So, when the hour had grown late and the tea very thin indeed, she seized upon a moment when a certain brother held the others spellbound with his eloquent discussion of the rights of the proletariat, to slip through the door into the secret chamber. She was more than a little frightened at first. The place was completely dark. How was she to find a place of hiding?
Fortune favored her, for almost at once her hand came into contact with a long davenport. At once she dropped on her knees to feel beneath.
“Just room,” she breathed. “Glad I’m thin as a rail.”
Ten seconds later found her flat on her stomach beneath that davenport, waiting patiently for secret matters to transpire.
* * * * * * * *
At this same hour a plainly dressed youth was preparing to enter a dingy brick building in an unlovely section of the great city. With his hand on the knob, he glanced right and left. As if apprehensive of being followed, he lingered on the threshold.
Seeing no one, he disappeared quickly within. At once there came the sound of a key being turned in a lock.
This ceremony performed, he proceeded in a leisurely manner up seven flights of grimy, unscrubbed wooden stairs to a small room beneath the eaves.
This youth was none other than the one of the burning eyes—the one who, having been introduced to Johnny Thompson by “The Ferret,” had taken him for an eight mile walk with no apparent reason except that he wished Johnny to know that hundreds of thousands of honest people lived in the city. To-night his eyes appeared to shine in the dark.
That he had reason for apprehension on this particular night might easily have been discovered by anyone who chanced to linger near that street doorway. Hardly had the boy’s footsteps died away than a short, dark individual, whose features were all but hidden by a turned-up collar and a pulled down cap, moved stealthily toward the same door.