y. Every now and then a lonely carriage spluttered along the
oily and pool-strewn pavement of the cross-street. Every now and then,
too, the rush and clang of the Broadway cars echoed down the canyon of
rain-swept silence.

Durkin waited until the lights of the cigar-store went out. Then he
once more circled the block, keeping to the shadows. As he passed the
darkened cigar-store for the second time his foot, as though by
accident, came sharply in contact with the refracting-prismed manhole
cover which had sounded so hopefully hollow to his previous tread. As
he had half-suspected, it was loose.

He stooped quickly, to turn up his trousers. As he did so three
exploring fingers worked their way under the ledge of the unsecured
circle of iron and glass.

It came away without resistance. He looked about him cautiously,
without straightening up; then by its shoulder-strap he carefully
lowered his leather tool-bag into the passage below, and as guardedly
let himself down after it.

He waited and listened for a minute or two, before replacing the cover
above him. From the river, in the distance, he could hear the booming
and tooting of the steam craft through the fog. A hurrying car rumbled
and echoed past on the Broadway tracks. Two drunken wanderers went
singing westward in the drizzling rain. Then everything was silence
again.

Durkin replaced the covering, noiselessly, and feeling to right and
left with his outstretched hands, crept inward through the narrow
tunnel in which he found himself. His fingers came in touch with the
chilly surface of a steel-faced door. It sounded heavy and unyielding
to his tentative tap, and his left hand was already reaching back for
the tool-bag which hung by its strap over his shoulder when his
questioning right hand, pushing forward, discovered that the door was
unlocked, and swung easily outward without resistance.

He felt and fondled the heavy bolts, thoughtfully, puzzled why it
should be so, until he remembered seeing the half-dozen pieces of
anthracite lying about the manhole on the sidewalk above. That, he
told himself, possibly explained it. Some careless wagon-driver,
delivering his load, had left the place unlocked.

But before he crept into the wider and higher passage before him he
paused to take out the revolver which he carried in his hip pocket, to
unlimber it, and carefully feel over the chambered cylinder, to make
sure every cartridge-head stood ther