“I have it,” breathed Nat. “The second man is to remain on watch outside. And,” with a grim setting of his jaws, “that proves to me that there is going to be something attempted, as I thought.”
He had laid the long pistol upon a chair shortly after he had entered the room. Now he took it up, raised the hammer and renewed the priming.
“There is nothing like being sure,” he thought. “And unless I’m entirely wrong, a pistol that’s ready to fire will be a useful thing to have at hand before very long.”
Again he fell to waiting. A clock from some distant part of the hostelry struck eleven and then midnight. It was some time after that—how much, Nat did not know—for he had gradually become drowsy—when a faint creaking noise suddenly came from the hall. With the step of a cat he crept to his room door and laid his ear against its edge to listen.
He was not mistaken; there was a soft scuffling sound, much like that which would be made by a person advancing slowly and with much caution.
Outside his door the sound ceased, and a long silence followed. At first Nat was convinced that the prowler intended to enter his apartment; but a moment’s thought showed him that the man could hardly be working by chance.
“The door of the room occupied by Ben and Ezra directly faces mine,” was Nat’s conclusion. “It is there he has stopped and it is there he is going to enter.”
A faint click—so faint as to be scarcely discernible—came from the other side of the door. The prowler had lifted the catch and was probably at that moment standing with his eyes peering through the darkness into the opposite room. Nat gave him a moment to get well within the room; then he grasped the handle of his own door, slowly and noiselessly swinging it open.
The hall was dark save for the starlight that sifted through the window at the front. But just then there came the crackle of a tinder-box in the room opposite, as it caught the spark from a steel. Nat saw a form crouching close to the floor. Then there was a swift glance—a swifter movement and the pigskin saddle-bags were in the hands of the unknown.
So, pistol in hand, Nat stepped into the doorway.