The Firefly of France | Page 7

just one chance. If you care to tell me
how you got through a locked door and what you were after, I'll let you
go. I'm off to the firing line, and it may bring me luck!"
Hope glimmered in his eyes. In broken English, with a childlike
ingenuousness of demeanor, he informed me that he was a first-class
locksmith--first-glass he called it--who had been sent by the
management to open a reluctant trunk. He had entered my room, I was
led to infer, by a mistake.
"I go now, /ja/?" he concluded, as postscript to the likely tale.
"The devil you do! Do you take me for an utter fool?" I asked,
excusably nettled, and stepping to the telephone, I took the receiver
from its hook.
"Give me the manager's office, please," I requested, watching my
visitor. "Is this the manager? This is Mr. Bayne speaking, Room four
hundred and three. I've found a man investigating my trunk--a foreigner,
a German." An exclamation from the manager, and from the listening
telephone-girl a shriek! "Yes; I have him. Yes; of course I can hold him.
Send up your house detective and be quick! My dinner is spoiling--"
The receiver dropped from my hand and clattered against the wall. The
little German, suddenly galvanized, had leaped away from the trunk,
not toward me and the door beyond me, but toward the electric switch.
His fingers found and turned it, plunging the room into the darkness of
the grave. Taken unaware, I barred his path to the hall, only to hear him
fling up the window across the room. Against the faint square of light
thus revealed, I saw him hang poised a moment. Then with a desperate
noise, a moan of mixed resolve and terror, he disappeared.

CHAPTER II
DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES

Standing there staring after him, I felt like a murderer of the deepest
dye. It is one thing to hand over to the police their natural prey, a thief
taken red-handed, but quite another, and a much more harrowing one,
to have him slip through your fingers, precipitate himself into mid-air,
and drop four stories to the pavement, scattering his brains far and wide.
There was not a vestige of hope for the poor wretch.
Unnerved, I groped to the window and peered downward for his
remains. My first glance proved my regrets to be superfluous. Beneath
my window, which, owing to the crowded condition of the hotel,
opened on a side street, a fire-escape descended jaggedly; and upon it,
just out of arm's reach, my recent guest clung and wobbled, struggling
with an attack of natural vertigo before proceeding toward the earth.
By this time my rage was such that I would have followed that little
thief almost anywhere. It was not the dizziness of the yawning void that
stayed me. I should have climbed the Matterhorn with all cheerfulness
to catch him at the top. But sundry visions of the figure I would cut, the
crowd that might gather, and the probable ragging in the morning
papers, were too much for me, and I sorrowfully admitted that the game
was not worth the price.
The little man's nerves, meanwhile, seemed to be steadying. Feeling
each step, he began cautiously to work his way down. To my wrath he
even looked up at me and indulged in a grimace--but his triumph was
ill-timed, for at that very instant I beheld, strolling along the street
below, humming and swinging his night-stick, as leisurely, complacent,
and stalwart a representative of the law as one could wish to see.
"Hi, there! Officer!" I shouted lustily. My hail, if not my words,
reached him; he glanced up, saw the figure on the ladder, and was
seized instantaneously with the spirit of the chase.
Yelling something reassuring, the gist of which escaped me, he
constituted himself a reception committee of one and started for the
ladder's foot. But our doughty Teuton was a resourceful person. Roused
to the urgency of his plight, he looked wildly up at me, down at the
officer, and, hastily pushing up the nearest window, hoisted himself

across its sill, and again took refuge in the St. Ives Hotel.
With a bellow of rage, the policeman dashed toward the porte-cochere,
while I ducked back into the room, rapidly revolving my chances of
cutting off the man's retreat below. If the system of numbering was the
same on every floor, my thief must, of course, emerge from Room 303.
But this similarity was problematical, and to invade apartments at
random, disturbing women at their opera toilets and maybe even
waking babies, was too desperate a shift to try.
It reminded me to wait with what patience I could summon for the
house detective. And where was he, by the way? I