y them, to wring from Nicky Viner the secret of where
the old miser hid his wealth; for Viner would understand that Danglar
was not hampered by having to safeguard himself on account of having
been originally connected with the case in a legal capacity, or any
capacity, and therefore in demanding all or nothing, would have no cause
for hesitation, failing to get what he wanted, in turning the evidence
over to the police. In other words, where Perlmer had to play his man
cautiously and get what he could, Danglar could go the limit and get
all. As it stood, then, Danglar and the gang had not found out the
location of that hoard; but they had found out where Perlmer kept his
spurious papers--stuffed in at the back of the bottom drawer of his desk
in his office, practically forgotten, practically useless to Perlmer
any more, for, having once shown them to Viner, there was no occasion
to call them into service again unless Viner showed signs of getting
a little out of hand and it became necessary to apply the screws once
more.

For the rest, it was a very simple matter. Perlmer had an office in a
small building on lower Sixth Avenue, and it was his custom to go to
his office in the evenings and remain there until ten o'clock or so.
The plan then, according to the code message, was to loot Perlmer's
desk some time after the man had gone home for the night, and then, at
midnight, armed with the false documents, to beard old Nicky Viner in
his miserable quarters over on the East Side, and extort from the old
miser the neat little sum that Danglar estimated would amount to some
fifty thousand dollars in cash.

Rhoda Gray's face was troubled and serious. She found herself wishing
for a moment that she had never decoded the message. But she shook her
head in sharp self-protest the next instant. True, she would have evaded
the responsibility that the criminal knowledge now in her possession had
brought her; but she would have done so, in that case, deliberately at
the expense of her own self-respect. It would not have excused her
in her own soul to have sat staring at a cipher message that she was
satisfied was some criminal plot, and have refused to decode it simply
because she was afraid a sense of duty would involve her in an effort to
frustrate it. To have sat idly by under those circumstances would have
been as reprehensible--and even more cowardly--than it would be to sit
idly by now that she knew what was to take place. And