“Everything, Saidee.”
“Then it’ll be moved where you say, if a carpenter can do it.”
The other tenants of the Bradock Building, so called from a stone over the doorway to “The Black Cougar’s” brokerage offices, had ample opportunity to observe Miss Saidee Sorjoni, Photographer of Children. She wore shiny celluloid cuffs and a neat white ruching about her neck. Her fingers were stained with developer. Beneath this yellow stain was a coating of collodium—a sovereign cure for fingerprints.
The boy, whom Fay had picked up in the street, held down the position of messenger. He could be sent on almost any kind of pretext. He had an innocent though dirty face, that disarmed suspicion.
Fay took his time in cutting through the floor over the exact center of “The Black Cougar’s” customers’ room—a place of wire-wickets, tickers, soft chairs and a long board upon which two boys changed the day’s quotations with lightning-like celerity.
The hole he made through the floor of the studio’s front office was cone-shaped and ended in a quarter-inch opening. A view could be obtained by means of this peekhole of “The Black Cougar’s” private den—adjoining the vault.
Fay neatly fitted this opening with a trapdoor covered by a small table. Upon this he placed current magazines and samples of photographic art—left by the late owner of the studio.
“Come here, Saidee,” he said to her one day. “Get down and watch Pope. What is he doing at his desk? What is that he has carried from the vault?”
She dropped to her knees and looked through the opening. She bent lower. Suddenly she rose and arranged her skirt.
“That is queer,” she said. “He took a large spool of wire out of the vault, set it on a spindle, passed one end of the wire through a little box he has on his desk and then started winding the wire on another spool. He’s doing it now.”