CHAPTER I—AN AIDED ESCAPE

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      Winds whistled up the river, and winds whistled down from the hills, and they met to swirl and gather fury and rattle the city’s millions of windowpanes. They carried a mixture of sleet and fine snow, the first herald of the winter to come. In the business district they swung signs madly back and forth, and roared around the corners of high office buildings, and swept madly against struggling trolley cars. They poured through the man-made cañons; they dashed out the broad boulevards—and so they came to the attention of Mr. Roger Verbeck, at about the hour of midnight, as he turned over in his warm bed and debated whether to rise and lower the window or take a chance with the rapidly lowering temperature.

      “Beastly night!” Verbeck confided to himself, and put his head beneath the covers.

      He slept—and suddenly he awakened. A moment before he had been in the midst of a pleasant dream; now every sense was alert, and his right hand, creeping softly under the cover, reached the side of the bed and grasped an automatic pistol that hung in a rack there.

      From the adjoining room—his library—there came no flash of an electric torch, no footfall, no sound foreign to the apartment, nothing to indicate the presence of an intruder. Yet Verbeck sensed that an intruder was there.

      He slipped quietly from the bed, shivering a bit because of the cold wind, put his feet into slippers, and drew on a dressing gown over his pajamas. Then, his pistol held ready for use in case of emergency, he started across the bedroom, taking short steps and walking on his toes.

      A reflection entered the room from the arc light on the nearest street corner. This uncertain light was shut off for an instant, and Verbeck whirled quickly, silently, to find another man slipping up beside him. It was Muggs—a little, wiry man of uncertain age, who had been in Verbeck’s employ for several years, valet at times, comrade