The door of the ground-floor apartment was at his right, Jimmie Dale reached up and turned off the light.  Again those slim, tapering, wonderfully sensitive fingers worked with the little steel instrument, this time in the lock of the apartment door—­again there was that almost inaudible click—­and then cautiously, inch by inch, the door opened under his hand.  He peered inside—­down a hallway lighted, if it could be called lighted at all, by a subdued glow from two open doors that gave upon it—­peered intently, listening intently, as he drew a black silk mask from his pocket and slipped it over his face.  And then, silent as a shadow in his movements, the door left just ajar behind him, he stole down the carpeted hallway.

Opposite the first of the open doorways Jimmie Dale paused—­a curiously hard expression creeping over his face, his lips beginning to droop ominously downward at the corners.  It was a little sitting room, cheaply but tastefully furnished, and a young woman, Bookkeeper Bob’s wife evidently, and evidently sitting up for her husband, had fallen sound asleep in a chair, her head pillowed on her arms that were outstretched across the table.  For a moment Jimmie Dale held there, his eyes on the scene—­and the next moment, his hand curved into a clenched fist, he had passed on and entered the adjoining room.

It was a child’s bedroom.  A night lamp burned on a table beside the bed, and the soft rays seemed to play and linger in caress on the tousled golden hair of a little girl of perhaps two years of age—­and something seemed to choke suddenly in Jimmie Dale’s throat—­the sweet, innocent little face, upturned to his, was smiling at him as she slept.

Jimmie Dale turned away his head—­his eyelashes wet under his mask.  “Beneath the mattress of the child’s bed,” the letter had said.  His face like stone, his lips a thin line now, Jimmie Dale’s hand reached deftly in without disturbing the child and took out a package—­and then another.  He straightened up, a bundle of crisp new hundred-dollar notes in each hand—­and on the top of one, slipped under the elastic band that held the bills together, an unsealed envelope.  He drew out the latter, and opened it—­it was a second-class steamship passage to Vera Cruz, made out in a fictitious name, of course, to John Davies, the booking for next day’s sailing.  From the ticket, from the stolen money, Jimmie Dale’s eyes lifted to rest again on the little golden head, the smiling lips—­and then, dropping the packages into his pockets, his own lips moving queerly, he turned abruptly to the door.

“My God, the shame of it!” he whispered to himself.

He crept down the corridor, past the open door of the room where the young woman still sat fast asleep, and, his mask in his pocket again, stepped softly into the vestibule, and from there to the street.

Jimmie Dale hurried now, spurred on it seemed by a hot, insensate fury that raged within him—­there was still one other call to make that night—­still those remaining and minute details in the latter part of her letter, grim and ugly in their portent!