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The vault-room, a narrow apartment, is between the old man's room and mine, and I could have left the window up, propped with a stick, and from my window jerked out the prop, but the cool air would have shown the old man that the window was raised, and this would have ruined everything.
Also, that front manhole will be left kind of temptingly open, with a few chunks o' loose coal lyin' round it, so that even a Mercer street roundsman couldn't help fallin' into it! Oh, yes, he'll find it easy enough!" Frank followed him without a word, as he made his way through the low and narrow steel-lined tunnel leading to the vault-room.
He had lighted the gas shortly after returning from Witherspoon's house and had gone to bed, and it must have been about one o'clock when the household was startled by the report of a pistol. Brooks and his wife, whose room was on the same floor, ran into the old man's room. The place was dark, but a bright light burned in the vault-room.
Colton, and was accordingly shown through the house. He had insisted upon going into the vault-room, declaring that he had located the gas there, but was told that the room was always kept locked. He then went away. The servant had not thought to tell Mr. Colton. A general delivery clerk at the post-office testified that the letter addressed to Dave Kittymunks had passed through his hands.
The hall was dark. The old man hated a gas-bill. I felt my way to the vault-room door and gently pushed it open, a little at a time. When I got inside I remembered that the very first thing I must attend to during the excitement which would follow the discovery of the robbery was to slip the bolt back in its place.
The hall-door of the vault-room is but a step from my own door, and was kept fastened with a spring lock and a bolt and was supposed never to be opened. I drew back the bolt and the catch, and fixed the catch so that I could easily spring it when I went out. When everything had thus been arranged, I went to Witherspoon's to come home with the folks. The sky was clouded and the night was very dark.
When we reached home the old man complained of having eaten too much something he never had cause to complain of when he ate at home and said that he believed he would lie down. "'The window of the vault-room was never raised by the old man, and was kept fastened down with an old-time cast-iron catch.
It was a brief statement, and after leading up to the vital point, thus concluded: "I must have been asleep some time, when my husband awoke me. He said that he thought he heard a noise in the vault-room. I listened for a few moments and replied that I didn't think it was anything. But he got up and took his pistol from under the pillow and went into the vault-room.
I had broken this off; but, afraid that he might examine the window and the door, I went with him to his room. And when he went into the vault-room to light the gas, I stood in the door and talked to him about his intended investment, and I talked so positively of the great profit he would surely make that he looked at neither the door nor the window. Everything had worked well.
"'During the excitement which followed I forgot no precaution; I slipped the bolt back into place and removed the string from the button of my own window. My wife was frantic. I did not suspect that the old woman had seen me, for I was not in the vault-room an instant after the pistol fired, and before that it was so dark that she could not have recognized me. If I had thought that she did see me'
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