The procession started along No. 1 Traverse, the shortest route to the Arsenal. The arresting officer led. The prime culprit, his young-old accomplice clinging to his arm, followed. The dismounted officer brought up as rear guard. “Got a permit for your automatic?” Pape was able to ask Jane in a murmur well below the scrunch of feet. “No. But I’ve got the automatic with me.” “Slip it to me!” He did not explain the request. Whether he meant to force a gun-point escape and needed her pistol to supplement his own against their two captors or whether he feared some such desperate initiative on her part, he left her to wonder. Watching their chance, he whispered “Now!” Next second he had safe inside his own coat pocket that very small, very black and very competent looking something with which she had commanded him in vain earlier in the day. “Just try to trust me, Jane,” was his response to the unquestioning obedience which had produced it from the blouse beneath her old-lady black. “To try to trust you is getting easier, Peter.” The guarded admission sounded sweeter than the rhododendrons smelled. He felt happier going to jail with Jane than ever in his life before; was luxuriating in sentimentality when a roar like that of flaunted Fate lacerated the air. Pape started and stared about; saw that they were nearing Fifth Avenue and the menagerie that flanks the Arsenal; assumed that some monarch of the wild caged there had but vented his heart. A calming hand he placed over the girl’s two which had gripped his arm. “Just a moth-eaten old lion dreaming of his native jungle and talking in his sleep.” “But you don’t understand what it might mean, that Nubian roar. It may be another clew to point the location of—of what grandfather buried in the park, you know.” Through the gloom he stared down into the gloomier scoop of her bonnet. “Say,” he enquired, mildly as he could, “you ain’t going to ask me next to play Daniel and to dig in that lion’s den?” “Hush. Don’t make fun. This is very important. If we can find four poplars over on this side of the park, within earshot of the menagerie lions—The first crypt verse starts off like this: “‘List to the Nubian roar And whisper of poplars four.’” “I wish I could remember more accurately! It rhymes about bed-rock and crock, height and might and fight, then trails off into figures. But I am certain about those first two lines. Maybe we’re getting close. With that Nubian roar as a center, let’s walk round and round, in widening circles, until we list to the whisper of poplars four.” Pape’s perplexity had not been eased by his steady stare into the poke. “Very nice,” he said, “that stroll round and round, provided we don’t go too fast and get dizzy. But we can’t start at the present moment.” “Why not?”—she, this time impatiently. “You forget, my dear young lady, that we are arrested.” That was true. They were—and before the door of their jail. CHAPTER XVIII—TOO READY RESCUE