He still carried his drill with him; and, once he had found the private drawer he wanted, the softer iron of the inner fittings offered little resistance to a brutally impatient one-eighth bit. After two minutes of feverish work, he was able to insert the point of his furnace poker into the drawer, and firmly but gently pry it open. The next moment his blackened and oily fingers were rummaging carelessly through a fortune or two of unset stones—through little trays of different tinted diamonds, through crowded little cases of Ceylon pearls and Uralian emeralds. At last, in a smaller compartment, marked “I. Ottenheimer,” he found a gun-metal case sealed up in an envelope. The case itself, however, was securely locked. Durkin hesitated for one half second; then he forced the lid open with his steel screw-driver. One look was enough. It held the Blue Pear. He stooped and carefully brushed up the steel cuttings under his shoeless feet. As carefully he closed the inner drawers of the safe. His hand was on the nickel lock-knob once more, to swing the ponderous outer doors shut, when a sound fell on his ears, a sound that made his very blood chill and tingle and chill again through all his tense body. It was Frank’s voice, outside the same building in which he stood, not a hundred feet away from him, her voice shrilly screaming for help. His first mad impulse was to rush out to her, blindly. A second precautionary flash of thought kept him rooted to the spot, where he stood listening. He could hear confused, sharp voices, and the scuffling of feet. He heard the quick scream again; then guttural, angry protests. Some subliminal prompting told Durkin that that scream was not one of terror, but of warning. Snapping out his incandescent lamp, he stole cautiously forward through the row of partitioned, heavily-carpeted little offices, and, without showing himself, peered toward the shop-front. As he did so, a second involuntary thrill of apprehension sped up and down his backbone. The street-door itself was open. Already half way in through that door was a dark, stoutly-built man. He stood struggling in the arms of a determined young woman. That woman, Durkin could see, was Frances Candler. And all the while that she was clinging to him and holding him she was crying lustily for help. The next moment Durkin made out the man. It was Ottenheimer, himself. For some unknown reason, he hastily surmised, the diamond merchant had intended to drop into his own office. But why, he still asked, was Frank taking such risks? Durkin did not try to work the thing out in its minute details. Like a flash, he darted back to the open safe. He swung the big doors to, locked them, caught up his drill, and the loose strands of wire, and then backed quickly out through the steel door, securing it with a deft twist or two of a piece of his number twelve. The outer cellar door he as quickly closed after him.