There was a door in the room which contained the vault, but Mike was not certain but that the watchman would return through it. He swept his light around the room–keeping it low, lest it flash out through a window–and regretfully decided against remaining. He went out again, swiftly and silently, looking for a hiding-place.
He found it in a washroom, and listened from there while the watchman retraced his steps, coming downstairs again, going to the vault and throwing the glow from his lantern against it, then clumping off heavily to the lower part of the factory.
Mike emerged from hiding. He inspected the vault room with greater care. He would have to work in snatches, between visits from the watchman, and he did not want to have to tap the man on the head. There are a great many systems of burglar protection, and one very popular one signals the nearest police station when a watchman fails to ring his time clock at the appointed intervals. Mike did not desire the intrusion of the police, but he wanted a nearby niche to hide in.
The watchman’s footsteps died away. Mike waited to be sure, then opened the door he had noted. To be exact, he did not quite open it. He merely turned the knob, and a heavy weight leaning against it thrust it the rest of the way open, caromed clumsily against him, and fell with a curiously cushioned crash to the floor.
Mike’s hair stood on end. In the fractional part of a split second he knew what had struck him, and he bounced into the air to alight noiselessly a full five feet away, ready for anything. But the thing lay still upon the floor, breathing.
Slowly and cautiously Mike sent a momentary dart of light at it. What he saw at once reassured him and frightened him, because it was the last thing he could possibly have expected. It was a man–which he had known–but it was a man with his hands and feet bound together with leather straps, and so entwined with ropes that he could not even writhe. There was a gag in the figure’s mouth, and its eyes were staring wildly about.
Mike was still for perhaps two seconds, while his brain raced. Then he sent a tiny pencil-beam at the vault door. It was closed, solidly. No one had been before him. But there was a man bound hand and foot....
The light played upon him again. He was a young man, dressed as if he were a clerk or a bookkeeper in the factory. His eyes blinked and stared imploringly at Mike. There was some message, some terrible message, that he struggled to convey, but the gag prevented him. Mike watched him for an instant in mounting uneasiness and suspicion. That window had slipped up too easily....
Suddenly there was a tiny creaking, as of a board stepped upon. Mike heard it, catalogued it and had dismissed his obvious refuge in an instant. Someone was coming, softly, toward the spot. Perhaps the watchman, alarmed by the crash. He would certainly find the bound man, but it might be that he would waste precious time releasing him.
Tensely Mike swept the walls again. He could not go out the main door. He would run into the watchman. The one door he had noted was that of a closet. There was another, close beside the back of the vault.