Garrick was considering hastily what was to be done.  Quickly he mapped out his course of action.

“Come, Tom,” he said hurriedly to me, as he wrapped up a little cedar box which he took from the cabinet where he kept the endormeur outfit.  “Come—­let’s investigate that Ninth Street address while we have time.”

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEWSPAPER FAKE

Within a few minutes we were sauntering with enforced leisure along Ninth Street, in a rather sordid part, inhabited largely, I made out, by a slightly better class of foreigners than some other sections of the West Side.

As we walked along, I felt Garrick tugging at my arm.

“Slow up a bit,” he whispered under his breath.  “There’s the house which was mentioned in the maid’s note.”

It was an old three-story brownstone building with an entrance two or three steps up from the sidewalk level.  Once, no doubt, it had housed people of some means, but the change in the character of the neighbourhood with shifting population had evidently brought it to the low estate where it now sheltered one family on each floor, if not more.  At least that was the general impression one got from a glance at the cheapened air of the block.

Garrick passed the house so as not to attract any attention, and a little further on paused before an apartment house, not of the modern elevator construction, but still of quiet and decent appearance.  At least there were no children spilling out from its steps into the street, in imminent danger of their young lives from every passing automobile, as there were in the tenements of the block below.

He entered the front door which happened to be unlatched and we had no trouble in mounting the stairs to the roof.

What he intended doing I had no idea yet, but he went ahead with assurance and I followed, equally confident, for he must have had adventures something like this before.  On the roof, a clothesline, which he commandeered and tied about a chimney, served to let him down the few feet from the higher apartment roof to that of the dwelling house next to it, one of the row in which number 99 was situated.

Quickly he tiptoed over to the chimney of the brownstone house a few doors down and, as he did so, I saw him take from his pocket the cedar box.  A string tied to a weight told him which of the flues reached down to the room on the first floor, back.

That determined, he let the little cedar box fastened to an entwined pair of wires down the flue.  He then ran the wires back across the roof to the apartment, up, and into a little storm shed at the top of the last flight of stairs which led from the upper hall to the roof.

“There is nothing more that we can do here just yet,” he remarked after he had hauled himself back to me on the higher roof.  “We are lucky not to have been disturbed, but if we stay here we are likely to be observed.”