rkable in it. "Oh,
I suppose some of the big houses had guests," volunteered the foreman,
"and just to show off the place perhaps they turned on all the lights.
I don't know, sir, what it was, but it couldn't have been a heavy drain,
or we would have noticed it at the time, and the lights would all have
been dim."

"Well," said Craig, "just watch and see if it occurs again to-night
about the same time."

"All right, sir."

"And when you close down the plant for the night, will you bring the
record card up to Fletcherwood?" asked Craig, slipping a bill into the
pocket of the foreman's shirt.

"I will, and thank you, sir."

It was nearly half-past eleven when Craig had got his apparatus set up
in the library at Fletcherwood. Then he unscrewed all the bulbs from the
chandelier in the library and attached in their places connections with
the usual green silk-covered flexible wire rope. These were then joined
up to a little instrument which to me looked like a drill. Next he
muffed the drill with a wad of felt and applied it to the safe door.

I could hear the dull tat-tat of the drill. Going into the bedroom and
closing the door, I found that it was still audible to me, but an old
man, inclined to deafness and asleep, would scarcely have been awakened
by it. In about ten minutes Craig displayed a neat little hole in the
safe door opposite the one made by the cracksman in the combination.

"I'm glad you're honest," I said, "or else we might be afraid of
you--perhaps even make you prove an alibi for last night's job!"

He ignored my bantering and said in a tone such as he might have
used before a class of students in the gentle art of scientific
safe-cracking: "Now if the power company's curve is just the same
to-night as last night, that will show how the thing was done. I wanted
to be sure of it, so I thought I'd try this apparatus which I smuggled
in from Paris last year. I believe the old man happened to be wakeful
and heard it."

Then he pried off the door of the interior compartment which had been
jimmied open. "Perhaps we may learn something by looking at this
door and studying the marks left by the jimmy, by means of this new
instrument of mine," he said.

On the library table he fastened an arrangement with two upright posts
supporting a dial which he called a "dynamometer." The uprights were
braced in the back, and the whole thing reminded me of a miniature
guillotine.

"This is my mechanical detectiv