he had
to commit a new crime, and with new and terrible materials, which he had
never handled in the way of crime before.

He had in his boat a substance so dangerous that he had made a nest of
soft cotton for the receptacle which held it; and when the boat touched
the shore, light as the contact was, he quaked lest his imprisoned
giant-devil should go off and blow him to atoms.

He put off touching it till the last moment. He got his jointed ladder,
set it very softly underneath the window where the feeble gas-light was,
and felt about with his hands for the grating he had observed when he
first reconnoitered the premises from the river. He found it, but it was
so high that he had to reach a little, and the position was awkward for
working.

The problem was how to remove one of those bars, and so admit his
infernal machine; it was about the shape and size of an ostrich's egg.

It must be done without noise, for the room above him was Little's, and
Little, he knew, had a wire by means of which he could summon Ransome
and the police in the turn of a hand.

The cold of the night, and the now present danger, made Cole shiver all
over, and he paused.

But he began again, and, taking out a fine steel saw highly tempered,
proceeded to saw the iron slowly and gently, ready at the first alarm to
spring from his ladder and run away.

With all his caution, steel grated against steel, and made too much
noise in the stilly night. He desisted. He felt about, and found the
grating was let into wood, not stone; he oiled the saw, and it cut the
wood like butter; he made two cuts like a capital V, and a bar of the
grating came loose; he did the same thing above, and the bar came out.

Cole now descended the ladder, and prepared for the greatest danger of
all. He took from its receptacle the little metal box lined with glazed
paper, which contained the fulminating silver and its fuse; and, holding
it as gently as possible, went and mounted the ladder again, putting his
foot down as softly as a cat.

But he was getting colder and colder, and at this unfortunate moment
he remembered that, when he was a lad, a man had been destroyed by
fulminating silver--quite a small quantity--in a plate over which he was
leaning; yet the poor wretch's limbs had been found in different places,
and he himself had seen the head; it had been torn from the trunk and
hurled to an incredible distance.

That trunkless head he now fancied he saw, in t