She did it sulkily and Jim turned to the policeman.

“Yes, I know it was a false alarm before,” he explained patiently, “but this is genuine.  It is just as I tell you.  Yes, Flannigan is in the house somewhere, but he’s hiding, I guess.  We could manage the thing very well ourselves, but we have no cartridges for our revolvers.”  Then as the noise from the rear redoubled, “If you don’t come in and help, I will telephone for the fire department,” he concluded emphatically.

I ran to Aunt Selina and tried to straighten her head.  In a moment she opened her eyes, sat up and stared around her.  She saw the kettle at once.

“What are you doing with boiling water on the floor?” she said to me, with her returning voice.  “Don’t you know you will spoil the floor?” The ruling passion was strong with Aunt Selina, as usual.

I could not find out the trouble from any one; people appeared and disappeared, carrying strange articles.  Anne with a rope, Dal with his hatchet, Bella and the kettle, but I could get a coherent explanation from no one.  When the guards finally decided that Jim was in earnest, and that the rest of us were not crawling out a rear window while he held them at the door, they came in, three of them and two reporters, and Jim led them to the butler’s pantry.

Here we found Anne, very white and shaky, with the pantry table and two chairs piled against the door of the kitchen slide, and clutching the chamois-skin bag that held her jewels.  She had a bottle of burgundy open beside her, and was pouring herself a glass with shaking hands when we appeared.  She was furious at Jim.

“I very nearly fainted,” she said hysterically.  “I might have been murdered, and no one would have cared.  I wish they would stop that chopping, I’m so nervous I could scream.”

Jim took the Burgundy from her with one hand and pointed the police to the barricaded door with the other.

“That is the door to the dumb-waiter shaft,” he said.  “The lower one is fastened on the inside, in some manner.  The noises commenced about eleven o’clock, while Mr. Brown was on guard.  There were scraping sounds first, and later the sound of a falling body.  He roused Mr. Reed and myself, but when we examined the shaft everything was quiet, and dark.  We tried lowering a candle on a string, but—­it was extinguished from below.”

The reporters were busily removing the table and chairs from the door.

“If you have a rope handy,” one of them said, “I will go down the shaft.”

(Dal says that all reporters should have been policemen, and that all policemen are natural newsgatherers.)

“The cage appears to be stuck, half-way between the floors,” Jim said.  “They are cutting through the door in the kitchen below.”

They opened the door then and cautiously peered down, but there was nothing to be seen.  I touched Jim gingerly on the arm.

“Is it—­is it Flannigan,” I asked, “shut in there?”