nd dropped on hands and knees. One question at
least was answered--Connie Myers was inside.

The plan that she had given him showed an old-fashioned cellarway,
closed by folding trapdoors, that was located a little toward the rear
and, in a moment, creeping along, he came upon it. His hands felt over
it. It was shut, fastened by a padlock on the outside. Jimmie Dale's
lips thinned a little, as he took a small steel instrument from his
pocket. Either through inadvertence or by intention, Connie Myers had
passed up an almost childishly simple means of entrance into the house!
One side of the trapdoor was lifted up silently--and silently closed.
Jimmie Dale was in the cellar. The hammering, much more distinct now,
heavy, thudding blows, came from a room in the front--the connection
between the cellar and the house, as shown on the Tocsin's plan, was
through another trapdoor in the floor of the kitchen.

Jimmie Dale's flashlight played on a short, ladderlike stairway, and
in an instant he was climbing upward. The sounds from the front of the
house continued now without interruption; there was little fear that
Connie Myers would hear anything else--even the protesting squeak of
the hinges as Jimmie Dale cautiously pushed back the trapdoor in the
flooring above his head. An inch, two inches he lifted it; and, his eyes
on a level with the opening now, he peered into the room. The kitchen
itself was intensely dark; but through an open doorway, well to one
side so that he could not see into the room beyond, there struggled
a curiously faint, dim glimmer of light. And then Jimmie Dale's form
straightened rigidly on the stairs. The blows stopped, and a voice, in a
low growl, presumably Connie Myers', reached him.

"Here, take a drive at it from the lower edge!"

There was no answer--save that the blows were resumed again. Jimmie
Dale's face had set hard. Connie Myers was not alone in this, then!
Well, the odds were a little heavier, DOUBLED--that was all! He pushed
the trapdoor wide open, swung himself up through the opening to the
floor; and the next instant, back a little from the connecting doorway,
his body pressed closely against the kitchen wall, he was staring,
bewildered and amazed, into the next room.

On the floor, presumably to lessen the chance of any light rays stealing
through the tightly drawn window shades, burned a small oil lamp. The
place was in utter confusion. The right-hand side of a large fireplace,
mad