“Out?”
“Ah! I’m afraid I express myself rather badly. I mean to convey to you that Professor Fanely is indisposed.”
“But I thought I heard him speak in the hall a moment ago?”
“Oh, no. No, that was certainly not Professor Fanely. Oh, dear me, no.” He laughed—an unpleasant sound, for all its softness. “That was Mr.—but his name does not matter. He is upstairs now, attending to Mr. Kolinski, our estimable butler. You must not place too much reliance on our Kolinski’s chatter, you know. He does not always tell the truth. In fact, to put it bluntly, Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Kolinski is not—er—unfamiliar with the inside of a jail!”
“I know that well enough. I’ve been instrumental in sending him up the river twice, myself.”
“Oh, dear me! Fancy that, now!”
There came a silence, during which Sanborn had the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that a third presence had somehow entered the room. Mechanically he lit his pipe, and, blowing the first mouthful of smoke upward, he carelessly subjected the ceiling to a covert scrutiny. Nothing doing. He stooped and tapped the bowl of his pipe on an ashtray which rested on a small table. No one on the left hand side of the room. He turned round quickly, ostensibly to adjust a cushion on his easy chair. A flutter of a curtain hanging near the door caught his eye. Then he seated himself and leaned back comfortably.
“Yes,” he answered the big man’s unspoken inquiry. “That is why I called—to warn you against Kolinski. But as you are already aware of his past delinquencies—well,—” he shrugged his shoulders and stood up. “This is beside the point, now, don’t you think? Perhaps you had better ring for the man so that I may place him under arrest.”
“They’ll never bring him in here!”
Bill Bolton swung the curtain back and stepped into the room, a revolver grasped in his gloved right hand. “Stick ’em up, Lambert,” he told the big man. “That’s right—stick ’em up and keep ’em up!”