Recovering, Penfield threw him a cry of envenomed spite, and in one stride left the room.  He was turning up the stairs, three steps and an oath at a bound, by the time P. Sybarite gained the threshold and sped his departing host with a reminder superfluously ironic: 

“The Bizarre at seven—­don’t forget!”

A breathless imprecation dropped to him from the head of the staircase.  And he chuckled—­but cut the chuckle short when a heavy and metallic clang followed the disappearance of the gambler.  The iron door upstairs had closed, shutting off the second floor from the lower part of the house, and at the same time consigning P. Sybarite to the mercies of the police as soon as they succeeded in battering down the front door.

Now he harboured no whim to figure as the sole victim of the raid—­to be arrested as a common gambler, loaded to the guards with cash and unable to give any creditable account of himself.

“Damn!” said P. Sybarite thoughtfully.

The front doors still held, though shaking beneath a shower of axe-strokes that filled the house with sonorous echoes.

At his feet, immediately to the left of the lounge door, yawned the well of the basement stairway.  And one chance was no more foolhardy than another.  Like a shot down that dark hole he dropped—­and brought up with a bang against a closed door at the bottom.  Happily, it wasn’t locked.  Turning the handle, he stumbled through, reclosed the door, and intelligently bolted it.

He was now in a narrow and odorous corridor, running from front to rear of the basement.  One or two doors open or ajar furnished all its light.  Trying the first at a venture, P. Sybarite discovered what seemed a servant’s bedroom, untenanted.  The other introduced him to a kitchen of generous proportions and elaborate appointments—­cool, airy, and aglow with glistening white paint and electric light; everything in absolute order with the exception of the central table, where sat a man asleep, head pillowed on arms folded amid a disorder of plates, bottles and glasses—­asleep and snoring lustily.

P. Sybarite pulled up with a hand on the knob, and blinked with surprise—­an emotion that would assuredly have been downright dismay had the sleeper been conscious.  For he was in uniform; and a cap hung on the back of his chair; and uniform and cap alike boasted the insignia of the New York Police Department.

Wrinkling a perplexed nose, P. Sybarite swiftly considered the situation.  Here was the policeman on the beat—­one of those creatures of Penfield’s vaunted vest-pocket crew—­invited in for a bite and sup by the steward of the house.  The steward called away, he had drifted naturally into a gentle nap.  And now—­“Glad I’m not in his shoes!” mused P. Sybarite.

And yet....  Urgent second thought changed the tenor of his temper toward the sleeper.  Better far to be in his shoes than in those of P. Sybarite, just then....