“Don’t like to lock the stable door after the horse is stolen?” suggested Brice.  “Man, get it into that thick skull of yours that the time for secrecy is past!  Your game is up.  Hade is dead.  Your one chance is to play out the rest of this hand with your cards on the table.  The Government knows you are only the dupe.  It will let you off, if the money is—­”

“What in blue blazes is the matter with Central?” growled Milo, whanging the receiver-hook up and down in vexation.  “Is she dead?”

Gavin went over to him and took the receiver out of his hand.  Listening for a moment, he made answer: 

“I don’t believe Central is dead.  But I know this phone is.  Our Caesar friends seem to be more sophisticated than I thought.  They’ve cut the wires, from outside.”

“H’m!” grunted Milo.  “That means we’ve got to play a lone hand.  Well, I’m not sorry.  I—­”

“Not necessarily,” contradicted Gavin.  “I’d rather have relied on the local watchmen, of course.  But their absence needn’t bother us, overmuch.”

“What do you mean?”

Before Gavin could answer, a stifled cry from the hallway above brought both men to attention.  It was followed by a sound of lightly running feet.  And Claire Standish appeared at the stair-top.  She was deathly pale, and her dark eyes were dilated with terror.

Gavin ran up the steps to meet her.  For she swayed perilously as she made her way down toward the men.

“What is it?” demanded Milo, excitedly.  “What’s happened?”

Claire struggled visibly to regain her composure.  Then, speaking with forced calmness, she said: 

“I’ve just seen a ghost!  Rodney Hade’s ghost!”

The two looked at her in dumb incomprehension.  Then, without a word, Milo wheeled and strode to the window from which they had watched the tragedy.  Opening the shutter, he peered out into the moonlight.

“Hade’s still lying where he fell,” he reported, tersely.  “They haven’t even bothered to move him.  You were dreaming.  If—­”

“I wasn’t asleep,” she denied, a trace of color beginning to creep back into her blanched cheeks.  “I had just lain down.  I heard—­or thought I heard—­a sound on the veranda roof.  I peeped out through the grill of the shutter.  There, on the roof, not ten feet away from me, stood Rodney Hade.  He was dressed in rags.  But I recognized him.  I saw his face, as clearly as I see yours.  He—­”

“One of the Caesars,” suggested Brice.  “They found the lower windows barred and they sent some one up, to see if there was any ingress by an upper window.  The porch is easy to climb, with all those vines.  So is the whole house, for that matter.  He—­”

“It was Rodney Hade!” she insisted, shuddering.  “I saw his face with the moonlight on it—­”

“And with a few unbecoming scratches on it, too, from the underbrush and from those porch vines,” chimed in a suave voice from the top of the stairs.  “Milo, next time you bar your house, I suggest you don’t forget and leave the cupola window open.  If it was easy for me to climb up there from the veranda roof, it would be just as easy for any of our friends out yonder.”