What I have here set down was but the matter of a moment.  Flint brushed it aside like a cobweb and set briskly about his real business.  Over in the recess next to the fireplace was the safe, and before this he knelt.

“Hold the light!” he ordered in a curt whisper.  “There—­like that.  Steady now.”  My hand closed as well upon the rosary I carried, and I clung to the beads as the shipwrecked cling to a spar.  The familiar feel of them comforted me.

I do not know to this day the make of that safe, nor its actual strength, and I have always avoided questioning John Flint about it.  I do know it seemed incredibly strong, big, heavy, ungetatable.  There was a dark-colored linen cover on top of it, embroidered with yellow marguerites and their stiff green leaves.  And there was a brass fern-jar with claw feet, and rings on the sides that somehow made me think of fetters upon men’s wrists.

“A little lower—­to the left.  So!” he ordered, and with steady fingers I obeyed.  He stood out sharply in the clear oval—­the “cleverest crook in all America” at work again, absorbed in his task, expert, a mind-force pitting itself against inanimate opposition.  He was smiling.

The tools lay beside him and quite by instinct his hand reached out for anything it needed.  I think he could have done his work blindfolded.  Once I saw him lay his ear against the door, and I thought I heard a faint click.  A gnawing rat might have made something like the noise of the drill biting its way.  With this exception an appalling silence hung over the room.  I could hardly breathe in it.  I gripped the rosary and told it, bead after bead.

"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death—­“

There are moments when time loses its power and ceases to be; before our hour we seem to have stepped out of it and into eternity, in which time does not exist, and wherein there can be no relation of time between events.  They stand still, or they stretch to indefinite and incredible lengths—­all, all outside of time, which has no power upon them.  So it was now.  Every fraction of every second of every minute lengthened into centuries, eternities passed between minutes.  The hashish-eater knows something of this terror of time, and I seemed to have eaten hashish that night.

I could still see him crouching before the safe; and all the while the eternities stretched and stretched on either side of us, infinities I could only partly bridge over with Hailmarys and Ourfathers.

"And lead us not into temptation ... but deliver us from evil ..."

Although I watched him attentively, being indeed unable to tear my eyes away from him, and although I held the light for him with such a steady hand, I really do not know what he did, nor how he forced that safe.  I understand it took him a fraction over fourteen minutes.