At last he seemed ready.  “Walter,” he whispered, “roll that sofa quietly over against the door.  There, now the table and that bureau, and wedge the chairs in.  Keep that door shut at any cost.  It’s now or never—­here goes.”

He stopped a moment and tinkered with the box on the tripod.  “Hello!  Hello!  Hello!  Is that you, O’Connor?” he shouted.

I watched him in amazement.  Was the man crazy?  Had the blow affected his brain?  Here he was, trying to talk into a camera.  A little signalling-bell in the box commenced to ring, as if by spirit hands.

“Shut up in that room,” growled a voice from outside the door.  “By God, they’ve barricaded the door.  Come on, pals, we’ll kill the spies.”

A smile of triumph lighted up Kennedy’s pale face.  “It works, it works,” he cried as the little bell continued to buzz.  “This is a wireless telephone you perhaps have seen announced recently—­good for several hundred feet—­through walls and everything.  The inventor placed it in a box easily carried by a man, including a battery, and mounted on an ordinary camera tripod so that the user might well be taken for a travelling photographer.  It is good in one direction only, but I have a signalling-bell here that can be rung from the other end by Hertzian waves.  Thank Heaven, it’s compact and simple.

“O’Connor,” he went on, “it is as I told you.  It was Pitts Slim.  He left here ten or fifteen minutes ago—­I don’t know by what exit, but I heard them say they would meet at the Central freightyards at midnight.  Start your plain-clothes men out and send some one here, quick, to release us.  We are locked in a room in the fourth or fifth house from the corner.  There’s a secret passage to the yegg-house.  The Gay Cat is still unconscious, Jameson is groggy, and I have a bad scalp wound.  They are trying to beat in our barricade.  Hurry.”

I think I shall never get straight in my mind the fearful five minutes that followed, the battering at the door, the oaths, the scuffle outside, the crash as the sofa, bureau, table, and chairs all yielded at once—­and my relief when I saw the square-set, honest face of O’Connor and half a dozen plainclothes men holding the yeggs who would certainly have murdered us this time to protect their pal in his getaway.  The fact is I didn’t think straight until we were halfway uptown, speeding toward the railroad freight-yards in O’Connor’s car.  The fresh air at last revived me, and I began to forget my cute and bruises in the renewed excitement.

We entered the yards carefully, accompanied by several of the railroad’s detectives, who met us with a couple of police dogs.  Skulking in the shadow under the high embankment that separated the yards with their interminable lines of full and empty cars on one side and the San Juan Hill district of New York up on the bluff on the other side, we came upon a party of three men who were waiting to catch the midnight “side-door Pullman”—­the fast freight out of New York.