Page:Frank Packard - The Adventures of Jimmie Dale.djvu/77

Rh Jimmie Dale produced a black silk mask from one of the little leather pockets, adjusted it carefully over his face, and crossed the room to the hall door. He opened this—wide open—left it open—and entered the hall.

Here it was dark—a pitch blackness. He stood for a moment, listening—utter silence. And then—alert, strained, tense in an instant, Jimmie-Dale crouched against the wall—and then he smiled a little grimly. It was only some one coughing upstairs—Markel—in his sleep, perhaps, or, perhaps—in wakefulness.

"I'm a fool!" confided Jimmie Dale to himself, as he recognised the cough that he had heard at the club. "And yet—I don't know. One's nerves get sort of taut. Pretty stiff business. If I'm ever caught, the penitentiary sentence I get will be the smallest part of what's to pay."

A round button of light played along the wall from the flashlight in his hand—just for an instant—and all was blackness again. But in that instant Jimmie Dale was across the hall, and his fingers were tracing the telephone connection from the instrument to where the wires disappeared in the baseboard of the floor. Another instant, and he had severed the wires with a pair of nippers.

Again the quick, firefly gleam of light to locate the staircase and the library door opposite to it—and, moving without the slightest noise, Jimmie Dale's hand was on the door itself. Again he paused to listen. All was silence now.

The door swung under his hand, and, left open behind him, he was in the room. The flashlight winked once—suspiciously. Then he snapped its little switch, keeping the current on, and the ray dodged impudently here and there all over the apartment.

The safe was set in a sort of clothes closet behind the desk, she had said. Yes, there it was—the door, at least. Jimmie Dale moved toward it—and paused as his light swept the top of the intervening desk. A mass of papers, books, and correspondence littered it untidily. The yellow sheet of a telegram caught Jimmie Dale's eye.