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“What was he like? I ast what was he like–it’s that I’m astin’ you!” The janitress was the one who pressed for an answer.

For the moment the question, pointed though it was, went unanswered. The main speaker–shrieker, rather–was plainly a person with a mania for details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the incidental facts so far as these fell within her scope of knowledge.

“I was awake,” she clarioned through the keyhole, speaking much faster than any one following this narrative can possibly hope to read the words. “I couldn’t sleep. I never do sleep well when I’m in a strange house. And anyhow, I was all alone. My nephew by marriage–Mr. Edward Braydon, you know–had gone out with the gentleman who lives on the floor above to play cards, and he said he was going to be gone nearly all night, and my niece–I’m Mrs. Braydon’s unmarried aunt from Poughkeepsie and I’m down here visiting them–my niece was called to Long Island yesterday by illness–it’s her sister who’s ill with something like the bronchitis. And he was gone and so she was gone, and so here I was all alone and he told me not to stay up for him, but I couldn’t sleep well–I never can sleep in a strange house–and just a few minutes ago I heard the bell ring and I supposed he had forgotten to take his latchkey with him, and so I got up to let him in. And I called down the stairs and asked him if it was him and he answered back. But it didn’t sound like his voice. But I didn’t think anything of that. But, of course, it was out of the ordinary for him to have a voice like that. But all the same I went back to bed. But he didn’t come in and I was just getting up again to see what detained him–his voice really sounded so strange I thought then he might have been taken sick or something. But just as I got to the door a plank creaked and I opened the door and there it was right where I could have touched him. And then it ran–and oh, what if—-“

“I’m astin’ you once more what it was like?”

“How should I know except that—-“

“Was it a big, fat, wild, bare-headed, scary, awful-lookin’ scoundrel dressed in some kind of funny pink clothes?”

“Yes, that’s it! That’s him–he was all sort of pink. Oh, did you see him too? Oh, is it a burglar?”

“Burglar nothin’! It’s a ravin’, rampagin’ lunatic–that’s what it is!”

“Oh, my heavens, a lunatic!”

“Sure it is. He tried to git me to let him in and—-“

“Oh, whatever shall we do!”

XIII

“Hey, what’s all the excitement about?”

A new and deeper voice here broke into the babel, and Mr. Leary recognising it at a distance, where he stood listening–but not failing, even while he listened, to strive unavailingly with his problem of buttons–knew he was saved. Knowing this he nevertheless retreated still deeper into the inner room. The thought of spectators in numbers remained very abhorrent to him. So he did not hear all that happened next, except in broken snatches.

He gathered though, from what he did hear, that Bob Slack and Mr. Edward Braydon were coming up the stairs, and that a third male whom they called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march, and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr. Slack’s rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft–or words to that effect–he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance to the house, and how he must still be in the house. And through all her discourse there were questions from this one or that, crossing its flow but in no-wise interrupting it; and through it all percolated hootingly the terrorised outcries of Mr. Braydon’s maiden aunt-in-law, issuing through the keyhole of the door behind which she cowered. Only now she was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead away.