s. There was no entrance here. Even should a pane of glass be
removable--all seemingly solid and tight--the frame between and the sash
were of steel, and the panes were too small for the passage of a man. I
crept back to the ladder as Worth was striking a match to light the
pitch-pine kindling.

"What about this Vandeman chink?" I asked of Hughes as I rejoined him at
the foot of the ladder. "Does he hang around here much?"

"Him and Chung visit back and forth a bit. I hear 'em talkin' hy-lee
hy-lo sometimes when I go by the kitchen."

"Take me over there," I said.

The fog was beginning to blow away in threads; moonlight somewhere back
of it made a queer, gray, glimmering world around us. We circled the
garden by the path, passing a sort of gardener's tool shed where Hughes
left the ladder, and from which I judged Worth had brought the bar he
pried the door planks off with, to find a gap in a hedge between this
place and the next.

There was a light in the rear of the house over there, and a
well-trodden path leading from the hedge gap made what I took to be a
servants' highway.

Vandeman's house proved to be, as nearly as one could see it in the
darkness, a sprawling bungalow, with courts, pergolas and terraces
bursting out on all sides of it. I could fairly see it of a fine
afternoon, with its showy master sitting on one of the showy porches,
serving afternoon tea in his best manner to the best people of Santa
Ysobel. Just the husband for that doll-faced girl, if she only thought
so. What could she have done with a young outlaw like Worth?

When I looked at the Chinaman in charge there, I gave up my idea of
questioning him. Civilly enough, with a precise and educated usage of
the English language, he confirmed what Eddie Hughes had already told
me about the telephoning from that place this morning; and I went no
further. I know the Chinese--if anybody not Mongolian can say they know
the race--and I have also a suitable respect for the value of time. A
week of steady questioning of Vandeman's yellow man would have brought
me nowhere. He was that kind of a chink; grave, respectful, placid and
impervious.

On the way back I asked Eddie about the Thornhill servants at the house
on the other side of Gilbert's, and found they kept but one, "a sort of
old lady," Eddie called her, and I guessed easily at the decayed
gentlewoman kind of person. It seemed that Mrs. Thornhill was a widow,
and there wasn't much money no