The murder caused very little excitement, but everybody in the city knew what it meant, and everybody was willing to tell Dick all about it. The murdered man was a gambler who a few days before had had an altercation with another gambler named Tom Davis. Tom Davis had sworn to have revenge, and to bring it about he had taken a room in the Arlington Hotel--a front room--and stationed himself in it with a rifle and waited patiently for the other man to pass. When the man passed on the opposite side of the street he had fired and killed him, and then disappeared, without stopping to inquire what damage might have been done to Dick’s head, only six inches away. “I suppose it’s lucky for me that Tom Davis is a dead shot!” Dick reflected. “That bullet certainly was not a foot from my ear.” That night he sat in his room writing, as he did every night, when he heard a heavy thud, thud, thud on the iron stairs that made him pause and listen. “There must be a troop of cavalry coming upstairs!” he exclaimed. Tramp, tramp! If they were men, there were many of them, and all in heavy boots. The sound came nearer and nearer; up the stairs, into the wide hall floored with iron and glass, and stopped, as it seemed to Dick, directly in front of his door. All was still for a moment, and he heard a whispered consultation outside; then came a heavy knock upon the door. Wondering what it could all mean, Dick stepped to the door and opened it; and in a second he found himself looking into the barrel of a cocked revolver. It was the first time he had ever had a revolver pointed directly at his head; and it was not six inches away. Before he had time to feel alarmed he saw that the man who held it was in uniform, and that six men who stood in line behind him with rifles in their hands were also in uniform. They were policemen. There was security in those blue uniforms; such security that Dick, with the revolver still in his face, began to smile at the ludicrous situation. “You have the drop on me!” he exclaimed. “Here, take my watch and pocketbook. It’s all I have.” The man in front did not answer, but began to look past Dick into the room, as though searching for some one. “Walk in, gentlemen,” Dick said; “just keep your thumb on the hammer of that pistol, will you? those things sometimes go off. Perhaps he’s here, whoever you are looking for. If he is, I’ll be obliged to you if you’ll take him out.” He was so cool about it that the officer in advance, who proved to be the chief of police, could not help smiling. He lowered his revolver and stepped inside. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said; “but it is necessary to search this building. I have reason to believe that Tom Davis, the gambler, who murdered a man this afternoon, is in hiding in some of these rooms.”