“Good heavens!” I exclaimed.  “What did you tell them—­her, whichever it was?”

“Told her you were sick in a hospital and wouldn’t be out for a year!” she said triumphantly.  “And when she said she thought she’d come in and wait for you, I slammed the door on her.”

“What time was she here?”

“Late last night.  And she had a light-haired man across the street.  If she thought I didn’t see him, she don’t know me.”  Then she closed the door and left me to my bath and my reflections.

At five minutes before eight I was at the Incubator, where I found Hotchkiss and McKnight.  They were bending over a table, on which lay McKnight’s total armament—­a pair of pistols, an elephant gun and an old cavalry saber.

“Draw up a chair and help yourself to pie,” he said, pointing to the arsenal.  “This is for the benefit of our friend Hotchkiss here, who says he is a small man and fond of life.”

Hotchkiss, who had been trying to get the wrong end of a cartridge into the barrel of one of the revolvers, straightened himself and mopped his face.

“We have desperate people to handle,” he said pompously, “and we may need desperate means.”

“Hotchkiss is like the small boy whose one ambition was to have people grow ashen and tremble at the mention of his name,” McKnight jibed.  But they were serious enough, both of them, under it all, and when they had told me what they planned, I was serious, too.

“You’re compounding a felony,” I remonstrated, when they had explained.  “I’m not eager to be locked away, but, by Jove, to offer her the stolen notes in exchange for Sullivan!”

“We haven’t got either of them, you know,” McKnight remonstrated, “and we won’t have, if we don’t start.  Come along, Fido,” to Hotchkiss.

The plan was simplicity itself.  According to Hotchkiss, Sullivan was to meet Bronson at Mrs. Conway’s apartment, at eight-thirty that night, with the notes.  He was to be paid there and the papers destroyed.  “But just before that interesting finale,” McKnight ended, “we will walk in, take the notes, grab Sullivan, and give the police a jolt that will put them out of the count.”

I suppose not one of us, slewing around corners in the machine that night, had the faintest doubt that we were on the right track, or that Fate, scurvy enough before, was playing into our hands at last.  Little Hotchkiss was in a state of fever; he alternately twitched and examined the revolver, and a fear that the two movements might be synchronous kept me uneasy.  He produced and dilated on the scrap of pillow slip from the wreck, and showed me the stiletto, with its point in cotton batting for safekeeping.  And in the intervals he implored Richey not to make such fine calculations at the corners.

We were all grave enough and very quiet, however, when we reached the large building where Mrs. Conway had her apartment.  McKnight left the power on, in case we might want to make a quick get-away, and Hotchkiss gave a final look at the revolver.  I had no weapon.  Somehow it all seemed melodramatic to the verge of farce.  In the doorway Hotchkiss was a half dozen feet ahead; Richey fell back beside me.  He dropped his affectation of gayety, and I thought he looked tired.  “Same old Sam, I suppose?” he asked.