He was peering in through the blind. There
was no light in the room itself, but a faint glow came in through the
open doorway of a lighted room beyond--enough to enable him to make out
a woman's form, the grizzled hair streaming over the threadbare cloak,
as she lay on a cheap cot across the room, her face to the wall, her
hands bound together behind her back.
It was Jimmie Dale working with all the art he knew; now; and those
slim, sensitive, wonderful fingers were swift and silent as they had
never been before. A steel jimmy loosened the shutters, and they swung
apart with out a sound. He could see better now--see, at least, that she
was alone in the room. He tapped softly on the window pane. It was too
dark to see her face, but he saw her raise her head quickly, and then,
evidently, quick to meet an emergency as she always was, rise from the
cot and steal to the edge of the open door. He was working at the
window now. A fever of anxiety was him--it seemed that his fingers
stumbled, that they lost their cunning, that an eternity passed as she
stood there apparently on guard by the door, her bound hands behind her
back like some piteous appeal to him to hurry--to hurry--and, in the
name of all that life meant to both of them, to make haste.
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