Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/307

Rh cylinders, each one grotesquely tied with a string. The man was feverishly excited, muttering to himself, running from the fireplace to where the table had been pushed aside with the rest of the furniture, dropping the curious little rolls of money on the table, and running back for more. And then, having apparently emptied the receptacle, he wriggled his body over the dismantled fireplace, stuck his head into the opening, and peered upward.

"Kinks in his nut, kinks in his nut!" Connie Myers was muttering. "I'll drop the bar through from the top, mabbe there's some got stuck in the pipe."

He regained his feet, picked up the bar, and ran with it into what was evidently the front hall—then his steps sounded running upstairs.

Like a flash, Jimmie Dale was across the room and at the fireplace. Like Connie Myers, he, too, put his head into the opening; and then, a queer, unpleasant smile on his lips, he bent quickly over the man on the floor. Hagan was no more than stunned, and was even then beginning to show signs of returning consciousess [sic]. There was a rattle, a clang, a thud—and the bar, too long to come all the way through, dropped into the opening and stood upright. Connie Myers' footsteps sounded again, returning on the run—and Jimmie Dale was back once more on the other side of the kitchen doorway.

It was all simple enough—once one understood! The same queer smile was still flickering on Jimmie Dale's lips. There was no way to get the money out, except the way Connie Myers had got it out—by digging it out! With the irrational cunning of his mad brain, that had put the money even beyond his own reach, old Doyle had built his fireplace with a hollow some eighteen inches square in a great wall of solid stonework, and from it had run a two-inch pipe up somewhere to the story above; and down this pipe he had dropped his little string-tied cylinders of banknotes, satisfied that his hoard was safe! There seemed something pitfullypitifully [sic] ironic in the elaborate, insane craftiness of the old man's fear-twisted, demented mind.