“Keep your head,” Thwaite interrupted. “I’m no fool. I’ve spent years on this scheme. After I was sure of the prize I made sure of the means. There are precautions a-many, but not enough. How simple to put a watchman’s cottage every hundred yards on the other side of the road across from the wall? They haven’t done it. How simple to light the road and the outside of the wall? They haven’t done that. Nor have they thought of any one of the twenty other simple outside precautions. The park’s big enough to be lonely. And outside the wall is all dark, lonely road and unfenced, empty woods like this. They’re overconfident. They think their wall and their gate-houses are enough. And they are not. They think their outside precautions are perfect. They are not. I know. I’ve been over that wall ten times, twenty times, fifty times. I’ve risked it and I have risked man-traps and spring guns and alarm wires. There aren’t any. There isn’t any night patrol, nor any regular day patrol, only casual gardeners and such. I know. I made sure of it by crawling all over the place on my belly like an Iroquois Indian in one of Cooper’s novels. They are so confident of the potency of their wall that they haven’t so much as a watch dog, nor any dog of any kind.” I was certainly startled. “No dog!” I exclaimed. “Are you sure?” “Dead sure!” Thwaite returned, triumphantly, “And sure there never has been a dog on the place.” “How could you be sure of that?” I cavilled. “I’m coming to that,” Thwaite went on, “I could not get anybody that ever belonged to the place to talk, but I managed to arrange to overhear two of them talking to each other; and more than once, too. Most of what they said was no use to me, but I overheard scraps I could piece together. There’s a cross-wall that divides the park. In the smaller division, into which the lodge gates lead, are the homes of all the caretakers and servants, of the overseers and manager and of the estate doctor; for there is an estate doctor. He has two assistants, young men, frequently changed. He is married like most of the retinue. There is a sort of village of them inside the outer wall, outside the inner cross-wall. Some of them have been there thirty-five years. When they get too old they are pensioned off and sent away, somewhere; far off, for I could not get a clue to any pensioner.