Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/108

 In front of her stood a small iron ladder. Up this she swarmed, until she came to a transom, held shut by a chain over a heavy iron staple. It took her but a moment or two to untie this chain, push up the transom and climb into the open air.

With that advent to the open her spirits suddenly came back to her, and she giggled audibly, with a half-hysterical and sobbing choke at the end of her laughter. But she did not even stop to replace the transom. She scurried across the flat tin roof until she came to a tile-covered wall-top. Over this she scrambled, dropping to a roof of tar-and-gravel a couple of feet lower than the first one. Then came the climb to another tinned roof with a locked transom, another tile-covered party-wall which taxed her strength to surmount, another series of roofs in ever ascending planes, and then a flat house-top studded with clothes-line stanchions, between which stood a square frame shed like the deck-house of a schooner.

At the back of this roof-shed Sadie found a door that opened on a steep and narrow flight of steps. She paused for just one moment, first to look back, then to stow away her revolver, and then to straighten her hat.