oy came out of a
room and went ahead of Jimmie Dale.

And then Jimmie Dale stopped suddenly, and began to retrace his steps.
The group had entered the elevator, the bell boy had disappeared around
the farther end of the hall into the wing of the hotel--the corridor
was empty. In a moment he was standing before the door of No. 148;
in another, under the persuasion of a little steel instrument, deftly
manipulated by Jimmie Dale's slim, tapering fingers, the lock clicked
back, the door opened, and he stepped inside, closing and locking the
door again behind him.

It was already a quarter past nine, but no one was as yet in the
connecting room--the fanlight next door had been dark as he passed. His
flashlight swept about him, located the connecting door--and went out.
He moved to the door, tried it, and found it locked. Again the little
steel instrument came into play, released the lock, and Jimmie Dale
opened the door. Again the flashlight winked. The door opened into a
bathroom that, obviously, at will, was either common to the two rooms or
could, by the simple expedient of locking one door or the other, be used
by one of the rooms alone. In the present instance, the occupant of the
adjoining apartment had taken "a room with a bath."

Jimmie Dale passed through the bathroom to the opposite door. This was
already three-quarters open, and swung outward into the bedroom, near
the lower end of the room by the window. Through the crack of the door
by the hinges, Jimmie Dale flashed his light, testing the radius of
vision, pushed the door a few inches wider open, tested it again with
the flashlight--and retreated back into No. 148, closing the door on his
side until it was just ajar.

He stood there then silently waiting. It was Hamvert's room next door,
and Hamvert and the Weasel were already late. A step sounded outside in
the corridor. Jimmie Dale straightened intently. The step passed on
down the hallway and died away. A false alarm! Jimmie Dale smiled
whimsically. It was a strange adventure this that confronted him, quite
the strangest in a way that the Tocsin had ever planned--and the night
lay before him full of peril in its extraordinary complications. To win
the hand he must block Hamvert and the Weasel without allowing them an
inkling that his interference was anything more than, say, the luck of
a hotel sneak thief at most. The Weasel was a dangerous man, one of the
slickest second-story workers in the country, w