“If seen by any one, I can say I came in to ask for some water for my mortar,” he said to himself. “I’ll take the chance.”
Mounting the two low steps outside, Patsy found that the door was locked, also that the key had been removed.
“That simplifies it,” he muttered. “I can pick this lock like breaking sticks.”
He accomplished it with a picklock in half a minute. Quietly opening the door a few inches, he gazed into a narrow hall and at a bare stairway leading upward. A door in the right wall some ten feet away also met his gaze. He paused briefly and listened.
Not a sound came from within. The hall was as silent as if the building was deserted.
Patsy stepped in and closed the door, leaving it unlocked, lest he might have occasion to retreat hurriedly.
The closing of the door left the hall and stairway in[{35}] darkness—barring a single thread of artificial light that now caught his eye.
It was a vertical thread in the side wall, some two feet from where he was standing.
“Electric light,” thought Patsy, listening again. “The store is not lighted. Nor does the store run back as far as this. The door leading into the store from this hall is farther in. There must be a lighted room back here, all the same, or this chink—by gracious, it’s a panel door.”
Thrusting his nails into the crevice through which the light had shone, Patsy had felt a section of the wall slip noiselessly to one side, revealing a secret panel so skillfully constructed as to defy ordinary inspection.