I did so and reassured Garrick while the cab started on a blind cruise around the block.

On the floor was a curiously heavy instrument, on which I had stubbed my toe as I entered.  I surmised that it must have been the thing which Garrick had brought from his office, but in the darkness I could not see what it was, nor was there a chance to ask a question.

“Stop here,” ordered Garrick, as we passed a drug store with a telephone booth.

Dillon jumped out and disappeared into the booth.

“He is calling the reserves from the nearest station,” fretted Garrick.  “Of course, we have to do that to cover the place, but we’ll have to work quickly now, for I don’t know how fast a tip may travel in this subterranean region.  Here, I’ll pay the taxi charges now and save some time.”

A moment later Dillon rejoined us, his face perspiring from the closeness of the air in the booth.

“Now to that place on Forty-eighth Street, and we’re square,” ordered Garrick to the driver, mentioning the address.  “Quick!”

There had been, we could see, no chance for a tip to be given that a raid was about to be pulled off.  We could see that, as Garrick and I jumped out of the cab and mounted the steps.

The door was closed to us, however.  Only someone like Warrington who was known there could have got us in peacefully, until we had become known in the place.  Yet though there had been no tip, the lookout on the other side of the door, with his keen nose, had seemed to scent trouble.

He had retreated and, we knew, had shut the inside, heavy door—­ perhaps even had had time already to give the alarm inside.

The sharp rap of a small axe which Garrick had brought sounded on the flimsy outside door, in quick staccato.  There was a noise and scurry of feet inside and we could hear the locks and bolts being drawn.

Banging, ripping, tearing, the thin outer door was easily forced.  Disregarding the melee I leaped through the wreckage with Garrick.  The “ice-box” door barred all further progress.  How was Garrick to surmount this last and most formidable barrier?

“A raid!  A raid!” cried a passer-by.

Another instant, and the cry, taken up by others, brought a crowd swarming around from Broadway, as if it were noon instead of midnight.

CHAPTER X

THE GAMBLING DEBT

There was no time to be lost now.  Down the steps again dashed Garrick, after our expected failure both to get in peaceably and to pass the ice-box door by force.  This time Dillon emerged from the cab with him.  Together they were carrying the heavy apparatus up the steps.

They set it down close to the door and I scrutinized it carefully.  It looked, at first sight, like a short stubby piece of iron, about eighteen inches high.  It must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds.  Along one side was a handle, and on the opposite side an adjustable hook with a sharp, wide prong.