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
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