still so many of the
precious glass cases unharmed, and the Bugologist's favorite books and
his big desk, littered with papers, etc.? Blakely thought to hail and
warn him against moving about among those brittle glass things, but
reflected that he, the new man, had done the reshifting under his,
Blakely's, supervision, and knew just where each item was placed and
how to find the passage way between them. It really was a trifle
intricate. How could he have gone into the spare room at Captain
Wren's, and there made his home as--she--Mrs. Plume had first
suggested? There would not have been room for half his plunder, to say
nothing of himself. "What on earth can Nixon want?" he sleepily asked
himself, "fumbling about there among those cases? Was that a crack or
a snap?" It sounded like both, a splitting of glass, a wrenching of
lock spring or something. "Be careful there!" he managed to call. No
answer. Perhaps it was some one of the big hounds, then, wandering
restlessly about at night. They often did, and--why, yes, that would
account for it. Doors and windows were all wide open here, what was to
prevent? Still, Blakely wished he hadn't extinguished his lamp. He
might then have explored. The sound ceased entirely for a moment, and,
now that he was quite awake, he remembered that the hospital attendant
was no longer with him. Then the sounds must have been made by the
striker or the hounds. Blakely had no dogs of his own. Indeed they
were common property at the post, most of them handed down with the
rest of the public goods and chattels by their predecessors of the ----th.
At all events, he felt far too languid, inert, weak, indifferent or
something. If the striker, he had doubtless come down for cool water. If
the hounds, they were in search of something to eat, and in either case
why bother about it? The incident had so far distracted his thoughts
from the worries of the night that now, at last and in good earnest, he
was dropping to sleep.

But in less than twenty minutes he was broad awake again, with sudden
start--gasping, suffocating, listening in amaze to a volley of
snapping and cracking, half-smothered, from the adjoining room. He
sprang from his bed with a cry of alarm and flung himself through a
thick, hot veil of eddying, yet invisible, smoke, straight for the
communicating doorway, and was brought up standing by banging his head
against the resounding pine, tight shut instead of open as he had left
it, and