said. “I am the Saint; and the safe hasn’t been made that I can’t open. Nor has any thing else been thought of that I can’t do. We’ll go to Westmount together!”
“This is the place,” said the girl.
Simon switched off the engine and let the car coast to a stop under the lee of the hedge. It was her car-she had been pre pared for that. She had telephoned from the restaurant and it had been fueled and waiting for them at the garage.
Burt Northwade’s home, an unwieldy mansion in the Napoleonic style, stood on a slight rise of ground some distance back from the road, in the center of its extensive and pleasant grounds.
Rising to sit on the door of the convertible, with one foot on the seat, Simon could see the solid rectangle of its upper part painted in dull black on a smudged gray-blue sky. He felt that he knew every corner of it as if he had lived there for years, from the descriptions she had given him and the rough plans she had drawn on the back of the menu, familiarizing him with the configurations of rooms and corridors while their coffee grew cold and neither of them cared. That had been a time of delight shared in adventure which he would always like to re member; but now it was over, and the adventure went on.
It was a night without moon or stars, and yet not utterly dark; perfect for the purpose. She saw the clean-cut lines of his face, recklessly etched in the burst of light as he kindled a cigarette.
“I still don’t know why you should do this for me,” she said.
“Because it’s a game after my own heart,” he answered. “Northwade is a bird I’ve had ideas of my own about for some time. And as for our present object-well, no one could have thought of a story that would have been more likely to fetch me a thousand miles to see it through.”
“I feel I ought to be coming with you.”
He drew smoke into his lungs, and with it the sweet smell of green leaves.
“This sort of thing is my job, and I’ve had more practice you.”
“But suppose Uncle Burt wakes up.”
“I shall immediately hypnotize him so that he falls into a deep sleep again.”
“Or suppose the servants catch you.”
“I shall tie them up in bundles of three and heave them into the outer darkness.”
“But suppose you are caught?”
He laughed.
“It’ll be a sign that the end of the world is at hand. But don’t worry. Even if that happens it’ll cause a certain amount of commotion, and if you hear it I shall expect you to drive rapidly away and await the end in some other province. I shall tell them I came out here on roller skates. It’s not your burglary any more-it’s mine.”
He swung his immaculately tailored legs over the side and dropped lightly to the road, and without another word he was gone, melting into the obscurity like a ghost.
He walked up the turf path beside the drive with the quick confidence of a cat. No lights showed in any of the front windows as he approached, but he made a careful circle of the house for complete certainty. His eyes adjusted themselves to the gloom with the ease of long habit, and he moved without rustling a blade of grass under his feet.
The ground floor was a rugged façade of raised arches and pilasters broken by tall gaunt windows, with a pair of carved oak doors in the middle that would have given way to nothing short of a battering-ram; but it is an axiom of housebreaking that those buildings whose fronts look most like fortresses are most likely to defend their postern gates with a card saying “No Admittance.” In this case, there was an open pantry window six feet above the ground. Simon squeezed up through the aperture, and lowered himself gently over the shelves of viands on the inside.
He passed through into the kitchen. With the help of a tiny pocket flashlight he located the main switchboard and removed all the fuses, burying them in a sack of potatoes. If by any chance there should be an accident, the garrison of the house would be more