driver a whole one
instead, and only wish that it had been a hundred.

Already the Italian had his latch-key in the door of 38, and in another
moment we were rushing up the narrow stairs of as dingy a London house
as prejudiced countryman can conceive. It was panelled, but it was
dark and evil-smelling, and how we should have found our way even to
the stairs but for an unwholesome jet of yellow gas in the hall, I
cannot myself imagine. However, up we went pell-mell, to the
right-about on the half-landing, and so like a whirlwind into the
drawing-room a few steps higher. There the gas was also burning behind
closed shutters, and the scene is photographed upon my brain, though I
cannot have looked upon it for a whole instant as I sprang in at my
leader's heels.

This room also was panelled, and in the middle of the wall on our left,
his hands lashed to a ring-bolt high above his head, his toes barely
touching the floor, his neck pinioned by a strap passing through
smaller ring-bolts under either ear, and every inch of him secured on
the same principle, stood, or rather hung, all that was left of
Raffles, for at the first glance I believed him dead. A black ruler
gagged him, the ends lashed behind his neck, the blood upon it caked to
bronze in the gaslight. And in front of him, ticking like a
sledge-hammer, its only hand upon the stroke of twelve, stood a
simple, old-fashioned, grandfather's clock--but not for half an instant
longer--only until my guide could hurl himself upon it and send the
whole thing crashing into the corner. An ear-splitting report
accompanied the crash, a white cloud lifted from the fallen clock, and
I saw a revolver smoking in a vice screwed below the dial, an
arrangement of wires sprouting from the dial itself, and the single
hand at once at its zenith and in contact with these.

"Tumble to it, Bunny?"

He was alive; these were his first words; the Italian had the
blood-caked ruler in his hand, and with his knife was reaching up to
cut the thongs that lashed the hands. He was not tall enough, I seized
him and lifted him up, then fell to work with my own knife upon the
straps. And Raffles smiled faintly upon us through his blood-stains.

"I want you to tumble to it," he whispered; "the neatest thing in
revenge I ever knew, and another minute would have fixed it. I've been
waiting for it twelve hours, watching the clock round, death at the end
of the lap! Electric connection. Simple