“Furnace?  What furnace?  What are you talking about?” she cried agitatedly.  “What do you mean by saying that Sir Horace came down?”

“Only what the superintendent himself will tell you, miss, if you ask him.  Sir Horace came downstairs in his pyjamas a few minutes ago to say as he’d recollected about the flues of the furnace in the cellar being big enough to hold a man, and then him and Mr. Narkom went below to have a look at it.”

She gave a sharp and sudden cry, and her face went as pale as a dead face.

“Sir Horace came down?” she repeated, moving back a step and leaning heavily against the bannister.  “Sir Horace came down to look at the furnace?  We have no furnace!”

“What!”

“We have no furnace, I tell you, and Sir Horace did not come down.  He is up there still.  I know—­I know, I tell you—­because I feared for his safety, and when he went to his room I locked him in!”

“Superintendent!” The word was voiced by every man present, and six pairs of eyes turned toward Narkom with a look of despairing comprehension.

“Get to the cellar.  Head the man off!  It’s he—­the Cracksman!” he shouted out.  “Find him!  Get him!  Nab him, if you have to turn the house upside down!”

They needed no second bidding, for each man grasped the situation instantly, and in a twinkling there was a veritable pandemonium.  Shouting and scrambling like a band of madmen, they lurched to the door, whirled it open, and went flying down the staircase to the kitchen and so to a discovery which none might have foreseen.  For, almost as they entered they saw lying on the floor a suit of striped pyjamas, and close to it, gagged, bound, helpless, trussed up like a goose that was ready for the oven, gyves on his wrists, gyves on his ankles, their chief, their superintendent, Mr. Maverick Narkom, in a state of collapse, and with all his outer clothing gone!

“After him!  After that devil, and a thousand pounds to the man that gets him!” he managed to gasp as they rushed to him and ripped loose the gag.  “He was here when we came!  He has been in the house for hours.  Get him! get him! get him!”

They surged from the room and up the stairs like a pack of stampeded animals; they raced through the hall and bore down on the picture-gallery in a body, and, whirling open the now closed door, went tumbling headlong in.

The light was still burning.  At the far end of the room a window was wide open, and the curtains of it fluttered in the wind.  A collection of empty cases and caskets lay on the middle table, but man and jewels were alike gone!  Once again the Vanishing Cracksman had lived up to his promise, up to his reputation, up to the very letter of his name, and for all Mr. Maverick Narkom’s care and shrewdness, “Forty Faces” had “turned the trick” and Scotland Yard was “done!”

III

Through all the night its best men sought him, its dragnets fished for him, its tentacles groped into every hole and corner of London in quest of him, but sought and fished and groped in vain.  They might as well have hoped to find last summer’s partridges or last winter’s snow as any trace of him.  He had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared, and no royal jewels graced the display of Miss Wyvern’s wedding gifts on the morrow.