It was the second of these, on the left-hand side, and creeping toward it we stood for a moment getting our wind. The place was very cold, as if a window was open, and there was not a sound. Standing by the door O’Mally knocked softly. There was no answer. In that half-lit passage, chilled with the icy breath of the winter night and held in a strange stillness, I was seized by a grisly sense of impending horror. If I’d been a small boy my teeth would have begun to chatter. At thirty years of age that doesn’t happen, but I doubt whether anyone whose body was supplied with an ordinarily active nervous system would not have felt something sinister in that cold, dark place, in the silence behind that close-shut door. O’Mally knocked again and again; there was no answer. "Try it," I whispered and the detective turned the handle. "Locked," he breathed back, then—"Stand away there. I’m going to break it. There’s something wrong here." He turned sideways, bracing his shoulder against the door. There was a cracking sound, and the lock, embedded in old soft wood, gave way, the door swinging in with O’Mally hanging to the handle. The room was unlit but for the silver moonlight that came from the window, uncurtained and open. At that sight the same thought seized the three of us—the man was gone—and O’Mally, fumbling in his pocket for matches, broke into furious profanity. I had a box and as I dug round for it, took a look about, and saw the shapes of a chair with garments hanging over it, an open desk, and, against the opposite wall, the bed. It was only a pale oblong, and looked irregular, as if the clothes were heaped on it as the man had thrown them back. I could have joined O’Mally in his swearing. Gone—when our fingers were closing on him! Then I found the matches and the gas burst out over our heads. My eyes were on the bed and O’Mally’s must have been, for simultaneously I gave an exclamation and he leaped forward. There, asleep, under the covers lay a man. Quick as a flash of lightning the detective was beside him, bending to look close at the face, then he drew back with a sound—a cry of amazement, disbelief—and pulling off the bed clothes laid his hand on the sleeper’s chest. "God in Heaven!" he gasped, turning to us. "He’s dead!" Babbitts and I made a rush for the bed, I to the head, where I leaned low to make sure, staring into the gray, pale face with its prominent nose and sunken eyes. Then it was my turn to cry out, to stagger back, looking from one man to the other, aghast at what I’d seen: "It’s not Barker at all." For a moment we stared at one another, jaws fallen, eyes stony. Not a word came from one of us, the silence broken by the hissing rush of the gas turned up full cock in a sputtering ribbon of flame. I came to myself first, turned from them back to the dead face, its marble calm in strange contrast to the stunned consternation of the living faces.