to-night about the same time."

"All right, sir."

"And when you close down the plant for the night, will you bring
the record card up to Fletcherwood?" asked Craig, slipping a bill
into the pocket of the foreman's shirt.

"I will, and thank you, sir."

It was nearly half-past eleven when Craig had got his apparatus
set up in the library at Fletcherwood. Then he unscrewed all the
bulbs from the chandelier in the library and attached in their
places connections with the usual green silk-covered flexible
wire rope. These were then joined up to a little instrument which
to me looked like a drill. Next he muffed the drill with a wad of
felt and applied it to the safe door.

I could hear the dull tat-tat of the drill. Going into the
bedroom and closing the door, I found that it was still audible
to me, but an old man, inclined to deafness and asleep, would
scarcely have been awakened by it. In about ten minutes Craig
displayed a neat little hole in the safe door opposite the one
made by the cracksman in the combination.

"I'm glad you're honest," I said, "or else we might be afraid of
you--perhaps even make you prove an alibi for last night's job!"

He ignored my bantering and said in a tone such as he might have
used before a class of students in the gentle art of scientific