THE FIGHT IN THE STUDY

Eaton dismissed the man who had been waiting in his rooms for him; he
locked the door and carefully drew down all the window-shades. Then he
put his overcoat, folded as he had been carrying it under his arm, on
the writing table in the center of the room, and from its folds and
pockets took a "breast-drill" such as iron workers use in drilling
steel, an automatic pistol with three clips of cartridges, an electric
flashlight and a little bottle of nitroglycerine. He loaded the pistol
and put it in his pocket; then he carefully inspected the other things.

The room he was in, the largest of his suite, resembled Santoine's
study on the floor below in the arrangement of its windows, though it
was smaller than the study. The writing-desk in its center occupied
much the position of Santoine's large desk; he moved it slightly to
make the relative positions coincide. The couch against the end wall
represented the position of the study's double doors. Eaton switched
out the lights, and starting at the windows, he crossed the room in the
darkness, avoiding the desk, and stopping a few feet to the right of
the couch; here he flashed his light upon the wall at the height of the
little wall-safe to the right of the doors in the study below. A dozen
times he did this, passing from the windows to the position of the
wall-safe and only momentarily flashing his light.

He assured himself thus of being able to pass in the dark from the
windows of Santoine's study to the wall-safe. As the study was larger
than this room, he computed that he must add two steps to what he took
here in each direction. He paid no attention to the position of the
safe to the left of the doors, for he had kept watch of the vase on the
table in the lower hall, and the only sign he had found there had told
him that what he wanted was in the safe to the right.

He raised a shade and window, then, and sat in the dark. The night was
cloudy and very dark; and the lake was smooth with barely a ripple.
Near at hand a steamer passed, blazing with lights, and further out he
saw the mast-head light of some other steamer. The lake was still
ice-locked at its northern end, and so the farther of these steamers,
he knew, was bound to some southern Michigan port; the nearer was one
of the Chicago-Milwaukee boats. For some moments after it had passed,
the waves of its wake washed in and sounded on the shore at the foot of
the bluff. Ne