Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman | Page 7

which Raffles showed his light, and put on his

shoes once more, bidding me do the same in a rather louder tone than
he had permitted himself to employ overhead. We were now
considerably below the level of the street, in a small space with as
many doors as it had sides. Three were ajar, and we saw through them
into empty cellars; but in the fourth a key was turned and a bolt drawn;
and this one presently let us out into the bottom of a deep, square well
of fog. A similar door faced it across this area, and Raffles had the
lantern close against it, and was hiding the light with his body, when a
short and sudden crash made my heart stand still. Next moment I saw
the door wide open, and Raffles standing within and beckoning me
with a jimmy.
"Door number one," he whispered. "Deuce knows how many more
there'll be, but I know of two at least. We won't have to make much
noise over them, either; down here there's less risk."
We were now at the bottom of the exact fellow to the narrow stone stair
which we had just descended: the yard, or well, being the one part
common to both the private and the business premises. But this flight
led to no open passage; instead, a singularly solid mahogany door
confronted us at the top.
"I thought so," muttered Raffles, handing me the lantern, and pocketing
a bunch of skeleton keys, after tampering for a few minutes with the
lock. "It'll be an hour's work to get through that!"
"Can't you pick it?"
"No: I know these locks. It's no use trying. We must cut it out, and it'll
take us an hour."
It took us forty-seven minutes by my watch; or, rather, it took Raffles;
and never in my life have I seen anything more deliberately done. My
part was simply to stand by with the dark lantern in one hand, and a
small bottle of rock-oil in the other.
Raffles had produced a pretty embroidered case, intended obviously for
his razors, but filled instead with the tools of his secret trade, including

the rock-oil. From this case he selected a "bit," capable of drilling a
hole an inch in diameter, and fitted it to a small but very strong steel
"brace." Then he took off his covert-coat and his blazer, spread them
neatly on the top step--knelt on them--turned up his shirt cuffs--and
went to work with brace-and-bit near the key-hole. But first he oiled the
bit to minimize the noise, and this he did invariably before beginning a
fresh hole, and often in the middle of one. It took thirty-two separate
borings to cut around that lock.
I noticed that through the first circular orifice Raffles thrust a forefinger;
then, as the circle became an ever-lengthening oval, he got his hand
through up to the thumb; and I heard him swear softly to himself.
"I was afraid so!"
"What is it?"
"An iron gate on the other side!"
"How on earth are we to get through that?" I asked in dismay.
"Pick the lock. But there may be two. In that case they'll be top and
bottom, and we shall have two fresh holes to make, as the door opens
inwards. It won't open two inches as it is."
I confess I did not feel sanguine about the lock-picking, seeing that one
lock had baffled us already; and my disappointment and impatience
must have been a revelation to me had I stopped to think. The truth is
that I was entering into our nefarious undertaking with an involuntary
zeal of which I was myself quite unconscious at the time. The romance
and the peril of the whole proceeding held me spellbound and
entranced. My moral sense and my sense of fear were stricken by a
common paralysis. And there I stood, shining my light and holding my
phial with a keener interest than I had ever brought to any honest
avocation. And there knelt A. J. Raffles, with his black hair tumbled,
and the same watchful, quiet, determined half-smile with which I have
seen him send down over after over in a county match!

At last the chain of holes was complete, the lock wrenched out bodily,
and a splendid bare arm plunged up to the shoulder through the
aperture, and through the bars of the iron gate beyond.
"Now," whispered Raffles, "if there's only one lock it'll be in the
middle. Joy! Here it is! Only let me pick it, and we're through at last."
He withdrew his arm, a skeleton key was selected from the bunch, and
then back went his arm to the shoulder. It was a breathless moment. I
heard the heart throbbing in my body,