ough the keyhole.

"Keep quiet," Blobs was saying huskily. "You're in deadly peril. The
police are waiting in your office, three of 'em. I'm goin' to lock the
whole bunch in and throw the key out of the window."

"Come back here, you imp of Satan!" I called furiously, but I could hear
him speeding down the corridor, and the slam of the outer office door
by which he always announced his presence. And so I stood there in that
ridiculous cupboard, hot with the heat of a steaming September day,
musty with the smell of old leather bindings, littered with broken
overshoes and handleless umbrellas. I was apoplectic with rage one
minute, and choked with laughter the next. It seemed an hour before
Blobs came back.

He came without haste, strutting with new dignity, and paused outside my
prison door.

"Well, I guess that will hold them for a while," he remarked
comfortably, and proceeded to turn the key. "I've got 'em fastened up
like sardines in a can!" he explained, working with the lock. "Gee whiz!
you'd ought to hear 'em!" When he got his breath after the shaking I
gave him, he began to splutter. "How'd I know?" he demanded sulkily.
"You nearly broke your neck gettin' away the other time. And I haven't
got the old key. It's lost."

"Where's it lost?" I demanded, with another gesture toward his coat
collar.

"Down the elevator shaft." There was a gleam of indignant satisfaction
through his tears of rage and humiliation.

And so, while he hunted the key in the debris at the bottom of the
shaft, I quieted his prisoners with the assurance that the lock had
slipped, and that they would be free as lords as soon as we could find
the janitor with a pass-key. Stuart went down finally and discovered
Blobs, with the key in his pocket, telling the engineer how he had tried
to save me from arrest and failed. When Stuart came up he was almost
cheerful, but Blobs did not appear again that day.

Simultaneous with the finding of the key came Hotchkiss, and we went
in together. I shook hands with two men who, with Hotchkiss, made a
not very animated group. The taller one, an oldish man, lean and hard,
announced his errand at once.

"A Pittsburg warrant?" I inquired, unlocking my cigar drawer.

"Yes. Allegheny County has assumed jurisdiction, the exact locality
where the crime was committed being in doubt." He seemed to be the
spokesman. The other, shorter and rotund, kept an amiable silence. "We
hope you will see the wisdom of wai