Jimmie Dale was lying flat on the little landing now, peering into the room.  Back a short distance from the doorway, a repulsive-looking little man in unkempt clothes and soiled linen, with yellowish-skinned, parchment face, out of which small black eyes shone cunningly and shrewdly, sat at a bare deal table in a rickety chair; facing him across the table stood a young man of not more than twenty-five, clean cut, well dressed, but whose face was unnaturally white now, and whose hand, as he extended it in a pleading gesture toward the other, trembled visibly.  Jimmie Dale’s hand made its way quietly to his side pocket and extracted his automatic.

Old Isaac humped his shoulders, and leered at his visitor.

“We talk a great deal, my young friend.  What is the use?  A bargain is a bargain.  A few rubies in exchange for your life.  A few rubies and my mouth is shut.  Otherwise”—­he humped his shoulders again.  “Well?”

Burton drew back, swept his hand in a dazed way across his eyes—­and laughed out suddenly in bitter mirth.

“A few rubies!” he cried.  “The most magnificent stones on this side of the water—­a few rubies!  It’s been Maddon’s life hobby.  Every child in New York knows that!  A few—­yes, there’s only a few—­but those few are worth a fortune.  He trusts me, the man has been like a father to me, and—­”

“So you are the very last to be suspected,” observed old Isaac suavely.  “Have I not told you that?  There is nothing to fear.  Did we not arrange everything so nicely—­eh, my young friend?  See, it was to-night that Maddon gives a little reception to his friends, and did you not say that the rubies would be taken from the safe-deposit vault this afternoon since his friends always clamoured to see them as a very fitting conclusion to an evening’s entertainment?  And did you not say that you very naturally had access to the safe in the library where you worked, and that he would not notice they were gone until he came to look for them some time this evening?  I think you said all that.  And what suspicion let alone proof, would attach itself to you?  You were out of the room once when he, too, was absent for perhaps half an hour.  It is very simple.  In that half hour, some one, somehow, abstracted them.  Certainly it was not you.  You see how little I ask—­and I pay well, do I not?  And so I gave you until to-night.  Three days have gone, and I have said nothing, and the body has not been found—­eh?  But to-night—­eh—­it was understood!  The rubies—­or the chair.”

Burton’s lips moved, but it was a moment before he could speak.

“You wouldn’t dare!” he whispered thickly.  “You wouldn’t dare!  I’d tell the story of—­of what you tried to make me do, and they’d send you up for it.”

Old Isaac shrugged with pitying contempt.