ce was now so great, and his natural distrust of the
confederate he had employed was so prominent in his mind that he left
his chair, having first extinguished the light, and, going to the door,
opened it softly and peered outside.

The hallway was in utter darkness, the same as when he was there last,
and, although he listened intently, he could not hear the suggestion of
a sound from the lower regions of the house. After waiting a few moments
longer, he tiptoed forward cautiously to the stairs, and descended them,
being careful to step as closely as possible to the spindles of the
balustrade, in order that they might not creak beneath his weight, and
thus alarm others in the house. In this way he gained the lower floor.

Nick was somewhat handicapped without his flash light, but he remembered
quite distinctly the location of the sound he had heard two hours
earlier, when the party from the laundry had followed him in, and passed
through the hallway to a rear door. Now he sought that door by following
carefully along the wall until he came to it.

But, although he searched diligently for many minutes, he could not find
so much as a suggestion of a door anywhere.

He remembered then that in all probability there was no perceptible door
at all; that the door which was there somewhere was concealed in the
wainscoting in some way, or otherwise hidden from casual observation. To
have maintained a door of entrance to the saloon from that hallway would
have rendered it entirely unnecessary for Grinnel to keep up his
private entrance to the saloon from the other street. Nick's only method
of finding it now was to light a match, and this he hesitated to do, not
knowing what warning its glare might convey to others.

But there was no alternative, and presently he began his search by
lighting matches one after another, permitting them to flare up
sufficiently for a moment's vision, and then throwing them quickly to
the floor, after the manner adopted by burglars when they were engaged
in robbing a house before the pocket flash light was invented.

He was not long in discovering the entrance he sought. The walls along
the hallway were not plastered; they were merely built up with matched
boards, which had stood there unpainted for so long a time that they had
achieved a veneer of filth and dirt which made them look, in the flare
of the match, like mahogany.

But he could easily see where there was a keyhole cut into one of t