“The door was open,” he said blandly.
“That’s that dreadful Mr. Dietz again,” they cried in unison. “He drinks, and when he goes out to the saloon, he puts the catch back so there won’t be the bother of a key. I have complained but the janitor takes no notice. I suppose we don’t offer him cigars and tips, so he takes the part of Dietz.”
By this simple maneuver Anthony Trent established his right to use the roof without incurring suspicion.
The Drummond loot proved not to be despised by one anxious to put a hundred thousand dollars to his credit. The actual amount was three thousand, eight hundred dollars. Furthermore, there was some of the Drummond stationery, a bundle of letters and the two or three things he had taken hastily from young Bulstrode’s room. He regretted there had been so small an opportunity to investigate the Bulstrode mansion but time had too great a value for him. The black pearl had flung itself at him, and some yale keys and assorted club stationery—these were all he could take. The stationery might prove useful. He had discovered that fact in the Conington Warren affair. If it had not been that the butler crept out of the dark hall to watch him as he left the Bulstrode house, he would have tried the keys on the hall door. That could be done later. It is not every rich house which is guarded by burglar resisting devices.
It was the bundle of letters and I. O. U.’s that he examined with peculiar care. They were enclosed in a long, blue envelope on which was written “Private and Personal.”
When Trent had read them all he whistled.
“These will be worth ten times his measly thirty-eight hundred,” he said softly.
But there was no thought of blackmail in his mind. That was a crime at which he still wholesomely rebelled. It occurred to him sometimes that a life such as his tended to lead to progressive deterioration. That there might come a time when he would no longer feel bitterly toward blackmailers. It was part of his punishment, this dismal thought of what might be unless he reverted to the ways of honest men. Inasmuch as a man may play a crooked game decently, so Anthony Trent determined to play it.
Many of the letters in the blue envelope were from women whose names were easily within the ken of one who studied the society columns of the metropolitan dailies. Most of them seemed to have been the victims of misplaced bets at Belmont Park or rash bidding at Auction. There was one letter from the wife of a high official at Washington begging him on no account to let her husband know she had borrowed money from him. A prominent society golfing girl whose play Trent had a score of times admired for its pluck and skill had borrowed a thousand dollars from Drummond. There was her I. O. U. on the table. Scrawling a line on Drummond stationery in what seemed to be Drummond handwriting, Anthony Trent sent it back to her. There were acknowledgments of borrowings from the same kind of rich waster that Graham Bulstrode represented. A score of prominent persons would have slept the better for knowing that their I. O. U.’s had passed from Drummond’s keeping. The man was more of a usurer than banker.
What interested Anthony Trent most of all was a collection of letters signed “N.G.” and written on the stationery of a very exclusive club. It was a club to which Drummond did not belong.