From one room to another we proceeded, without finding anyone.  Then we mounted to the second floor.  The odour was worse there, but still we found no one.

The light on the third floor had been extinguished, as I have said.  We made our way toward the corner where it had been.  Room after room we entered, but still found no one.  At last we came to a door that was locked.  Together we wrenched it open.

There was surely nothing for us to fear in this room, for a bomb had penetrated it, and had filled it completely.  As we rushed in, Garrick saw a figure sprawled on the floor, near the bed, in the corner.

“Quick, Tom!” he shouted, “Open that other window.  I’ll attend to this man.  He’s groggy, anyhow.”

Garrick had dropped down on his knees and had deftly slipped a pair of handcuffs on the unresisting wrists of the man.  Then he staggered to my side at the open window, for air.

“Heavens—­this is awful!” he gasped and sputtered.  “I wonder where they all went?”

“Who is this fellow?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet.  I couldn’t see.”

A moment later, together, we had dragged the unconscious man to the window with us, while I fanned him with my hat and Garrick was wetting his face with water from a pitcher of ice on the table.

“Good Lord!” Garrick exclaimed suddenly, as in the fitful light he bent over the figure.  “Do you see who it is?”

I bent down too and peered more closely.

It was Angus Forbes.

Strange to say, here was the young gambler whom we had seen at the gambling joint before it was raided, the long-lost and long-sought Forbes who had disappeared after the raid, and from whom no one had yet heard a word.

I did not know his story, but I knew enough to be sure that he had been in love with Violet himself, and, although Warrington had once come to his rescue and settled thousands of dollars of his gambling debts, was sore at Warrington for closing the gambling joint where he hoped ultimately to recoup his losses.  More than that, he was probably equally sore at Warrington for winning the favour of the girl whose fortune might have settled his own debts, if he had had a free field to court her.

Why was Forbes here, I asked myself.  The fumes of the bombs from the Mathiot gun may have got into my head but, at least as far as I could see, they had not made my mind any the less active.  I felt that his presence here, apparently as one of the gang, explained many things.

Who, I reasoned, would have been more eager to “get” Warrington at any cost than he?  I never had any love for the fellow, who had allowed his faults and his temptations so far to get the upper hand of him.  I had felt a sort of pity at first, but the incident of the cancelled markers in the gambling joint and now the discovery of him here had changed that original feeling into one that was purely of disgust.