“The bear, driven from his lair, returns; the rabbit circles back to his brush pile; sometimes crooks return to their rendezvous. I wonder if they will this time? Well, we shall see what we shall see.”
He was by this time nearing a long, low-lying building that flanked the river. Before a door which was reached by three downward steps, he paused. All was dark, silent, mysterious. For a moment he listened intently, then after a hasty glance up and down the deserted alley, he darted to a low, narrow window. His efforts to lift the sash were fruitless. Quickly drawing a thin-bladed knife from his pocket, he inserted the blade beneath the catch. There was a click. The next instant Pant had lifted the sash, dived through and closed the window after him.
The room was utterly dark, yet he appeared to have no difficulty in finding his way about the place. Whether he had a previous knowledge of the building, was endowed with an instinctive sense of location of things, or could see in the dark, would have been a question too difficult for a casual thinker to answer. An observer, had there been one, might have said that the room had a strange way of flashing crimson for a fraction of a second, then becoming inky black again.
After moving about for a time, Pant doubled himself up and, creeping into the broad lower part of a dilapidated cupboard, closed the door behind him.
Ten minutes elapsed. A rat scurried over the uneven floor. Another creeping through a hole in the base of the cupboard, began rattling a loose bit of board about. Pant kicked at it. Then all was silent again.
Five minutes more passed. Three rats had ventured out upon the floor when, of a sudden, there sounded the rattle of a key in the outer door. The rats scurried away. Pant caught a quick breath, as he whispered:
“They return!”
A match was struck. A broad, fat face appeared at the door. The man’s small, beady eyes peered about the place for a moment, then he whispered back over his shoulder:
“All right. C’m’on.”
“Safe?”