It then was half past six, and many of the guests had gone down to dinner. The long, luxuriously carpeted corridor was quiet and deserted, lighted only with an incandescent lamp here and there.
Patsy listened at the door for a moment. He could hear no sound from within, nor detect any evidence of a light.
“It’s a hundred to one the sawbones is out,” he muttered. “I can woolly eye that valet, all right, if he is here. I’ll pretend I’ve got a bad throat, trouble in my pipes, and that I want to consult his jags from Hungary. He’ll be a wise gazabo, all right, if I can’t fool him.”
Patsy was folding his handkerchief in the form of a bandage, which he then fastened around his neck, turning up his coat collar, much as if the advice and aid of a physician was really necessary. Putting on a look of abject misery that would have deceived a clairvoyant, he then knocked sharply on Doctor Guelpa’s door.
It brought no response from within.
Patsy listened intently, then knocked again, with the same negative result.
“Gee! that’s good enough for me,” he muttered. “It’s a cinch that both are out, and it’s me for the inside. I’ll make this door look like thirty cents.”
Patsy had it unlocked and opened in less than thirty seconds, at all events, and he then stepped into the entrance hall. A thick portière across an inner door was closely drawn. The room beyond was in darkness. Silence reigned in the gloomy suite.
Closing the hall door, Patsy groped his way to the other and found an electric switch key on the wall near the casing. He turned it and a flood of light revealed a handsomely furnished parlor, also the partly open doors of two adjoining bedrooms.
He could see through one of them a broad bed, with other sleeping-room furnishings, also two large trunks near one of the walls.