I heard the sound of prying and sawing. There alone I looked but once at the dead cracksman. The thing that had killed him was the size of a four to six year old child, but more stockily built, looked entirely human up to the neck, and was dressed in a coat of bright dark blue, a vest of crimson velvet, and white duck trousers. As I looked the muzzle wriggled for the last time, the jaws fell apart and the carcass rolled sideways. It was the very duplicate in miniature of the figure in the big picture on the staircase landing. Thwaite came dashing back. Without any sign of any qualm he searched Rivvin and tossed me two or three bundles of greenbacks: He stood up. He laughed. “Curiosity,” he said, “will be the death of me.” Then he stripped the clothing from the dead monster, kneeling by it. The beast-hair stopped at the shirt collar. Below that the skin was human, as was the shape, the shape of a forty-year-old man, strong and vigorous and well-made, only dwarfed to the smallness of a child. Across the hairy breast was tattooed in blue, “HENGIST EVERSLEIGH.” “Hell,” said Thwaite. He stood up and went to the fatal door. Inside he found the electric button. The room was small and lined with cases of little drawers, tier on tier, rows of brass knobs on mahogany. Thwaite opened one. It was velvet lined and grooved like a jeweler’s tray and contained rings, the settings apparently emeralds. Thwaite dumped them into one of the empty bags he had taken from Rivvin’s corpse. The next case was of similar drawers of rings set with rubies. The first of these Thwaite dumped in with the emeralds. But then he flew round the room pulling out drawers and slamming them shut, until he came upon trays of unset diamonds. These he emptied into his sack to the last of them, then diamond rings on them, other jewelry set with diamonds, then rubies and emeralds till the sack was full. He tied its neck, had me open a second sack and was dumping drawer after drawer into that when suddenly he stopped. His nose worked, worked horridly like that of the dead monster. I thought he was going crazy and was beginning to laugh nervously, was on the verge of hysterics when he said: “Smell! Try what you smell.” I sniffed. “I smell smoke,” I said. “So do I,” he agreed. “This place is afire.” “And we locked in!” I exclaimed. “Locked in?” he sneered. “Bosh. I broke open the front door the instant I was sure they were dead. Come! Drop that empty bag. This is no time for haggling.” We had to step between the two corpses. Rivvin was horridly dead. The colors had all faded from the snout. The muzzle was all mouse-color. When we had hold of the bag of coin, Thwaite turned off the electric lights and we struggled out with that and the bag of jewels, and went out into the hallway full of smoke. “We can carry only these,” Thwaite warned me. “We’ll have to leave the rest.”