They reached the rear and found the open court which extended along behind the houses, to be even wider than that on the south side of the street, the back wall higher and devoid of a single vine. The silent Quentin house presented as blank an aspect as from the front, its sealed windows and barred doors staring like blind eyes in the sunlight. The inspector shook his head.
“No one has entered here in months; years maybe,” he remarked. “The padlocks are so rusted on those board doors that they would have to be broken and the boards themselves are weatherbeaten and rotting. I’m surprised they’d let the place get into such a condition, even though it is in litigation.... What are you doing, Riordan?”
The house, being the corner one, was built around in an ell on the Madison Avenue side and in the right angle formed by its two walls a leader descended from the roof. Dennis was examining and testing it speculatively. At the inspector’s question he turned.
“Do you mind, sir, ’twas a wide shiny mark burnished on a pipe running across the top of an air-shaft that showed Mac and me how a murderer had swung himself down on a rope and in at a window, in the first case ever he butted in on after he left the Force?” he asked. “This rain-pipe looks to be too frail to bear the weight of a cat, but ’tis not a cat rubbed the rust off here, and here, so it shines like new tin! I put on a clean shirt yesterday, more’s the pity, but hold my coat and hat, Mac.”
“Mind or you’ll break your neck!” McCarty warned, forgetful of his friend’s calling, as he complied. Dennis scorned to reply but swarmed up the straining, creaking leader to the second floor, swinging out to land lightly and sure-footedly on the broad sill of a window two feet away. The leader, released suddenly from his weight, tore loose from its fastening and canted crazily against the angle of the wall, shaking and clattering, and McCarty exclaimed:
“You’ll not be coming down the way you went up!”
“True for you!” Dennis sang out with a note of rising excitement. “I’ll be coming down the way the last guy did who lit here, and that’s by the inside! Wait you there for me.”
He had been examining the sill upon which he stood and the boards which covered the window, pressing experimentally upon the latter. Suddenly one of them gave way, forced inward with an accompanying crash of glass.
“Now you’ve done it!” McCarty observed superfluously. “Look out there is not more than us waiting for you inside!”
“I’ve my flashlight, thanks be, and my two fists,” Dennis responded. “That board wasn’t tight; the nails had just been stuck back in the holes. Here goes another!”