There he stood still for a moment, listening. There was no alarm of
any sort. He crept along beside the house till he came to the first
windows of the south wing. He tried these carefully and then went on.
He gained the south corner of the wing, unobserved or at least without
sign that he had been seen, and went on around it.

He stopped at the first high French window on the south. It was partly
hidden from view from south and west by a column of the portico, and
was the one he had selected for his operations; as he tried to slip his
jimmy under the bottom of the sash, the window, to his amazement,
opened silently upon its hinges; it had not been locked. The heavy
curtains within hung just in front of him; he put out his hand and
parted them. Then he started back in astonishment and crouched close
to the ground; inside the room was a man moving about, flashing an
electric torch before him and then exploring an instant in darkness and
flashing his torch again.

The unexpectedness of this sight took for an instant Eaton's breath and
power of moving; he had not been at all prepared for this; now he knew
suddenly that he ought to have been prepared for it. If the man within
the room was not the one who had attacked him with the motor, he was
closely allied with that man, and what he was after now was the same
thing Eaton was after. Eaton looked about behind him; no one
apparently had been left on watch outside. He drew his pistol, and
loosing the safety, he made it ready to fire; with his left hand, he
clung to the short, heavy jimmy. He stepped into the great room
through the curtains, taking care they did not jingle the rings from
which they hung; he carefully let the curtains fall together behind
him, and treading noiselessly in his stocking feet, he advanced upon
the man, moving forward in each period of darkness between the flashes
of the electric torch.

The man, continuing to flash his light about, plainly had heard
nothing, and the curtains had prevented him from being warned by the
chill of the night air that the window was open; but now, at the
further side of the room, another electric torch flashed out. Another
man had been in the room; he neither alarmed nor was alarmed by the man
flashing the first light; each had known the other's presence before.
There were at least two men in the room, working together--or rather,
one was working, the other supervising; for Eaton heard now a steady,
almost in