Chapter 6 - Page 2

assault on the door followed, this time with cane, hands, and toes in unison.

"I'll have him out this time or die!" I ejaculated, filled with resolve, and then began such a pounding upon the door as should have sufficed to awake a dead Raffles, not to mention a living one.

"Hi, there, Jenkins!" cried a voice behind me, in the midst of this operation, identically the same voice, too, as that still going on in the room in front of me. "What the dickens are you trying to do--batter the house down?"

I whirled about like a flash, and was deeply startled to see Raffles himself standing by the divan I had just vacated, divesting himself of his gloves and light overcoat.

"You--Raffles?" I roared in astonishment.

"Yep," said he. "Who else?"

"But the--the other chap--in the room there?"

"Oh," laughed Raffles. "That's my alibi-prover--hold on a minute and I'll show you."

Whereupon he unlocked the door into the bedroom, whence had come the tuneful lyrics, threw it wide open, and revealed to my astonished gaze no less an object than a large talking-machine still engaged in the strenuous fulfilment of its noisy mission.

"What the dickens!" I said.

"It's attacked to my front-door," said Raffles, silencing the machine. "The minute the door is opened it begins to sing like the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie."

"But what good is it?" said I.

"Oh, well--it keeps the servants from spending too much time in my apartment, snooping among my papers, perhaps; and it my some day come in useful in establishing an alibi if things go wrong with me. You'd have sworn I was in there just now, wouldn't you?"

"I would indeed," said I.

"Well--you see, I wasn't, so there you are," said Raffles Holmes. "By-the-way, you've come at an interesting moment. There'll be things doing before the evening is over. I've had an anxious caller here five times already to-day. I've been standing in the barber-shop opposite getting a line on him. His card name is Grouch, his real name is--"

Here Raffles Holmes leaned forward and whispered in my ear a name of such eminent respectability that I fairly gasped.

"You don't mean the Mr. ----"

"Nobody else," said Raffles Holmes. "Only he don't know I know who he is. The third time Grouch called I trailed him to Blank's house, and then recognized him as Blank himself."

"And what does he want with you?" I asked.

"That remains to be seen," said Raffles Holmes. "All I know is that next Tuesday he will be required to turn over $100,000 unregistered bonds to a young man about to come of age, for whom he has been a