Between the file room and the draftsman’s room there is a door that opens on a small dark spiral stairway that winds from the lower floor to the ceiling at the top of the house.
This stairway was not used then, nor is it now.
It is unnecessary, inconvenient, dusty, and dark as night, and was a blunder of the architect who designed the building.
This stairway ends above at the tent-shaped space between the roof and the joists.
That space is dark and forbidding, and being useless is rarely visited.
Sharp opened this door and gazed for a moment up this narrow cobwebbed stairway.
After dark that night a man opened cautiously one of the lower windows of the Land Office, crept out with great circumspection and disappeared in the shadows.
One afternoon, a week after this time, Sharp lingered behind again after the clerks had left and the office closed. The next morning the first comers noticed a broad mark in the dust on the upstairs floor, and the same mark was observed below stairs near a window.