e room
above; surely he must be summoning his servants!

Eaton listened; there was still no sound from the rest of the house.
But overhead now, he heard an almost imperceptible pattering--the sound
of a bare-footed man crossing the floor; and he knew that the blind man
in the bedroom above was getting up.

CHAPTER XVIII

UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS

Basil Santoine was oversensitive to sound, as are most of the blind; in
the world of darkness in which he lived, sounds were by far the most
significant--and almost the only--means he had of telling what went on
around him; he passed his life in listening for or determining the
nature of sounds. So the struggle which ended in Eaton's crash to the
floor would have waked him without the pistol-shot immediately
following. That roused him wide-awake immediately and brought him
sitting up in bed, forgetful of his own condition.

Santoine at once recognized the sound as a shot; but in the instant of
waking, he had not been able to place it more definitely than to know
that it was close. His hand went at once to the bellboard, and he rang
at the same time for the nurse outside his door and for the steward.
But for a few moments after that first shot, nothing followed; there
was silence. Santoine was not one of those who doubt their hearing;
that was the sense in which the circumstances of his life made him
implicitly trust; he had heard a shot near by; the fact that nothing
more followed did not make him doubt it; it made him think to explain
it.

It was plain that no one else in the house had been stirred by it; for
his windows were open and other windows in bedrooms in the main part of
the house were open; no one had raised any cry of alarm. So the shot
was where he alone had heard it; that meant indoors, in the room below.

Santoine pressed the bells quickly again and sat up straighter and more
strained; no one breaking into the house for plate or jewelry would
enter through that room; he would have to break through double doors to
reach any other part of the house; Santoine did not consider the
possibility of robbery of that sort long enough to have been said to
consider it at all; what he felt was that the threat which had been
hanging vaguely over himself ever since Warden's murder was being
fulfilled. But it was not Santoine himself that was being attacked; it
was something Santoine possessed. There was only one sort of valuable
article for which one might