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It seemed as if the door were slowly being crushed in before the irresistible ten-ton punch of the hydraulic ram.

Kennedy stopped. Evidently he did not dare to crush the door in altogether. Quickly he released the ram and placed it vertically. Under the now-yawning door jamb he inserted a powerful claw of the ram and again he began to work the handle.

A moment later the powerful door buckled, and Kennedy deftly swung it outward so that it fell with a crash on the cellar floor.

As the noise reverberated, there came a sound of a muttered curse from the cavern. Some one was there.

We pressed forward.

On the floor, in the weird glare of the little furnace, lay a man and a woman, the light playing over their ghastly, set features.

Kennedy knelt over the man, who was nearest the door.

“Call a doctor, quick,” he ordered, reaching over and feeling the pulse of the woman, who had half fallen out of her chair. “They will, be all right soon. They took what they thought was their usual adulterated cocaine–see, here is the box in which it was. Instead, I filled the box with the pure drug. They’ll come around. Besides, Carton needs both of them in his fight.”

“Don’t take any more,” muttered the woman, half conscious. “There’s something wrong with it, Haddon.”

I looked more closely at the face in the half-darkness.

It was Haddon himself.

“I knew he’d come back when the craving for the drug became intense enough,” remarked Kennedy.

Carton looked at Kennedy in amazement. Haddon was the last person in the world whom he had evidently expected to discover here.

“How–what do you mean?”

“The episode of the telephone booth gave me the first hint. That is the favourite stunt of the drug fiend–a few minutes alone, and he thinks no one is the wiser about his habit. Then, too, there was the story about his speed mania. That is a frequent failing of the cocainist. The drug, too, was killing his interest in Loraine Keith–that is the last stage.

“Yet under its influence, just as with his lobbygow and lieutenant, Brodie, he found power and inspiration. With him it took the form of bombs to protect himself in his graft.”

“He can’t–escape this time–Loraine. We’ll leave it–at his house–you know–Carton–“

We looked quickly at the work-table. On it was a gigantic bomb of clockwork over which Haddon had been working. The cocaine which was to have given him inspiration had, thanks to Kennedy, overcome him.

Beside Loraine Keith were a suit-case and a Gladstone. She had evidently been stuffing the corners full of their favourite nepenthe, for, as Kennedy reached down and turned over the closely packed woman’s finery and the few articles belonging to Haddon, innumerable packets from the cabinet dropped out.

“Hulloa–what’s this?” he exclaimed, as he came to a huge roll of bills and a mass of silver and gold coin. “Trying to double-cross us all the time. That was her clever game–to give him the hours he needed to gather what money he could save and make a clean getaway. Even cocaine doesn’t destroy the interest of men and women in that,” he concluded, turning over to Carton the wealth which Haddon had amassed as one of the meanest grafters of the city of graft.

Here was a case which I could not help letting the Star have immediately. Notes or no notes, it was local news of the first order. Besides, anything that concerned Carton was of the highest political significance.

It kept me late at the office and I overslept. Consequently I did not see much of Craig the next morning, especially as he told me he had nothing special, having turned down a case of a robbery of a safe, on the ground that the police were much better fitted to catch ordinary yeggmen than he was. During the day, therefore, I helped in directing the following up of the Haddon case for the Star.