two o'clock in the morning
In the street below a police whistle shrieked , and a fusillade of pistol shots woke scandalised echoes . Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside the western tracks , and so gained the old station on the west side of Fifty-eighth Street , for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude . Through this he crept , then down the stairs , encountering at the lower landing an iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump . Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning . In New York anything can happen , and most things do , without stirring up meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders . This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that night , considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation . If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights : that Manhattan Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it ; that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery that Lanyard had come safely through the _ Assyrian _ débâcle to take up anew his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general and to the genius of its American bureau in particular .