“Good!”he exclaimed. “There won’t be a soul out o’ doors to-night.”
With his head bent to the storm and his hat pulled down over his ears, John made his way through alleys and bye-streets to the edge of town, and then set off across the intervening empty space towards the house where Joe and I were at that moment playing our last game of checkers. As he approached, he saw dimly through the blur of rain the light of two windows.
“Good!”he exclaimed a second time. “Old Snyder not gone to bed yet. Mighty kind of the old gent to leave his light burning for me to steer by. If it hadn’t been for him I’d ’a’ had a job to tell which was the right house. As it is, I’ve borne more to the right than I thought.”
At this moment the town clock struck ten, and almost immediately afterwards the light in the windows went out.
“Never mind,”remarked John to himself. “I know where I am now.”
Advancing a little further, he caught sight of the dim outline of the house through the rain, and turning short to his left, he measured off one hundred steps along the empty street, a distance which brought him opposite the next house to the east.
All was dark and silent, as he had expected, but to make sure he approached the house and thumped upon the door. There was no reply. Again he thumped and struck the door sharply with the handle of his knife. Silence!
“He’s out all right,”muttered John. “Was there ever such a lucky chance? Howling wind, driving rain, dark as the ace of spades, and Tom Connor not coming back for an hour!”
Dark it surely was. The night was black. Not a glimmer of light in any direction. Even the town itself, only a quarter-mile away, seemed to have been blotted from the face of the earth.