He was answered by a wild yell from overhead.
"He's in the storeroom!" cried Quinn. "Follow me with that lamp, Munn—quick!"
The professor rushed for the stairway and I made after him with what speed I could.
CHAPTER V.
TRAVELING SUNWARD.
There never lived a man, I suppose, who did not, at some time or other in his career, submit his veracity to question. A reformed burglar, therefore, although animated by the most disinterested motives, can scarcely hope to escape the shafts of the incredulous.
Although well-grounded in the science of cracksmanship, and with some store of legal learning as to alibis and so forth, my mind was as empty of astronomical lore as a drained bottle. The professor's sayings were jotted down in a sort of commonplace book at a later day when leisure offered.
Memory may have played me false in some few minor points, but in all of major importance this narrative is to be taken with the same sincerity in which it is written. I ask no more of the reader than that; and if he is not averse to strolling through unfrequented ways touching elbows with a man who has a past, we shall get along famously.
To return, then, to the steel car, and the obliquity it suddenly presented to the direction of its course. Startling disclosures had somewhat obscured Gilhooly, and he had vanished from the lower room without being missed.
For a man of sixty-five, the professor was very agile, and he took the winding iron stairway two steps at a time. I gained the storeroom close behind him, and there we found Gilhooly, crooning to himself and working like mad.