He brushed the servant's hand from the knob. He saw the two women standing open-mouthed, but before words came to them, he stepped back into the street, closing the door behind him. The girl's slip about her sister's name had saved him.
§8. He was glad to be in the light. He hurried across the street with no purpose but that of getting as quickly and as far from the house as possible. He was escaping.
For a minute or more he did not know what it was that he was escaping from. Then he glanced back toward the doorway.
Three policemen were entering the doorway. As Luke reached the corner, a gong clanged and a patrol-wagon turned into Sixth Avenue.
A messenger-boy, who had been standing on the corner, began to trot after the wagon. Luke stopped him.
"What's the matter?" asked Luke.
The boy turned to him a leering face:
"It's a raid, I guess. I knowed there was somethin' doin' when I seen that patrol standin' over on Thirty-nint' Street."
CHAPTER XI
§1. Luke wanted to dismiss the episode of the raid as a coincidence. He tried to argue that the girl had been a stool-pigeon employed to get him into the Sixth Avenue house solely for the purpose of robbery by confederates waiting for her there. Schemes of that sort were common enough in New York and succeeded in spite of their clumsiness; the more often one was reported in the papers and brought to the attention of the papers, the readier a certain portion of the public was to succumb to the next attempts. Luke wanted to believe that the appearance of the police might have proved welcome enough for him.