“Come out now,” said Teverson, pulling at me absolutely unnecessarily; he didn’t have to put up any argument. “I may be a damn fool, as Sencort suggests, but then I’ve rather a longer life expectancy--away from slotted gas pipes--than he. Besides, I’m beginning to feel some of this is personal against me. I was invited to Costrelman’s dinner and was expected, though I didn’t get there.... Weston, get help at once and try to cover the places where these pipes may run to; they may be entirely outside the building, of course. Jump! Reed, post men here to see no one uses this room or room next to it to-day. Leave the electric lights burning as if the room was being used and send some one, on the run, to that animal store the other side of Broadway in a cellar, Thames Street, I think, and buy four or five guinea pigs; if he gets back with them in fifteen minutes, cover your head, hold your breath, and put them inside this door; close it. If he doesn’t get back that soon, don’t even go near the door. Wait here, Fanneal.” He left me in an office near by and himself rushed away. “Now you tell me,” he went at me three minutes later, “how much you know about this?” XVIII DORIS APPEARS AND VANISHES. I was a changed man, as you may imagine. Yesterday and up to this minute of this morning, I was the laugh of the locality. “F. P. A.” had put in a little paragraph about me; the librettists of the running revues also had tamped in a line or two of appropriate personal reference to the Chicago vendor of beans, with two nice, new money plates packed in his jeans. It was music to me to hear any one address me as Teverson was doing. “You know nearly all that I do,” I told him. “Maybe you’ve heard I’ve been in a little mix-up with counterfeiters and others recently. I got my tip out of that.” “Who sent the tip?” I shook my head; it was hopeless to go into the question of Jerry with him; and Teverson was not inclined to waste time impractically. “Pipes!” he repeated. “They were going to use the pipes; that’s all you knew of their method?” “That’s all.” “What do you want to do now?” he asked me, almost deferentially. “Stay here?” “I’d like to see this through, of course,” I said. “I’d like to know what happens to those guinea pigs.” “Whatever you like,” he answered, and shook hands with me. I could see he was getting uneasy about Strathon and Géroud. He went out and I, having nothing to do but wait, wandered in the hall. A door opened at the rear and showed an enclosed stairway lit by yellow electricity; a girl had come up the stairs and now was standing in the dimness of the hall. During the second she showed herself in the lighted doorway, before the door closed again, I had a glimpse of her outline. She was little and trim; like Doris, I thought.