Head the man off! It's he--the Cracksman!" he shouted out.

"Find him! Get him! Nab him, if you have to turn the house upside down!" They needed no second bidding, for each man grasped the situation instantly, and in a twinkling there was a veritable pandemonium.
Shouting and scrambling like a band of madmen, they lurched to the door, whirled it open, and went flying down the staircase to the kitchen and so to a discovery which none might have foreseen.

For, almost as they entered they saw lying on the floor a suit of striped pyjamas, and close to it, gagged, bound, helpless, trussed up like a goose that was ready for the oven, gyves on his wrists, gyves on his ankles, their chief, their superintendent, Mr.Maverick Narkom, in a state of collapse, and with all his outer clothing gone! "After him! After that devil, and a thousand pounds to the man that gets him!" he managed to gasp as they rushed to him and ripped loose the gag.
"He was here when we came! He has been in the house for hours.

Get him! get him! get him!" They surged from the room and up the stairs like a pack of stampeded animals; they raced through the hall and bore down on the picture-gallery in a body, and, whirling open the now closed door, went tumbling headlong in.
The light was still burning.

At the far end of the room a window was wide open, and the curtains of it fluttered in the wind.