If possible, it was worse than before.  There was no lightning, and only by a miracle did I find the little gate again.  I drew a long breath of relief, followed by another, equally long, of dismay.  For I had found the hitching strap and there was nothing at the end of it!  In a lull of the wind I seemed to hear, far off, the eager thud of stable-bound feet.  So for the second time I climbed the slope to the Laurels, and on the way I thought of many things to say.

I struck the house at a new angle, for I found a veranda, destitute of chairs and furnishings, but dry and evidently roofed.  It was better than the terrace, and so, by groping along the wall, I tried to make my way to Hotchkiss.  That was how I found the open window.  I had passed perhaps six, all closed, and to have my hand grope for the next one, and to find instead the soft drapery of an inner curtain, was startling, to say the least.

I found Hotchkiss at last around an angle of the stone wall, and told him that the horse was gone.  He was disconcerted, but not abased; maintaining that it was a new kind of knot that couldn’t slip and that the horse must have chewed the halter through!  He was less enthusiastic than I had expected about the window.

“It looks uncommonly like a trap,” he said.  “I tell you there was some one in the park below when we were coming up.  Man has a sixth sense that scientists ignore—­a sense of the nearness of things.  And all the time you have been gone, some one has been watching me.”

“Couldn’t see you,” I maintained; “I can’t see you now.  And your sense of contiguity didn’t tell you about that flower crock.”

In the end, of course, he consented to go with me.  He was very lame, and I helped him around to the open window.  He was full of moral courage, the little man:  it was only the physical in him that quailed.  And as we groped along, he insisted on going through the window first.

“If it is a trap,” he whispered, “I have two arms to your one, and, besides, as I said before, life holds much for you.  As for me, the government would merely lose an indifferent employee.”

When he found I was going first he was rather hurt, but I did not wait for his protests.  I swung my feet over the sill and dropped.  I made a clutch at the window-frame with my good hand when I found no floor under my feet, but I was too late.  I dropped probably ten feet and landed with a crash that seemed to split my ear-drums.  I was thoroughly shaken, but in some miraculous way the bandaged arm had escaped injury.

“For Heaven’s sake,” Hotchkiss was calling from above, “have you broken your back?”

“No,” I returned, as steadily as I could, “merely driven it up through my skull.  This is a staircase.  I’m coming up to open another window.”

It was eerie work, but I accomplished it finally, discovering, not without mishap, a room filled with more tables than I had ever dreamed of, tables that seemed to waylay and strike at me.  When I had got a window open, Hotchkiss crawled through, and we were at last under shelter.