I guess Burroughs was a great writer, but he wasn't a good one. Everything about this early story is some degree of awful but I enjoyed the whole. The plot would fit the bad Camp Fire Girls series; the characters are stock; the subtext is lively, but probably unintentional, as no-one does anything with it; the prose suggests that the author was paid by the word:
But even the most expert of second story men nod and now that all seemed as though running on greased rails a careless elbow rakes a silver candle-stick to the floor where it crashed with a resounding din that sent cold shivers up the youth's spine and conjured in his mind a sudden onslaught of investigators from the floor below.
That's a clunky sentence as narrative, but it isn't hard to say; it's not tin-eared. Likewise, although the plot and characters are old chestnuts, they're used handily. At least, I assume they're used handily, and that a blind test would show some difference between this and a similar-plotted story by a failed or a pulp writer who never wrote anything better. I don't know where the difference resides; pacing, maybe: the sentences are prolonged but the action clips along paragraph by paragraph.
It is very sad that the republisher who wrote such a laudatory preface about Burroughs could not honor him with adequate proof-reading as well as hard covers.
Project Gutenberg etext 363
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).