第21章 MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN(1)

The burglar stepped inside the window quickly, and then he took his time.

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

The house was a private residence.By its boarded front door and untrimmed Boston ivy the burglar knew that the mistress of it was sitting on some oceanside piazza telling a sympathetic man in a yachting cap that no one had ever understood her sensitive, lonely heart.He knew by the light in the third-story front windows, and by the lateness of the season, that the master of the house had come home, and would soon extinguish his light and retire.For it was September of the year and of the soul, in which season the house's good man comes to consider roof gardens and stenographers as vanities, and to desire the return of his mate and the more durable blessings of decorum and the moral excellencies.

The burglar lighted a cigarette.The guarded glow of the match illuminated his salient points for a moment.He belonged to the third type of burglars.

This third type has not yet been recognized and accepted.The police have made us familiar with the first and second.Their classification is simple.The collar is the distinguishing mark.

When a burglar is caught who does not wear a collar he is described as a degenerate of the lowest type, singularly vicious and depraved, and is suspected of being the desperate criminal who stole the handcuffs out of Patrolman Hennessy's pocket in 1878 and walked away to escape arrest.

The other well-known type is the burglar who wears a collar.He is always referred to as a Raffles in real life.He is invariably a gentleman by daylight, breakfasting in a dress suit, and posing as a paperhanger, while after dark he plies his nefarious occupation of burglary.His mother is an extremely wealthy and respected resident of Ocean Grove, and when he is conducted to his cell he asks at once for a nail file and the Police Gazette.He always has a wife in every State in the Union and fiancees in all the Territories, and the newspapers print his matrimonial gallery out of their stock of cuts of the ladies who were cured by only one bottle after having been given up by five doctors, experiencing great relief after the first dose.

The burglar wore a blue sweater.He was neither a Raffles nor one of the chefs from Hell's Kitchen.The police would have been baffled had they attempted to classify him.They have not yet heard of the respectable, unassuming burglar who is neither above nor below his station.

This burglar of the third class began to prowl.He wore no masks, dark lanterns, or gum shoes.He carried a 88-calibre revolver in his pocket, and he chewed peppermint gum thoughtfully.

The furniture of the house was swathed in its summer dust protectors.The silver was far away in safe-deposit vaults.The burglar expected no remarkable "haul." His objective point was that dimly lighted room where the master of the house should be sleeping heavily after whatever solace he had sought to lighten the burden of his loneliness.A "touch" might be made there to the extent of legitimate, fair professional profits -- loose money, a watch, a jewelled stick-pin -- nothing exorbitant or beyond rea son.He had seen the window left open and had taken the chance.

The burglar softly opened the door of the lighted room.The gas was turned low.A man lay in the bed asleep.On the dresser lay many things in confusion -- a crumpled roll of bills, a watch, keys, three poker chips, crushed cigars, a pink silk hair bow, and an unopened bottle of bromo-seltzer for a bulwark in the morning.

The burglar took three steps toward the dresser.The man in the bed suddenly uttered a squeaky groan and opened his eyes.His right hand slid under his pillow, but remained there.

"Lay still," said the burglar in conversational tone.Burglars of the third type do not hiss.The citizen in the bed looked at the round end of the burglar's pistol and lay still.

"Now hold up both your hands," commanded the burglar.

The citizen had a little, pointed, brown-and-gray beard, like that of a painless dentist.He looked solid, esteemed, irritable, and disgusted.

He sat up in bed and raised his right hand above his head.