“Two robberies!” Jimmie’s eyes shone. “Pretty! Mac, let me get the story through to the shop and we’ll have an ‘extra’ out in half an hour! I’ll keep you out of it, I swear—!”
“All right, then, if you’ll do something for me after,” McCarty suddenly reached into his pocket and drew out Parsons’ bookmark. “Find out what the devil is this made of and ’phone me at my rooms to-night; mind you don’t mention it in your story or never another tip will you get from me!—Now, here’s what happened....”
He repeated briefly the inspector’s version of the incidents of the previous night and then, well satisfied, he continued on his way. It led him on a long and diversified path through that day’s storm; to headquarters, the Public Library, the city’s mortuary and the laboratories of the university. For the first time since the inception of the strangely complex case he steered clear of the Mall and it was not until darkness had fallen that he returned to his rooms, rain-soaked and weary.
Inside the living-room he felt mechanically for the light switch in the wall, but the button clicked futilely. At the same moment he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed sharply.
Some one had been in his rooms again! His lights had been tampered with, for they were on the same current as the house next door and a ray from there was even now streaking faintly across the air-shaft past his bedroom window. Moreover there’d been nothing wrong with his switch the night before! Was somebody waiting for him?
Aware that the feeble gas jet in the hall below was yet strong enough to silhouette him vaguely in its glimmering half-light, he pulled the door shut behind him and whipped out his revolver.
“Is anybody here?” His bull-throated demand cut the silence. “Come on, you white-livered son-of-a-gun, and I’ll give you the fight of your life!”
He waited, his ears strained to catch the slightest sound, but none came; no stir of a foot, no whisper of breathing broke the utter stillness in which the echo of his voice had died away and after a minute that seemed ages long doubt changed to certainty.
Somebody had been there and gone; but had he gone far? What had been done in his rooms that he was not meant to see? What had the intruder left behind him for McCarty to blunder into in the darkness? Had a trap been set for him under his own roof?
McCarty pressed his lips grimly together, his square jaw outthrust. Keeping his revolver still cocked and ready in his right hand he reached behind him with the other and propped his umbrella against the wall. Then half-stooping he advanced a step straight before him in the direction of the fireplace. With infinite caution and the delicacy of one in a maze of live wires his left hand groped about in the pitch blackness surrounding him, but it encountered only empty air. He took another step forward, then another....