He'll be gone, however, in a day, or at the most two, and then you'll have no more risk with Bill." "How did you know Bill was goin' to-morrow?
It wasn't settled thirty minutes ago." "I know it just as I know that you, about May fifteenth, will pick up a dozen or more pals who are whole crooks and half sailors; that you will then leave on a boat, probably a steam yacht, May twenty-sixth, bound for Washington; and that the job of bin-cracking you will engage in is to be pulled off May twenty-seventh to twenty-ninth inclusive." "You know more'n me, Inspector," observed Dan, with wonder undisguised.
"If I didn't I wouldn't be telling you what to do.

That's all, Dan; have you got your orders straight ?" "Straight as a gun," declared Dan, wiping the last drops of the chianti from his mouth.
"Screw out then," commanded Inspector Val, "and come only when I send for you." Two days later, a laborer, clean-shaven and of rather superior exterior, fastened a tape measure to the iron cover of a manhole that opened into the drain that ran by the side of the Treasury Building.

Tape fastened, the laborer unwound its length along the asphalt for perhaps one hundred feet.

Then he began to re-wind the tape into its circular box.

As he followed the incoming tape towards the end that was fastened to the manhole cover, winding as he went, he paused for the ghost of a second squarely opposite the little basement door-way in the Treasury Building, where the old watchman stood smoking his pipe on the evening that Storri was told of the gold inside.