“In which case it’s just as well to have a note of the advance down in black and white, eh?” I added.
His little eyes looked sharply at me; but he made no reply, and, shaking hands, I left him.
THE HOBBY RIDER
Bump. Bump. Bump-bump. Bump.
I sat up in bed and listened intently. It seemed to me as if someone with a muffled hammer were trying to knock bricks out of the wall.
“Burglars,” I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter of course, that everything happening in this world after 1 a.m. is due to burglars), and I reflected what a curiously literal, but at the same time slow and cumbersome, method of housebreaking they had adopted.
The bumping continued irregularly, yet uninterruptedly.
My bed was by the window. I reached out my hand and drew aside a corner of the curtain. The sunlight streamed into the room. I looked at my watch: it was ten minutes past five.
A most unbusinesslike hour for burglars, I thought. Why, it will be breakfast-time before they get in.
Suddenly there came a crash, and some substance striking against the blind fell upon the floor. I sprang out of bed and threw open the window.