O’Malley had a taxi waiting and they slid off up the deserted regions of Broadway. After a few blocks they swerved to the left, plunging into a congeries of mean streets where a network of fire-escapes encaged the house fronts. The lights from small shops illumined the sidewalks, thick with sauntering people. The taxi moved slowly, children darting from its approach, swept round a corner and ran on through less animated lanes of travel, upper windows bright, disheveled figures leaning on the sills, vague groupings on front steps. At intervals, like the threatening voice of some advancing monster, came the roar of the elevated trains, sweeping across a vista with a rocking rush of light. O’Malley drew himself to the edge of the sea and peered out ahead. "We’re not far off now," he muttered. "We’ll stop at the corner of the block—there’s a bookbinding place there that’s dark and quiet. If we go to the door they might catch on, get panicky, and make a row." At one end of the street’s length the lamp-spotted darkness of Washington Square showed like a spangled curtain. The cab turned from it and crossed a wide avenue over which the skeleton structure of the elevated straddled like a vast centipede. Beyond stretched a darkling perspective touched at recurring intervals with the white spheres of lamps. It was a propitious time, the evening overflow dispersed, the loneliness of the deep night hours, when a footfall echoes loud and a solitary figure looms mysterious, not yet come. The cab drew up at the curb by the shuttered face of the book bindery and the man alighted. With a low command to the driver, O’Malley, George beside him, walked up the block. From a shadowy doorway a figure detached itself, slunk by them with a whispered hail and vanished. Toward the street’s far end they stopped at a door level with the sidewalk, and O’Malley, bending to scrutinize a line of push buttons, pressed one. "Is this the place?" George whispered, in startled revulsion. "This is the place. And a good one for Price’s purpose as you’ll see when you get in." The young man noted the battered doorway, slightly out of plumb, then stepped back and glanced at the façade. Many of the windows, uncurtained and open, were lit up. Those of the top floor—dormers projecting from a mansard roof—were dark. He was about to call O’Malley’s attention to this, when the sounds of footsteps within the house checked him. There was a rattling of locks and bolts and the door swung open disclosing a man, grimy, old and bent, a lamp in his hand. He squinted uncertainly at them, then growled irritably as he recognized O’Malley: "Oh, it’s you. I thought you wasn’t comin’? If you’d been any later you wouldn’t ’a got me up." O’Malley explained that the gentleman was detained—couldn’t get away any earlier, very sorry, but they’d be quick and make no noise—just wanted to see the rooms and get out.