“It is upstairs! I see him when I reach the head of the staircase. He rush’ from that room through all the smoke and he is laughing! Then he mount to the next floor and on above, and in the attic there is a room which none but he may enter, which he guards with a heavy steel door—!”
“Show us where it is!” McCarty ordered. “That’s where I fell down. I might have figured that a guy with his brains would have looked out for everything, even failure, and planned a way out for himself!”
He started on a shambling trot for the back stairs, with the others crowding after, but Jean slipped past him and leaped up three steps at a time. Past the guest rooms and servants’ quarters to the storerooms and the attic above the searchers hurried, pausing only before a small wooden door.
“I thought you said ’twas made of steel!” McCarty turned the handle and then put his shoulder to a panel. “We’ll have to break through.”
“It is but the false one, the cover,” explained Jean. “Just beyond is the real door of steel.”
“You’re sure he came this way? There’s nowhere else he could be hiding?” McCarty glanced at the Frenchman and then turned to his companions. “Stand back! We’ll have this down!”
But the small door was stouter than it looked and it required the combined efforts of Dennis and one of the officials as well before it yielded and crashed inward, only to lean, as Jean had said, against a second door a foot or two beyond, which presented to their impatient gaze a solid sheet of tempered steel.
“We’d never get through that except with soup and God knows what’s beyond it that would blow us all into the next world!” McCarty exclaimed. “Inspector, will you ’phone for an expert from headquarters? There’s nothing to do but wait. We know where he is, though; that’s some comfort!”
The inspector hurried downstairs and the others grouped themselves before the wall of steel separating them from that which lay on the other side, after clearing away the débris of the wrecked door.
“There’s not a sound from in there!” Dennis moved over to McCarty. “What’s he doing, do you suppose? Fixing a train of powder, belike?”