But if the officer had been unmoved, the man with the ladder had not. On the contrary, he was greatly disturbed, and was deterred from casting down his burden and taking to his heels only by the fear that a bullet from the civic soldier’s pistol might outrun him. When the danger was overpast, he rested the ladder against the fence and took a long pull from a flat pocket bottle. “Whooh!” he growled, stopping to take breath, and glancing up at the darkened windows of the Seeley house. “I’ll just about get my blooming leg pulled for twenty years before I get through with this deal! Run right smack against that cop, when I’d been dodging him for a half hour and better!” The flat bottle gurgled again, and then the ladder was lifted and dropped quietly over the fence, to be reared presently behind a tangle of evergreen vines at the end of the veranda. A minute later the man appeared at the top and made his way cautiously over the tin roof, which bulged and crackled under his weight until the sweat of fear made him damp and uncomfortable. He paused before Brant’s window, and, inserting a thin-edged bit of steel beneath the sash, tried it gently. “Fastened, of course,” he muttered, and a knife blade was slipped deftly between the upper and lower sash. There was a muffled click, and then the window opened noiselessly. Once safely inside, the burglar’s first care was to close the window and to draw the curtains. Then he lighted a dark lantern and flashed its beam around the room. “So far, so good,” was his comment. “Camp cached, and nobody at home. Now for them dockyments.” He took another pull at the flat bottle as a preliminary, and then proceeded to ransack the apartment with the skilful rapidity of one to whom the craft was not new. The belongings of a man’s room are soon overhauled. Brant’s impedimenta were of the lightest, and in a short time the burglar came to the end of his quest without finding anything more to the purpose than a large revolver and a bottle of brandy. Laying the weapon aside, he unstoppered the bottle and sampled its contents. “Brandy--ten-year-old cognac, as I’m a sinner!” He held the bottle up and flashed the beam of the lantern on it. Then he gave a toast. “Here’s to you, Mister Snap-shot Brant; and may you live happy and die suddint--when I git the drop on you!” The liquor paid the penalty of the toast at a frightful cost, and the burglar smacked his lips and wiped them on the sleeve of his coat. “Blast him! he knows what good liquor is,” he remarked. “I’ll say that much for him, anyway. Now, then, I’ll have a squint among his clothes.” He dived into the closet and came out with an armful of clothing, and when the pockets yielded nothing he broke out in a monologue of thick-tongued malediction, and again had recourse to the brandy bottle. After a deeper potation than any of the preceding he did that which was afterward to prove his undoing. He drew up Brant’s easy-chair and sat down to curse his ill luck.