Perhaps never had Peter Pape felt in more of a rush to reach any given spot. Yet, once there, he seemed in a greater rush to get away. Scarcely did he pause in his brisk walk along the pavement outside the park wall to study the details of the scene beneath the poplars which so had interested him—three laborers dressed in jeans, each equipped with pick or shovel, digging in the shade under direction of a dapper-dressed, slight-built stranger. But in the sprinkling of curious bystanders, men and women who decorated the wall like rail-birds, there was no sight of her whom he rather had expected to find among those present. The total absence of Jane Lauderdale, either in the bonnet and black of East Sixty-third Street or in the modish morning frock which might have attired her dual self, decided his next move. By passage of several minutes, a picked-up taxi and a dollar bill, he was mounting the front steps of the old, scaly far-East mansion. The front door standing open, he seemed tacitly invited to enter without formality of a ring. Upon undertaking the flight of stairs within he congratulated himself that he was not superstitious. Every step of the weathered wood squeaked, scrooped or screeched as if in ill-omen. Never had he climbed so foreboding a stair-case, albeit never so determinedly. Just why he had come did not matter. There was plenty of time, as he told himself, to argue that out afterward. Impulse had mastered him, the same sort of impulse that would have started him burning the trail back home to warn a pal whose mining claim had been jumped or whose cattle were being rustled toward the Canadian line. Actionful resentment had moved him, as during the previous winter when he had discovered poachers attacking the Yellowstone buffalo herd and had skied forty miles in blizzard weather to warn the Spread-Eagle Rangers. So far as he cared to figure in the emergency, a bent-back, ill-clad old lady—no matter who else or what else or whyfore else she might be—had preëmpted that poplar patch and owned therefore the exclusive digging rights thereto. In the event that she herself had not instigated the present activity, he was here to warn her. Whom he should meet at the top of his climb was problematic. If it was the blond-mopped man—Well, they both might be taking chances. A moment did he pause before the door of the fourth floor front. Suppose a maid attended his knock, for whom should he ask? “Miss Lauderdale” might not be known in the house—mention of the name might betray an incognito. Reminding himself, however, that a servant was the difficulty least likely to be encountered in that tenement, he knuckled up his hand and knocked. His first rap did not bring response; had to be repeated more peremptorily. He could hear low voices within. Then there was silence. Perhaps the occupants of flats did not answer unexpected knocks. His hand was fisted for a third when the knob turned and the door opened a crack.