uous task to support him and at the same time
remove his coat. Only a man of Wilson's size and prodigious strength
could have accomplished the feat in anything like the time required,
and both he and Watkins were purple and breathless when they lowered
the again unfrocked Officer 666 into the chest and piled portieres and
a small Persian rug on top of him.

While Watkins held up the lid the thief tore off his claw-hammer coat
and stuffed that down into the chest. In another instant he had forced
his shoulders into the uniform coat, donned the cap and buckled on the
belt.

"Now break for it, Watkins," he gasped, fighting the buttons into the
buttonholes. "Take it easy out the front door. I'll go out on the
balcony and call down to the men in the street that it's all right.
Start the engine in the car and keep it going till I can make my
getaway. Now!"

Watkins vanished out the door at the psychological moment. Captain
Stone and Kearney were coming down the stairs engaged in earnest
conversation. So engrossed were they when they entered the room that
they failed to notice the absence of Officer 666, whose uniform was
strutting on the balcony while he himself lay anaesthetized in the
chest.

"How could he have been hiding in those portieres, Kearney?" Captain
Stone was saying. "I looked through them before I left the room."

"I don't know how, Captain," replied Kearney, "but he was and Gladwin
knew it."

"You're sure of that?"

"Positive."

"I say, captain, do you know where Mr. Ryan is?" intervened the roving
Barnes, who seemed to have bobbed up from nowhere in particular with
Sadie in his train.

"He may be in the cellar and he may be on the roof," snapped the
captain. "Don't bother me now!"

"But I must bother you, by Jove," persisted the frantic Barnes. "I
demand that you send that man to unlock me. I'm not a prisoner or that
sort of thing."

Captain Stone ignored him, addressing Kearney:

"Well, if he isn't out now--he can't get out without an airship. Still
we had better search some more below stairs. Where's that man Phelan
gone? Look out on the balcony, Kearney."

Kearney stepped to the curtains, pulled them back, dropped them, and
nodded, "He's out there."

"Very well, let's go down into the cellar and work up. There isn't a
room in the house now that isn't guarded."

"But, dammit, Captain," exploded Barnes again, rattling his
handcuffs.

"Don't annoy me--can't you see I'm busy," was all th