“Get the handcuffs on them,” Quest directed the Sheriff, who with his men had at last succeeded in forcing his way into the saloon.

The Sheriff wasted no words till the two thugs, now nerveless and cowed, were handcuffed.  Then he turned to Quest.  There was a note of genuine admiration in his tone.

“Mr. Quest,” he declared, “you’ve got the biggest nerve of any man I have ever known.”

The criminologist smiled.

“This sort of bully is always a coward when it comes to the pinch,” he remarked.

* * * * *

Crouching in her chair, her pale, terror-stricken face supported between her hands, Lenora, her eyes filled with hopeless misery, gazed at the dumb instrument upon the table.  Her last gleam of hope seemed to be passing.  Her little friend was silent.  Once more her weary fingers spelt out a final, despairing message.

“What has happened to you?  I am waiting to hear all the time.  Has Craig told you where I am?  I am afraid!”

There was still no reply.  Her head sank a little lower on to her folded arms.  Even the luxury of tears seemed denied her.  Fear, the fear which dwelt with her day and night, had her in its grip.  Suddenly she leaped, screaming, from her place.  Splinters of glass fell all around her.  Her first wild thought was of release; she gazed upwards at the broken pane.  Then very faintly from the street below she heard the shout of a boy’s angry voice.

“You’ve done it now, Jimmy!  You’re a fine pitcher, ain’t you?  Lost it, that’s what you’ve gone and done!”

The thoughts formed themselves mechanically in her mind.  Her eyes sought the ball which had come crashing into the room.  There was life once more in her pulses.  She found a scrap of paper and a pencil in her pocket.  With trembling fingers she wrote a few words: 

    “Police head-quarters.  I am Sanford Quest’s assistant, abducted
    and imprisoned here in the room where the ball has fallen.  Help! 
    I am going mad!”

She twisted the paper, looked around the room vainly for string, and finally tore a thin piece of ribbon from her dress.  She tied the message around the ball, set her teeth, and threw it at the empty skylight.  The first time she was not successful and the ball came back.  The second time it passed through the centre of the opening.  She heard it strike the sound portion of the glass outside, heard it rumble down the roof.  A few seconds of breathless silence!  Her heart almost stopped beating.  Had it rested in some ledge, or fallen into the street below?  Then she heard the boy’s voice.

“Gee!  Here’s the ball come back again!”

A new light shone into the room.  She seemed to be breathing a different atmosphere—­the atmosphere of hope.  She listened no longer with horror for a creaking upon the stairs.  She walked back and forth until she was exhausted....  Curiously enough, when the end came she was asleep, crouched upon the bed and dreaming wildly.  She sprang up to find Inspector French, with a policeman behind him, standing upon the threshold.