unpleasant rodents meant that this particular acquaintance was false, an enemy, someone who meant him harm. I, therefore, understood the allusion in his mind, but this time, for some reason, I did not believe it. He was lying. The terror of a guilty conscience was in those startled eyes and in that sheet-white skin. I felt still more uneasy. I was glad I had put my resignation from the "beezness" in writing. There was trouble coming in connexion with that recipe, and Brodie already knew it.
It was after two in the morning when we reached home. My rooms were a couple of streets before his own, but he begged me to see him to his door. His nervous state had grown, meanwhile, worse and worse; his legs failed him several times, seeming to sink under his weight; he took my arm; more than once he reeled. There was something about it all, about himself particularly, that made my skin crawl. The awful feeling that I, too, was to be involved increased in me.
As we turned out of Fourth Avenue into his street, a loud noise met us: a prolonged, hoarse sound, a clank of machinery in it somewhere, another sound as well that pulsed and throbbed. A dense crowd blocked the way. There was smoke. A fire engine was pumping water into a burning building--the one that Brodie lived in. These details I noticed in the first few seconds, but even before I had registered them Brodie uttered a queer cry and half-collapsed against me. He was speechless with terror, and at first something of his terror he communicated to me, too. My heart sank into my boots. The "rats" I understood instantly, had nothing to do with his eau de Cologne recipe. This was a far more serious matter.
Fires were no new thing to me, and this evidently was only a small one, but, none the less, people might have been burned to death. Telling my companion to wait for me, and to keep his mouth shut whatever happened, I produced some paper and pushed my way through the crowd to the police cordon, saying I was from the Evening Sun. Though I had no fire-badge, the bluff
worked. I ran up the steps of the familiar house. "Which
