was how I found the open window. I had passed perhaps
six, all closed, and to have my hand grope for the next one, and to find
instead the soft drapery of an inner curtain, was startling, to say the
least.

I found Hotchkiss at last around an angle of the stone wall, and told
him that the horse was gone. He was disconcerted, but not abased;
maintaining that it was a new kind of knot that couldn't slip and that
the horse must have chewed the halter through! He was less enthusiastic
than I had expected about the window.

"It looks uncommonly like a trap," he said. "I tell you there was some
one in the park below when we were coming up. Man has a sixth sense that
scientists ignore--a sense of the nearness of things. And all the time
you have been gone, some one has been watching me."

"Couldn't see you," I maintained; "I can't see you now. And your sense
of contiguity didn't tell you about that flower crock."

In the end, of course, he consented to go with me. He was very lame, and
I helped him around to the open window. He was full of moral courage,
the little man: it was only the physical in him that quailed. And as we
groped along, he insisted on going through the window first.

"If it is a trap," he whispered, "I have two arms to your one, and,
besides, as I said before, life holds much for you. As for me, the
government would merely lose an indifferent employee."

When he found I was going first he was rather hurt, but I did not wait
for his protests. I swung my feet over the sill and dropped. I made a
clutch at the window-frame with my good hand when I found no floor under
my feet, but I was too late. I dropped probably ten feet and landed with
a crash that seemed to split my ear-drums. I was thoroughly shaken, but
in some miraculous way the bandaged arm had escaped injury.

"For Heaven's sake," Hotchkiss was calling from above, "have you broken
your back?"

"No," I returned, as steadily as I could, "merely driven it up through
my skull. This is a staircase. I'm coming up to open another window."

It was eerie work, but I accomplished it finally, discovering, not
without mishap, a room filled with more tables than I had ever dreamed
of, tables that seemed to waylay and strike at me. When I had got
a window open, Hotchkiss crawled through, and we were at last under
shelter.

Our first thought was for a light. The same laborious investigation
that had landed us where we were, revealed that the house was ligh