THE SECRET ENTRANCE
When Jenkins arrived with the keys, McKelvie looked them over critically, selected a couple, and tried them on the door. The first was too large, but the second turned the trick. Cautioning us to stoop to avoid the shelves, McKelvie pushed open the back of the safe, which swung away from him into the darkness beyond. With the flash to guide him he stepped through the opening, then beckoned us to follow him. Though it was too dark to see, I knew I was in a room of some sort, for I felt the velvet softness of a carpet beneath my feet, and I also tripped over some article of furniture. By this time McKelvie had located the light and I saw that my room was really an alcove fitted up with a luxurious divan heaped high with pillows, beside which stood a small smoking-stand. But ornate and sumptuous as the alcove was I should not personally have cared for it, since the atmosphere was close and smoke-laden and there was no means of letting in the light of day.
McKelvie glanced hastily about and then striding to the divan he bent down and sniffed at it critically. Instantly I imitated him. To my amazement the same fragrance clung to the Persian cover of the couch that I had detected on the blood-stained handkerchief. I smelled it again to make sure and then as my memory still played me false I turned to ask McKelvie what it was. He was trying his key in the lock of a door at the rear of the room, and if he heard my question he failed to reply to it.
With less difficulty this time he unlocked this second door, which swung inwards and stood at the head of a flight of rather steep and dark stairs. As before, McKelvie preceded Jenkins and myself, but we kept as close as possible to him that his flash might guide us as well. At the bottom of the steps was another door of similar make, which also opened inwards, and to my astonishment it gave exit onto the garden at the side of the house between the first study window and the corner. So skillfully had it been cut in the masonry, however, that only one initiated into the secret of the entrance would have known it was there.
McKelvie examined the ground around the door and as at this point also the cement walk reached clear to the wall, I wondered what he hoped to discover. Whatever it was, his scrutiny satisfied him, for he stood up with a smile and applied his lens to the key-hole of the door. Then he nodded his head in a contented manner and remarked that we had better return to the study. I noticed that he locked all the doors scrupulously behind him, leaving the secret entrance exactly as he had found it, even to replacing the round disk which counterfeited the knot-hole.
Once in the room he knelt down and examined minutely the dial of the safe.
"Interesting and unique," he commented. "Look here, Mr. Davies!" He pointed to the inside of the door, and I noticed to my astonishment that the dial was duplicated within. "Do you get the significance?" he asked quickly.
"Why, that safe can be opened or closed by combination from the inside as well as the outside," I hazarded.
"Naturally, to be of any use as an entrance it would have to be capable of being opened from the inside," he said caustically. "No, what I meant was this. Supposing we want to lock the safe. Give me a combination."
"I gave him 'Darwin,' the first word that occurred to me, for it was one of those old style safes with the six-letter combination. He twirled the knob of the dial on the outside and pointed as he did so to the inside. Just as the inside handle of a door will revolve when the outer one is turned, so the inner knob of the dial duplicated the revolutions of the outer.