CHAPTER XVII
GILDED ACORNS
And so again Coe went over the room.
“Lord!” he cried, “I’m sick and tired of looking for a mousehole when the mousehole isn’t here! Not a baby mouse could get in or out of this box,—let alone a swashbuckler villain, carrying a drugged unconscious man on his back!”
For that was the way Coe visualized it,—he felt sure the abductor had entered by his confounded secret entrance, had drugged or chloroformed the sleeping Webb, and had returned the way he came, carrying his prey.
For how else could it have been done? And anyway details didn’t matter. Even if Webb had been cajoled,—say by a tale of Elsie in immediate danger,—or her sudden illness,—even so, the secret entrance must have afforded the way in.
And so the secret entrance had to be found, and Coe vowed he wouldn’t leave the room until he left through that entrance itself!
Patiently he went over the walls again,—the floor, the ceiling, noting unmarred decorations that precluded an opening of any sort.
But this he soon finished and set himself to work with his brain, thinking up some other type of entrance than any he had yet thought of.
“Suppose the whole side wall swings out,” he thought. “Suppose this wall between his house and the next—swings like a door,—no, that’s too wide,—suppose it swings on a pivot,—a central pivot,—oh, shucks, it couldn’t! Well, suppose the whole hall door came out in one piece,—frame and all. Suppose the frame is hinged on like a door,—then the bolted door wouldn’t matter.”
But this ingenious plan likewise failed to work, because the door wasn’t built that way. It was just an ordinary, regular made and regular hung door.