watched his finger, however, count the cracks from a knot in the wood.
Then he pressed a certain spot, and one of the blocks sprang up a little
way and was easily removed. Beneath it was the steel lid of a small
coffer, with two keyholes.

"This is my hiding-place," he said calmly, "and these," he added, "are
the keys."

He laid before her two keys of curious device, and he took from a drawer
in his desk a thin chain of platinum and gold.

"Now," he said, "you are going to be the guardian of these keys. You are
going to wear this chain around your neck all the time, and the keys are
going in here."

He drew from his pocket a gold locket, and touching the spring showed
her that inside, instead of any place for a photograph, were little
embedded pads of velvet, shaped for the keys. He placed them in and hung
the locket around her neck. She looked at it, half terrified.

"I do not understand," she said, "why you trust me with this. Surely it
would be safer with you!"

He smiled grimly.

"You do not know my friends," he said. "Remember that in my possession
is not only the document which must cause them to abandon their great
scheme of attack upon me, but also that that same document, if made
proper use of, means ruin and ridicule for them. New York is a civilized
city, it is true, but money can buy the assassin's pistol to-day as