"What did you say?" cried the doctor, surprised out of himself. "General Ruff in the strong-room—two robbers with him in the house! Why, it is plainly impossible—it is three weeks on Tuesday since you were hurt." "The General was in the house when I was attacked," repeated Cleg. "I heard him go into the strong-room and shut the door." The doctor went into Netherby and telegraphed to the General's lawyers, who lived in the larger town of Drumnith. The two heads of the firm arrived by the next train, and, as a result of a conference with the doctor and Cleg, an urgent message was sent to the great firm of safe and strong-room makers who had engineered the safety appliances, to come and open the room in which lay the most hidden treasures of General Theophilus Ruff. In response to this urgent application three skilled mechanicians came down that same night, and by five in the morning they stood ready to break in the door. The foreman of Messrs. Cox & Roskell's declared that no power existed by which, in the absence of the keys and the knowledge of the time and word combinations, the lock could be opened without violence. But the lawyers promptly decided that at all hazards the room must be reached. So, very philosophically, the foreman proceeded to demolish the work of his own hands and brain—the preparation and fitting of which had cost him so many weeks. He inserted two dynamite cartridges on either side of the red iron door, boring holes for their reception in the rock itself, so that the frame might be started bodily from its bed. Then he placed other two under the step which led to the room. There were present only the three artisans, the two lawyers from Drumnith of the firm of Hewitson & Graham, together with Doctor Sidey, who had constituted himself Cleg's representative, and had insisted either on having the regular police called in or upon being present himself. These six men stood far back from the house while the dynamite was exploded. The foreman timed the fuse with his watch. Presently there came a little jar of the earth, as if a railway train were passing underneath. But the great bulk of the building stood firm. The lawyers and the doctor were eager to run forward. But the foreman held them back till the fumes had had time to clear out of the stone narrow passages and to dissipate themselves through the glassless windows. Then they went below, each carrying a lantern. The doctor had in his pocket also a case of surgical instruments and the strongest restoratives known to his art. When they arrived in the passage they found the mighty iron door fallen outward, frame and all. It lay with the time lock and the letter attachment still in their places, leaving a black, cavernous opening, into which the light of the bull's-eye lanterns refused to penetrate. The foreman stooped as he came up. "It's not a pennypiece the worse," he said, examining the fallen door with professional solicitude.