dollars,” confided the Hawk to the lock, “isn't to be picked up every night; and we can't afford to take any chances, you know.”
He began to retrace his steps toward the paymaster's office, but now, obviously, with more attention to the details of his surroundings, for his flashlight kept dancing quick, jerky flashes in all directions about him.
“Ah!” The exclamation, low-breathed, came suddenly. “I thought there ought to be something like this around here!”
From, beside a desk, he stooped and picked up an empty pay satchel; then, returning at once to the other office, but leaving the connecting door just ajar, he dropped the pay bag in front of the safe, and went silently over to the desk—a mouse running across the floor would have made more commotion than the Hawk had made since his entry into the station.
“... Upper drawer, left side,” he muttered, “Locked, of course—ah!” A tiny key, selected from its fellow outlaws, was inserted in the lock—and the Hawk pulled out the drawer, and began to rummage through its contents.
From the back of the drawer, after perhaps a minute's search, he picked up a card, and with a nod of satisfaction began to study it.
“'Left—two right; eighty-seven, one quarter—left; three... '” The Hawk's eyes travelled swiftly over the combination. He read it over again, “Thank you!” murmured the Hawk whimsically—and dropped the card back in the drawer, and locked the drawer.