fire escape's
iron surface? And yet it would seem that a young girl had accomplished
this feat, without noise, without making the least mark to register her
passage. He thought of the tell-tale handkerchief, which he had found on
the fire escape earlier in the evening, then turned back with a feeling
of annoyance. The thing was, he realized, an impossibility.

A sudden sense of the passage of time made him hurry to the roof of the
rear building of the house at No. 162. Like its neighbor, it was built
with an attic story, and in the rear were two dormer windows opening in
the same way upon the lower roof. Could these windows, by any chance, be
those of the room of Marcia Ford? It seemed highly probable, since, if
she had operated from the roof, they could afford an easy way to reach
it. Very cautiously he crept up to the nearer of the two windows and
looked in.

The room before him was in total darkness, and the very faint radiance
from without was not sufficient to enable him to distinguish anything
within it. The window, however, he saw to his delight was open, and the
opening, although small, was quite large enough to enable him to crawl
in. Holding his electric torch in one hand, he crept into the room.

The beam of light from his torch, although powerful, was, of course,
very concentrated. He swept it about the room, to make sure that it was
unoccupied. It was a small room, long and narrow, with the single dormer
window, by which he had just entered, at one end, and a similar one at
the side, in the slanting mansard roof. It contained a small bed, a
chiffonier and dresser, a table, some chairs and a trunk. It was a
woman's room; one glance at the dresser told him that, and a
handkerchief lying crumpled on the latter's top proved to be identical
with the one he had found on the fire escape, both in its general
character, and in the initial "F" in one of its borders. Beyond any
doubt, he was now in Marcia Ford's room.

Had he been inclined to doubt it, two photographs upon the wall would
have convinced him. One was a picture of the Ford girl herself. The
other was a portrait of the woman of the cab, the one that Duvall fully
believed to be the author of the attacks upon Ruth Morton.

He examined the various articles about the room with the utmost care,
but nothing of any interest rewarded his search. It had been his hope
that he might find something of definite value--the typewriter, perhaps,
upon which the threa