Rouletabille laid his two hands on Matrena’s strong shoulders and repeated, detaching each syllable, “They will draw it back from the other side.”
“It is impossible. I repeat it.”
“Madame, your Nihilists haven’t invented anything. It is a trick much in vogue with sneak thieves in hotels. All it needs is a little hole the size of a pin bored in the panel of the door above the bolt.”
“God!” quavered Matrena. “I don’t understand what you mean by your little hole. Explain to me, little domovoi.”
“Follow me carefully, then,” continued Rouletabille, his eyes all the time fixed elsewhere. “The person who wishes to enter sticks through the hole a brass wire that he has already given the necessary curve to and which is fitted on its end with a light point of steel curved inward. With such an instrument it is child’s play, if the hole has been made where it ought to be, to touch the bolt on the inside from the outside, pick the knob on it, withdraw it, and open the door if the bolt is like this one, a small door-bolt.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” moaned Matrena, who paled visibly. “And that hole?”
“It exists.”
“You have discovered it?”
“Yes, the first hour I was here.”
“Oh, domovoi! But how did you do that when you never entered the general’s chamber until to-night?”