.

"Give me your torch--or go with me, Worth," I said. "I'd like to take a
scoot around outside."

He didn't speak, only indicated the flashlight by a motion, where it lay
on the shelf beside his hand. I took it, unbolted the door, and stepped
into the garage.

Everything all right here. My roadster; a much handsomer small machine
beyond it; a bench, portable forge and drill made a repair shop of one
corner, and as my light flashed over these, I checked and stared. Why
had Worth gone to the shed hunting a crowbar to open the door? Here were
tools that would have served as well. I put from me the hateful thought,
and damned Cummings and his suspicions. The shadow didn't have to be
Worth. Certainly he had not first lit that lamp, for I had seen it from
the kitchen with him beside me. Some one other than Worth had been in
there when Worth put up the roadster. I'd find the man it really was.
But even as I crossed to Eddie Hughes's door, something at the back of
my head was saying to me that Worth could have been in that room--that
there was time for it to be, if he had taken the crowbar from the garage
and not from the shed as he said he did.

At this I took myself in hand. The lie would have been so clumsy a one
that there was no way but to accept this statement for the truth; and
some one else had made that shadow on the canvas.

I tried the chauffeur's door and found it locked; called, shook it, and
had set my shoulder against it to burst it in, when the rolling door on
the street side moved a little, and a voice said,

"H-y-ah! What you doin' there?"

I turned and flashed my light on the six-inch crack of the sliding door.
It gave me a strip of man, a long drab face at top, solid, meaty
looking, yet somehow slightly cadaverous, a half shut eye, a crooked
mouth--if I'd met that mug in San Francisco, I'd have labeled it
"tough," and located it South of Market Street.

Slowly, it seemed rather reluctantly, Eddie Hughes worked the six-inch
crack wider by working himself through it.

"What the hell do you want in my room for?" he demanded. The form of the
words was truculent, but the words themselves slid in a sort of
spiritless fashion from the corner of that crooked mouth of his, and he
added in the next breath, "I'll open up for you, when I've lit the
blinks."

There was a central lamp that made the whole place as bright as day.
Eddie fumbled a key out of his pocket, threw the door of his room open,
and stepp