carefully
shifted the screen of cases before him a little to one side. And yet
still he was not satisfied. With a sort of ironical droop at the
corners of his lips, as though suddenly there had flashed upon him the
inspiration that fathered one of those whimsical ideas and fancies that
were so essentially a characteristic of Jimmie Dale, he came out from
behind the cases, went across the room to the case he had opened when he
first entered, took out the cord and the cover of one of the cardboard
shoe boxes, and with these returned to his hiding place once more.

The sounds from the upper stories of the tenement now reached him hardly
at all; but from below, directly under his feet almost, he could hear
some one, the proprietor of the shoe store probably, walking about.

Tense, every faculty now on the alert, his head turned in a strained,
attentive attitude, Jimmie Dale threw on the flashlight's tiny switch,
took that intimate and thin metal case from his pocket, extracted a
diamond-shaped, gray paper seal with the little tweezers, moistened the
adhesive side, and stuck it in the centre of the white cardboard-box
cover, then tore the edges of the cardboard down until the whole was
just small enough to slip into his pocket. Through the cardboard he
looped a piece of cord, placard fashion, and with his pencil printed the
four words--"with the compliments of "--above the gray seal. He
surveyed the result with a grim, mirthless chuckle--and put the piece of
cardboard in his pocket.

"I'm taking the longest chances I ever took in my life," said Jimmie
Dale very seriously to himself, as his fingers twisted, and doubled,
and tied the remaining pieces of cord together, and finally fashioned a
running noose in one end. "I don't--" The cord and the flashlight went
into his pocket, the room was in darkness, the black mask was whipped
from his breast pocket and adjusted to his face, and his automatic was
in his hand.

Came the creak of a footstep, as though on a ladder exactly below him,
another, and another, receding curiously in its direction, yet at the
same time growing louder in sound as if nearer the floor--then a crack
of light showed in the floor in the centre of the room. This held for
an instant, then expanded suddenly into a great luminous square--and
through a trapdoor, opened wide now, a man's head appeared.

Jimmie Dale's eyes, fixed through the space between the piles of cases,
narrowed--there was, indeed, littl