We were at the doorway of a little triangular erection which covered the stairway leading from the roof to the attic and our approach, in rubbers, had been almost noiseless. The door was shut, but only locked; the precautions against invasion had been forgotten or overlooked. It was not even bolted. Evidently the conspirators or counterfeiters, or whatever they were, apprehended nothing; we might catch them red handed. A stout chisel enabled us to force the door inward, and a dark lantern revealed a dilapidated stairway below, ending in a kind of storage room, cluttered up with the refuse of successive occupancies, a dangerously inflammable chaos of rubbish, in which a feebly sputtering match could create a conflagration before it was suspected. It required some discrimination to cross this debris without starting some crumbling avalanche of fragments in the boxes, baby carriages, stoves, chairs, trunks, picture frames, racks and easels. As it was, with our best efforts slides occurred, and the mastodon-like tread of the detectives sank noisily through an occasional bandbox. We paused anxiously—I did, at least—at such moments, but the crash, so it sounded to me, brought no response. I reasoned the house must be vacant, and that our quarry had escaped.
We found that a closed door opened upon a narrow hallway, and as we softly drew it back loud voices most unexpectedly became audible, certainly proceeding from the front rooms of that very floor; from that front room wherein Jack had noticed the light, and where the detectives reported the insertion of the ruby panes. A hoarse dominant swelled up in the excited conversation. Jack leaned towards me and whispered “That’s Husky”; Captain raised a warning finger, and we filed out, one by one, gingerly tiptoeing toward the room which now unquestionably contained the objects of our search. The familiar scare or thrill which submerges all lesser emotions, as the danger point in an encounter is approached, decidedly manifested itself somewhere in my anatomy, or probably all over it.
Any mental analysis of my feelings was abruptly halted by the threats or altercation now heard very clearly in the room before us.
We had reached the door, beneath which a streak of light gave a penumbral illumination to the end of the little hallway. Below, in the house itself, absolute silence reigned, and apparently as complete darkness. Our approach was unnoticed. The excitement or rage that overpowered the speaker, breaking out in threats that now became intelligible and startled us into a fierce impatience to interfere, had certainly stopped his ears. The suffocation of anger had made him deaf.
“Damn you—you’ll show us the trick, or else your starved and scorched body will take the consequences. We know well enough you can do it. You’ve led us on with blind promises, but now we’ve got you where we want you. You can’t get out of this, remember, until we get what we want. Can you understand?”
“And then you’ll kill, I suppose?” The voice was strained, thick, foreign in accent, and low.
Riddles stretched himself up to my ear again and whispered “A. E.?” I nodded assent.
“No! No! Oh, no; but—you must not stay here.” The voice was a woman’s. “We’ll take care of you. Nicely too, Diaz, I guess. We’ll keep you where you won’t tell tales.” A mean, cynical laugh followed, a muttered corroboration from a third person, who had evidently crossed the room. It was this last voice that continued the harangue of the prisoner in a smooth, polished, plausible manner that thinly veiled its heartlessness; its crafty insinuation betrayed a designing selfishness, but it seemed welcome after the barking hoarseness and ferocity of its predecessor, and the cruelty of that feminine sneer. Its climax came at the close with a threat of fiendish wickedness that broke the tension of our restraint.
“Alfred Erickson, perhaps you can understand your predicament a little better, if you will stop to think it over. You are a stranger here, and you are in our power. That, you probably realize pretty well by this time. There is something else you may not so clearly comprehend, and that is, we are not afraid of consequences, because in your case, so far as we are concerned, there will be no consequences! You can extricate yourself easily enough if you will be sensible. Obstinacy has its merits under some circumstances; your perseverance in your Arctic experiences was rewarded—and we know exactly how—but obstinacy is of no avail just now, and no rescuing party from Norway, or even from the New York police will save you from, perhaps, an unfortunate calamity.”
This allusion appealed facetiously to the others, and there arose a musical outburst of laughter from the lady, with an accompaniment of harsh bass grunts from the first speaker. The voice continued: