As he ripped the ceiling away, light entered the cage from a dirty skylight far above. Just over his head a heavy iron grating covered the cage, barring him in, but high up he could see the great drum, from which the cable slowly unwound as the car descended. He was in an elevator, but this knowledge gave him small comfort. Cage, room, or elevator--call it what he chose--it was relentlessly descending into the flooded cellar. He watched the drum with fascinated eyes, as the wire cable unwound itself. He lay back on the bed, his feet hanging to the floor, and stared upward. He could not take his eyes from the revolving drum. It was like a clock, marking the moments he still had to live.

But suddenly he was galvanized into action. Over his feet something cold ran, making him jerk them from the floor. It was the water of the oubliette, and he gazed on it with horror as it rose, inch by inch, toward him. Slowly, as the car dropped, the water crept up. It reached the first drawer of the small bureau. It crept up to the side rails of the bed. It wet the mattress--and still it rose. He stood on the bed and grasped the iron grating above his head.

"Stop!" whispered a voice above his head, and the creaking cage stopped.

"Gubb! Detective Gubb!" whispered the voice, and Philo Gubb looked upward. "Listen, Detective Gubb," said the voice. "One touch of my hand on the lever, and you will be dropped beneath the waters, never to appear again, except dead. One only chance remains for your life, and, blackened with crime though we are, we offer you that chance. If you will swear to leave the State, never to return, we will spare you.

What say you, Philo Gubb?"

It was an offer no mortal could refuse. Life, after all, is sweet.

Philo Gubb, the relentless Correspondence School detective, opened his mouth, but as he turned his head upward, he closed it again and licked his lips twice.

"No, durn ye!" he shouted angrily. "I won't never do no such thing!"

There was a hurried whispering of many voices above him.

"Think well," said the voice again. "We will give you until midnight to reconsider your rashness. Until midnight, Detective Gubb!"

"You can't scare _me_!" shouted Philo Gubb.

"Until midnight!" repeated the voice, and then there was silence.

Philo Gubb immediately drew his heavy pocket-knife from his pocket and began cutting out one of the panels of the door that shut him in on one side. He did not work hurriedly. He was not at all frightened.

Looking up, he had seen the drum, and there was no more cable on the drum to be unwound. The car could descend no farther. His feet were as wet as they could get. Unless the river rose to unbelievable height, he could not be drowned in the makeshift oubliette, unless he voluntarily lay down in the shallow water and inhaled it. He worked on the panel slowly, but with the earnestness of a very angry victim of a hoax. The panel fell outward with a splash, and floated away. Philo Gubb bent sideways and squeezed out of the small opening into the cellar.

The huge cellar was dusky in the dim light that entered through the cobwebbed panes, high in the wall. It was an immense place, and now knee-deep in water, except for a gangway of boards laid on low trestles, which led from one side of the cellar to the cellar door.

There were coal-bins and vegetable-bins, like watery bays leading from the general cellar sea, and--strange appliance to discover in a hotel cellar--a small hay-baling press stood on an extemporized platform against one wall, and alongside it, on a long table, such as are seen in factories, bales of hay, some complete and some torn open--and cases! The cases were labeled "Blue River Canned Tomatoes," but one, split across the end, gave evidence that their contents were not canned tomatoes at all. Through the crack in the case glittered the six silver stars of the Six Star whiskey. There were twenty-six of the cases.

Philo Gubb waded to the raised gangway and walked to the cellar door.

It was double-barred on the inside, and he lifted the bars cautiously and stepped into the alley, closing the door carefully behind him. He pulled his false whiskers and wig from his face and stuffed them in his pockets and hurried down the alley.

When he returned, Billy Getz, Jack Harburger, and six of the Kidders were holding high revel in the closed bar-room of the Harburger House, but they all fell silent when the door opened and the Sheriff of Derling County entered, with Philo Gubb and three deputies in company.

It was evident that the Sheriff did not consider Philo Gubb a joke.

"Search-warrant, Jack," he said to Harburger. "Detective Gubb, of Riverbank, has been doing some sleuthing in your hotel, he says. We want to have a look at the cellar."

The next morning the "Riverbank Eagle" was full of Philo Gubb again.

Through the superb ac.u.men of that wonderful detective, three stores of whiskey had been discovered and confiscated--one in the cellar of the Harburger House at Derlingport; one in Joe Henry's stable at Riverbank; and a smaller one in the room in the Willc.o.x Building frequented by the "Kidders."

"How I done it?" said Philo Gubb to one of his admirers. "I done it like a deteckative does it--a deteckative that wants to detect--picks up some feller that looks suspicious-like, like it says in Lesson Four, Rule Four. And then he shadows and trails him, like it says in Lesson Four, Rules Four to Seventeen. And then somethin's bound to happen."

"But how can you tell what's goin' to happen?" asked his admirer.

"Well, sir," said Philo Gubb, "that's the beauty of the deteckative business. You don't ever know what's goin' to happen until it happens."

THE UN-BURGLARS

Although Detective Gubb's experience with the oubliette-elevator did not lead to the detection of the dynamiters for whom a reward of five thousand dollars was offered, it resulted in the payment to him of one half of three fines of five hundred dollars for each of the three stores of whiskey he had unearthed. With this money, amounting to seven hundred and fifty dollars, Mr. Gubb went to the home of Jonas Medderbrook and paid that gentleman the entire amount.

"That there payment," Mr. Gubb said, "deducted from what I owe onto them shares of Perfectly Worthless Gold-Mine Stock--"

"The name of the mine, if you please, is Utterly Hopeless and not Perfectly Worthless," said Mr. Medderbrook severely.

"Just so," said Mr. Gubb apologetically. "You must excuse me, Mr.

Medderbrook. I ain't no expert onto gold-mines' names and, offhand, them two names seem about the same to me. But my remark was to be that the indebtedness of the liability I now owe you is only thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars."

"And the sooner you get it paid up the better it will suit me," said Mr. Medderbrook.

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Gubb, and hesitated. Then, a.s.suming an air of little concern, he asked: "It ain't likely to suppose we've had any word from Miss Syrilla, is it, Mr. Medderbrook?"

For answer Mr. Medderbrook went to his desk and brought Mr. Gubb a telegram. It was from Syrilla. It said:--

Eating no potatoes, drinking no water. Have lost eight pounds. Kind love to Mr. Gubb.

"She's wore herself down to nine hundred and ninety-two pounds, according to that," said Mr. Gubb. "She has only got to wear off two hundred and ninety-two pounds more before Mr. Dorgan will discharge her away from the side-show."

"And at the rate she is wearing herself away," said Mr. Medderbrook, "that will be in about ten years! What interests me more is that the telegram came collect and cost me forty cents. If you want to do the square thing, Mr. Gubb, you'll pay me twenty cents for your share of that telegram."

Mr. Gubb immediately gave Mr. Medderbrook twenty cents and Mr.

Medderbrook kindly allowed him to keep the telegram. Mr. Gubb placed it in the pocket nearest his heart and proceeded to a house on Tenth Street where he had a job of paper-hanging.

At about this same time Smith Wittaker, the Riverbank Marshal--or Chief of Police, as he would have been called in a larger city--knocked the ashes from his pipe against the edge of his much-whittled desk in the dingy Marshal's room on the ground floor of the City Hall, and grinned at Mr. Griscom, one of Riverbank's citizens.

"Well, I don't know," he said with a grin. "I don't know but what I'd be glad to be un-burgled like that. I guess it was just somebody playing a joke on you."

"If it was," said Mr. Griscom, "I am ready to do a little joking myself. I'm just enough of a joker to want to see whoever it was in jail. My house is my house--it is my castle, as the saying is--and I don't want strangers wandering in and out of it, whether they come to take away my property, or leave property that is not mine. Is there, or is there not, a law against such things as happened at my house?"

"Oh, there's a law all right," said Marshal Wittaker. "It's burglary, whether the burglar breaks into your house or breaks out of it. How do you know he broke out?"

"Well, my wife and I went to the Riverbank Theater last night," said Mr. Griscom, "and when I got home and went to put the key in the keyhole, there was another key in it. Here are the two keys."

Marshal Wittaker took the two keys and examined them. One was an old doorkey, much worn, and the other a new key, evidently the work of an amateur key-maker.

"All right," said Marshal Wittaker, when he had examined the keys.

"This new one was made out of an old spoon. Go ahead."

"We never had a key like that in the house," said Mr. Griscom. "But when we reached home last night, this nickel-silver key was sticking in the lock of the front door, on the outside, and the door was unlocked and standing ajar."

"Just as if some one had gone in at the front door and left it unlocked," said Mr. Wittaker.

"Exactly!" said Mr. Griscom. "So the first thing we thought was 'Burglars!' and the first place my wife looked was the sideboard, in the dining-room, and there--"

"Yes," said Mr. Wittaker. "There, on the sideboard, were a dozen solid silver spoons you had never seen before."

"And marked with my wife's initials--understand!" said Mr. Griscom.

"And the cellar window--the one on the east side of the house--had been broken out of."