"There must be something wrong here," she half-whispered.
"That we already know," Jane agreed, "else why the detective in our midst?"
In Pape's hands, suppose we say by accident, the volume he had rescued from the floor opened upon one of O. Henry's _immortelles_--"Alias Jimmie Valentine." To him the work of the lamented Mr. Porter ever had been fraught with suggestion for more than the "kick" that, unlike home-brew, is always to be found at the bottom of his bottle--at the _finis_ of his tale.
The latest in amateur detectives, thus opportunely reminded, decided that he must rise to the occasion. And he had reason to hope that he could, once upon a time having been shown some tricks of the tumbler profession by a professional.
"Why else should I be in your midst," he offered cheerfully, "if not to open your safe for you?"
Mrs. Sturgis at once gave him the benefit of doubt; made way for him; took a stand beside her skeptical-looking niece. But Jane's contempt over his essay was frank--really, made her look downright disagreeable.
Pape made up his mind to disappoint her evident expectations if within his powers so to do. He knelt down; wedged his head into the vacancy left by the swinging shelf; pressed his ear close to the lock; began to finger the dial. There was more than hope in his touch; there was also practice. In his ranch-house out Hellroaring way he long ago had installed a wall safe of his own in which to deposit the pay-roll and other cash on hand. And one day it had disobligingly gone on strike; but not so disobligingly that a certain derelict whom he had fed-up on he-man advice as well as food--one who had followed the delicate profession of "listener"--was beyond reach.
This turned-straight cracksman, without admitting his former avocation, had solved a pay-day dilemma by conquering the refractory dial and later had given his benefactor a series of lessons in the most-gentle "art," that the emergency might not recur. Pape, miles and miles from the nearest town which might afford an expert, had been convinced by the experience that a safe is unsafe which cannot be opened at the owner's will.
In the course of present manipulations, the "under-graduate" considered what he could say or do to the contemptuous half of his audience should he fail, but reached no satisfactory conclusion. Indeed, he felt that the only real way of venting his chagrin would be to wring her graceful, long, white neck for doubting him before he failed, a proceeding quite beyond consideration of any man from Montana. So he must not fail. Yet how succeed?