f his
men had a revolver wound through the shoulder. One of the two burglars,
however, whom they had surprised, was a prisoner in their hands, a pale,
sullen-looking man, who had apparently accepted his fate quite
philosophically. He was just being marched off by the uniformed police
when Virginia arrived.

"Has anything been taken?" she asked Leverson.

"Not a thing, miss," the man answered. "There were three of them, but
two escaped. One was Bill Danes, I'm sure o' that, and we can lay our
hands upon him at any time. This one I don't know, but they meant
business. They had enough dynamite with them to blow the house up."

She crossed to her uncle's desk and looked downward. The carpet had
apparently not been disturbed. There were no signs that it had been
touched at all.

"Are these men ordinary burglars?" she asked Leverson.

He hesitated.

"Why, I imagine so," he answered. "Their tools are as smart a lot as
ever I saw in my life. They had spies all round the house to help them
escape, and this one would have got away too, if I hadn't tripped
him up."

"Curse you!" the bound man muttered.

Virginia looked at him and shivered.

"Well, I am glad you caught one of them," she said. "I will go and tell
my uncle."

But Phineas Duge already knew all about it. He smiled when Virginia
brought him her news.

"They must be desperate indeed," he said, "to run such risks. However, I
suppose they have bought these fellows' silence safe enough."

The midday papers were full of the attempted burglary. Before the
magistrates, the man who had been apprehended said not a word. He seemed
to accept his position with stolid fatalism. The cross-examination as to
his associates, and the motive of the attempted robbery, was absolutely
futile.

Phineas Duge kept up during the day the assumption of severe
indisposition. No one was allowed to see him. A bulletin posted outside
announced that he had been ordered complete and entire rest; and all the
time the telephone wires from his bedroom, high up in the back of the
house, were busy flashing messages east and west, all over the country.
The work in which he had been engaged was zealously pushed home. No one
saw his secretaries coming and going so often from his room, and neither
of them was willing to admit, in fact they flatly denied when
questioned, that they had seen their chief at all. Towards afternoon,
Virginia returned from a short drive in the park to be told that two