Stolen Idols by E. Phillips Oppenheim — Read

Towards half-past five in the morning Mr. Johnson was awakened from a heavy slumber by the clamorous and increasing twitter of birds in the shrubberies and gardens outside. He woke with the sensation of being exceedingly uncomfortable and of being in an entirely unaccustomed spot. He sat up, looking around him. He was on the floor of the library, his revolver, with one barrel discharged, by his side, a dried but painful cut upon his cheek bone, and with the haunting remains of a most unpleasant odour still hanging about the room. He staggered to his feet with poignant apprehensions of disaster. A panel in the door communicating with the smaller apartment which it had been his purpose to guard had been neatly cut out, and the spring lock apparently picked from the other side. The door itself stood open. Inside, the steel-clamped coffer in which Endacott had kept his manuscripts lay upside down and empty upon the carpet. Mr. Johnson nodded slowly to himself.

It was a moment of great humiliation. After fifteen years of adventurous life, of scraps with Chinese cutthroats, Malay thieves, scamps of every sort, armed with every kind of weapon, he had, notwithstanding ample warning, been tricked by an amateur. He made a closer examination and realised how it must have happened. He had waited in the darkness for the opening of the garden door, and the intruder, whoever it might have been, had surprised him by coming in the other way -- there were, after all, a dozen windows on the ground floor by which he might have entered -- and stealing upon him from behind. He could recall, even then with his dazed senses, as he leaned out to get a little fresh air, the absolute noiselessness of that encounter. It was less a sound than the consciousness of somebody's presence which had made him suddenly alert, and then, before he could even turn, arms like iron bands were around his throat and the handkerchief was pressed to his nostrils.