could,” I responded savagely. “But I didn’t expect him to turn into a conjuring trick, which is what he did. He went out that window head foremost, down the ladder, and into the room below. Let’s be after him—though we stand as much chance of catching him as we do of finding the King of England!” and I turned toward the doorway, where the manager, the doctor and the detective were massed.
The manager put his hand upon my arm. I looked down at it with raised eyebrows, and he took it away.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, adopting a manner of appeal, “but if you’ll reflect for a moment you’ll see how it is, I know. People don’t care for houses where burglars fly in and out of windows; it makes them nervous; you wouldn’t believe how easily a hotel can get a bad name and lose its clientele. Besides, from what you tell me, the fellow must be well away by this time. You’d do me a favor—a big one—by dropping the matter here.”
“Well, I won’t!” I snapped indignantly. “I’ll see it through—or start something still livelier. Are you coming down with me to investigate the room beneath us or do you want me to ring up police headquarters and find out why?”
In the hall the policeman looked at me across the intervening heads and dropped one slow, approving eyelid. “If the gintleman says so—” he remarked in heavy tones fraught with meaning, and fixed a cold, blue, appraising gaze on the detective, who thereupon yielded with unexpectedly good grace.
“Aw, what’s eating you?” was his amiable demand. “Sure, we was going right down there anyhow—soon’s we found out how the land lay up here.”
The five of us took the elevator to the lower floor. An unfriendly atmosphere surrounded me. I was held a hotel wrecker without reason. We found the corridor empty, the floor desk abandoned—a state of things rather strikingly the duplicate of that reigning overhead—and in due course paused before Room 303, where the manager, figuratively speaking, washed his hands of the affair.
“Here is the room, Mr. Bayne, for which you ask.” If I would persist in my nefarious course, added his tone.
The detective, obeying the hypnotic eye of the policeman, knocked.
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