Page:Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger.djvu/108

Rh "There now! Who’d ever think of that?" said Bunting. "I should say that man ’ud got something on his conscience, wouldn’t you?"

"Well, I needn’t stay now," said Joe’s good-natured friend. "You show your friends round, Chandler. You knows the place nearly as well as I do, don’t you?"

He smiled at Joe’s visitors, as if to say good-bye, but it seemed that he could not tear himself away after all.

"Look here," he said to Bunting. "In this here little case are the tools of . I expect you’ve heard of him."

"I should think I have!" cried Bunting eagerly.

"Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most interesting of all. Peace was such a wonderful man! A great inventor they say he would have been, had he been put in the way of it. Here’s his ladder; you see it folds up quite compactly, and makes a nice little bundle—just like a bundle of old sticks any man might have been seen carrying about London in those days without attracting any attention. Why, it probably helped him to look like an honest working man time and time again, for on being arrested he declared most solemnly he’d always carried that ladder openly under his arm."

"The daring of that!" cried Bunting.

"Yes, and when the ladder was opened out it could reach from the ground to the second storey of any old house. And, oh! how clever he was! Just open one section, and you see the other sections open automatically; so Peace could stand on the ground and force the thing quietly up to any window he wished to reach. Then he’d go away again, having done his job, with a