McCarty halted his companion before the little side door.
“I’ll wait here while you go around back and cut any wires you find,” he directed. “The bulge of the conservatory hides me from the street and ’tis not likely any of the Goddard household will be looking out their windows. What with the murder and then company and all, Ching Lee may have forgot to fasten this door proper on the inside, and we can force it easier than the iron grill outside the rear windows. Don’t be all night, Denny!”
Dennis glanced rather dubiously up at the next house, then out to the sidewalk, but he hurried away without a word and McCarty took out his keys and waited.
The strangely coincidental facts he had unearthed in Benjamin Parsons’ study gave him much food for reflection, but long experience made him more wary of jumping to conclusions than his optimistic colleague. Parsons was known as an eminent and practical philanthropist; what if he’d taken those ex-convicts into his home to reform them at first hand? It would be natural enough for him to keep reports on their past records. Calabar bean had been prominently mentioned in the papers in connection with the murder of his neighbor’s valet; mightn’t he have been interested sufficiently to look it up as a rarity? The notes on poison gas “mixed up with religion” were more difficult to explain, but then only Dennis had seen them yet and—where the devil was Denny, anyway?
McCarty craned his neck to stare into the darkness toward the rear but no deeper shadow moved and no sound came to him but the moaning swish of the wind. Denny had maybe found a burglar alarm that it wasn’t so easy to put out of business!
Hollis pounded heavily past on the sidewalk, then returned and went on again and still there was no sign of his erstwhile companion. All at once the bolts of the door against which he leaned were drawn back and McCarty had barely time to spring aside and flatten himself in the corner of the out-curving glass conservatory wall when the door itself swung inward.
He held his breath but no one appeared. At last a low hiss assailed his ears.
“’Tis you!” Mingled relief and exasperation lent emphasis to his whispered ejaculation. “For what did you play such a damn fool trick? I near landed on the flat of my back—”
“Forget it!” Denny interrupted with unaccustomed tone. “Come on in before the watchman passes again! You’d never have got past these bolts only I found a way in through the little pantry ventilator; you couldn’t have squeezed through it in a year!—Now, which way? Is it up to the floor where the Frenchmen and them two heathen sleep that we’ll be going? Nobody’s stirring.”
He had closed the door and noiselessly shot the bolt. McCarty responded: