“It is nearly time to rig, then. But come with me first. I want to look over that Seventeenth Street house again. Though the people in the neighborhood say the folks who were in it for three days have left it, I’ve a notion it’s still in the game.” The two moved off in the direction of the house in question, and had reached the corner of Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue on their way, when a young man in a blue flannel shirt and a coil of wire about his shoulder, stopped Chick and asked: “Ain’t you Chickering Carter?” “Yes,” replied Chick, eying the young man keenly. “Well, say,” said the young man, “it’s up to me to tell you something. Say, I’ve been chewing on it all day, and just as soon as I was cleaned up I was going to hunt up Nick Carter and give it away, if it did fling me out of a job.” “Can you tell me?” asked Chick. “That’s what I hollered whoa on you for. You’ll do just as well.” “Step aside, then,” said Chick. Chick led the way to a place near the corner, where they could talk unobserved, followed by both Patsy and the young man. “Now, then, what is it?” asked Chick “I’ve been dead wrong,” said the young man, “and I’m going to square it, even if you fling me over to the company. It’s this way. I’m lineman for the telephone company. See? “I know all about Nick Carter, and you, and Patsy and Ida. See? Well, I was working on the line up by Ida’s house this morning, where a break had been reported, and I had to go on to the top of a house right by hers. “Well, I found a wire had been rung in on it, and I followed it to see that it run over the gutter and to a window on the third floor. See? “I went down to that room, and there was a young woman, and she was a peach, all smiles. See? “‘You’ve found it,’ she says, ‘and caught me. Now don’t give me away, ’cause there’s nothing in it. I was only trying to get on to my best feller.’ See? “Anyhow, she give me the great jolly and I went in up to my neck. I was soft as butter. When she flung up a fiver at me, hanged if I didn’t do what she wanted, and fixed the wire to an old ’phone she had in the room. “She jollied me into it. See? After I got away from her, I began to think, and the more I thought the more wrong it was to me, and I saw what mush I’d been in the hands of a pretty woman. “So, after I’d been thinking an hour, I went back to unfix it. Say! Just as I got to her door I heard her say: ‘All right, chief, this is Ida.’ Then I took a big tumble. I listened and heard her say over what the one at the other end had been saying, something about ‘Herman Hartwig’ and ‘Passen.’ She had got on to Nick Carter’s talk and was a crook playing Ida. “I took a sneak up to the roof, cut the leak wire, and switched the other over so that the crook couldn’t get at it again. “That’s all there is of it. I’ve squared it with you, and, if you want to, you can report me to the company and get me sacked. I won’t squeal.”