The house was dark and apparently deserted as to its street-fronting half when he let himself in at the gate and ran quickly up the steps. The front door was open, and he remembered afterward that he had wondered how the careful widow had come to leave it so, and why the hall lamp was not lighted. From the turn at the stair-head he felt his way to the door of his study. Like the one below, it was wide open; but some one had drawn the window shades and the interior of the room was as dark as a cavern. Once, in the novel-writing, following the lead of many worthy predecessors, Griswold had made much of the "sixth" sense; the subtle and indefinable prescience which warns its possessor of invisible danger. No such warning was vouchsafed him when he leaned across the end of the writing-table, turned on the gas, and held a lighted match over the chimney of the working-lamp. It was while he was still bending over the table, with both hands occupied, that he looked aside. In his own pivot-chair, covering him with the mate to the weapon he had smashed and thrown away, sat the man who had opened the two doors and drawn the window shades and otherwise prepared the trap. "You bought a couple o' these little playthings, Mr. Griswold," said the man, quietly. "Keep your hands right where they are, and tell me in which pocket you've got the other one." Griswold laughed, and there was a sudden snapping of invisible bonds. He dismissed instantly the thought that Charlotte Farnham had taken him at his word; and if she had not, there was nothing to fear. "I threw the other one away a little while ago," he said. "Reach your free hand over and feel my pockets." Broffin acted upon the suggestion promptly. "You ain't got it on you, anyway," he conceded; and when Griswold had dropped into the chair at the table's end: "I reckon you know what I'm here for." "I know that you are holding that gun of mine at an exceedingly uncomfortable angle--for me," was the cool rejoinder. "I've always had a squeamish horror of being shot in the stomach." The detective's grin was appreciative. "You've got a good cold nerve, anyway," he commented. "I've been puttin' it up that when the time came, you'd throw a fit o' some sort--what? Since you're clothed in your right mind, we'll get down to business. First, I'll ask you to hand over the key to that safety-deposit box you've got in Mr. Grierson's bank." Griswold took his bunch of keys from his pocket, slipped the one that was asked for from the ring, and gave it to his captor. "Of course, I'm surrendering it under protest," he said. "You haven't yet told me who you are, or what you are holding me up for." Broffin waved the formalities aside with a pistol-pointed gesture. "We can skip all that. I've got you dead to rights, after so long a time, and I'm goin' to take you back to New Orleans with me. The only question is: do you go easy, or hard?" "I don't go either way until you show your authority."