Racey, taking no chances on the Lainey horse stampeding at the explosion, rope-tied the animal to the trunk of the pine.  After which he removed his spurs, carefully unwrapped the dynamite and stuck three sticks in each hip-pocket.  The caps, in their little box, he put in the breast-pocket of his shirt.  With the coil of fuse in one hand and the bran sack given him by Lainey in the other he walked toward the house of Tweezy.

The house was of course dark.  Nor were there any lights in the irregular line of houses stretching up and down this side of the street.  The neighbours had apparently all gone to bed.  Through an opening between two houses Racey saw a brightly lighted window in a house an eighth of a mile away.  That would be Judge Allison’s house.  The Judge, then, was awake.  Two hundred and twenty yards was not a long distance even for a portly man like Judge Allison to cover at speed.  And Racey had known Judge Allison to move briskly on occasion.

Racey, moving steadily ahead, slid past someone’s barn and opened up a view of the dance hall.  It had previously been concealed from his sight by the high posts and rails of three corrals.  The dance hall was going full blast.  At least all the windows were bright with light.  He was too far away to hear the fiddles.

The dance hall!  He might have known it would still be operating at midnight.  But it was almost twice as far from the Tweezy house to the dance hall as it was from the Judge’s house to Tweezy’s.  That was something.  Indeed it was a great deal.  But he would have to work fast.  All the neighbours would come bouncing out at the crash of the explosion.

Racey paused to flatten an ear at the kitchen door.  He heard nothing, and tiptoed along the wall to the window of the room next the kitchen.  The ground plan of the house was almost an exact square.  There was a room in each angle.  The office, which Racey knew contained the safe, was diagonally across from the kitchen.

Racey, halting at the window of the room next the kitchen, was somewhat surprised to find it open.  He stuck in his head and saw a faint glow beyond the half-closed door of the office.  The glow seemed to be brighter near the floor.  Racey listened intently.  He heard a faint grumble and now and then a squeak.

He crouched beneath the window and removed his boots.  Then he crawled over the sill and hunkered down on the uncarpeted floor.  The floor boards did not creak.  Still crouching, his arms extended in front of him, he made his way silently across the room, skirting safely in the process two chairs and a table, and stood upright behind the crack of the door.

Looking through the crack he perceived that the glow he had seen from the window emanated from a tin can pierced with several holes.  The dim, uncertain light revealed the figure of a tall and hatless man kneeling beside the safe.  The man’s back was toward the lighted tin can.  One of the tall man’s hands was slowly turning the knob of the combination.  The side of the man’s head was pressed against the front of the safe near the combination.  Racey could not see the man’s face.