was stimulating,
nerving. On the very first day of his holidays he was become the central
figure of a Chinatown drama.

The last traces of fear fled. His position was uncomfortable and his
limbs were cramped, but he resigned himself, with something almost like
gladness, and began to look forward to that which lay ahead with a zest
and a will to be no passive instrument which might have surprised his
captors could they have read the mind of their captive.

The journey seemed almost interminable, but young Kerry suffered it in
stoical silence until the car stopped and he was lifted and carried down
stone steps into some damp, earthy-smelling place. Some distance was
traversed, and then many flights of stairs were mounted, some bare but
others carpeted.

Finally he was deposited in a chair, and as he raised his hand to the
scarf, which toward the end of the journey had been bound more tightly
about his head so as to prevent him from seeing at all, he heard a door
closed and locked.

The scarf was quickly removed. And Dan found himself in a low-ceilinged
attic having a sloping roof and one shuttered window. A shadeless
electric lamp hung from the ceiling. Excepting the cane-seated chair in
which he had been deposited and a certain amount of nondescript lumber,
the attic was unfurnished. Dan rapidly considered what his father would
have done in the circumstances.

"Make sure that the door is locked," he muttered.

He tried it, and it was locked beyond any shadow of doubt.

"The window."

Shutters covered it, and these were fastened with a padlock.

He considered this padlock attentively; then, drawing from his pocket
one of those wonderful knives which are really miniature tool-chests, he
raised from a grove the screw-driver which formed part of its equipment,
and with neatness and dispatch unscrewed the staple to which the padlock
was attached!

A moment later he had opened the shutters and was looking out into the
drizzle of the night.

The room in which he was confined was on the third floor of a dingy,
brick-built house; a portion of some other building faced him; down
below was a stone-paved courtyard. To the left stood a high wall, and
beyond it he obtained a glimpse of other dingy buildings. One lighted
window was visible--a square window in the opposite building, from which
amber light shone out.

Somewhere in the street beyond was a standard lamp. He could detect the
halo which it cast into the mist