Her quick eye had taken note of the fact that he wore a soiled blue uniform, and the leather-peaked blue cap of a Consolidated Gas Company employee, and that he carried with him a brass hand-pump. He laughed a little to himself, put down his pump in one corner of the room, and allowed his fingers to stray through his mutilated Vandyke, now a short and straggly growth of sandy whiskers. Then he turned to her with an unuttered query on his face. “I was right,” she said quietly, but hurriedly. “I never really doubted it!” “Ottenheimer has a private drawer in the vault. It’s in that. His wife telephoned down very cautiously about it this morning. A little later, too, Ottenheimer was called up from a Brooklyn drugstore, by a Mrs. Van Gottschalk, or some such name, who said her husband was still in bed with the grip, and couldn’t possibly get over until Monday. This man, you see, is Ottenheimer’s diamond-cutter.” “Thank heaven, that gives us a little more time!” “Three days, at least! But what have you done, Jim?” “Been trying to persuade the janitor of the Ottenheimer Building that I was sent to pump the water out of his gas-pipes,—but he was just as sure that I wasn’t. I got down in his cellar, though, and had a good look about, before I saw it wouldn’t do to push the thing too far. So I insisted on going up and seeing the owner about that order. There was an inside stairway, and a queer-looking steel door I wanted to get my knuckles against. I started up there, but he hauled me back. I found out, though, that this door is made of one-inch steel armor-plate. There’s another door leading from the foot of the outer hallway into the cellar itself. But that’s only covered with soft sheet-iron—more against fire than anything else. Fifteen minutes will get through that one, easily. It’s the inner door that is the problem. I tried it with a knife-point, just one hard little jab. It took the end off my Roger’s blade.” “But is this door the only way in?”