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“We landed with a grinding shudder, then keeled over sideways as if we'd never right. I had quite made up my mind we were going to crash over on our back to the sea below.”
Here is, perhaps, the greatest air story that has yet been written. The editor, who has personally read, as near as is humanly possible, every important air story of a scientific nature, has still to find a single one that excels '“The Ark of the Covenant.”
Here is a real story of the air that bristles with adventure, good science, tremendous suspense, and excellent construction. The author is always a step ahead of you and you are never permitted to guess in advance just what is in store for you. There is nothing contained in the story that could not come true at the present or the near future. It is one of these stories that grows upon you as time goes on, a story that you will wish to recommend to your friends for a long time to come.
As extraordinary as the story is, the author himself—who by the way is Scotch—comes pretty near matching it.
He was wounded in 1915 during the World War in Gallipoli by a bullet which lodged near his heart, and, strange to say, it remains there to this day, without in the least interfering with the author's literary career.
Sketch of the author, Victor MacClure
A HAND was laid on my shoulder. I woke up. My father stood by my bedside, with that in his look which drove sleepiness out of me and brought me quickly to my feet beside him.
“What's the matter, dad ?”
“The bank, son,” he said, quietly—“the bank has been robbed. How soon do you think you could land me at the Battery?”
It was all I could do to refrain from spluttering out a string of questions. Had it not been for the grimness of the old man's expression, I should have thought then that he was walking in his sleep. But there was no mistaking that he was clean awake and in deadly earnest.
What I did was to put a hand under the pillow for my watch. I said nothing. I was not going to be beaten in coolness by my own father, but I did some quick thinking. My roadster was in the garage, so the five miles between the house and my hangar on the beach was a small detail. I had to decide at once if I should risk taking the old man across Long Island on the only machine I had ready for the air that chilly morning. This was an ancient seaplane, built in 1928, and now held together by pieces of string and tin tacks. In a series of experiments on stability I had pared her wing area down to the absolute minimum, and she asked for a deal of handling.
As I reached for my watch, I kept my eyes on my father's face. It was as placidly grim as could be, but I saw that he was betting on me to get him over to his old bank in quick time. So, almost before I had seen on my watch that the time was half past six, I had decided to risk his neck and mine on the ancient bus.
“Get the hangar on the phone, dad,” I told him. “Ask Milliken to warm up the Sieve right away, and have her run out in less than ten minutes. Then put on some thick clothing, while I get into overalls and pull out the roadster. You'll find me outside. I'll have you at the Battery inside forty minutes.”
The old man took his orders like a soldier.
“The Sieve,” he repeated. “Right!”
Off he went, while I got into my flying kit. I went down to the garage, and had the car out on the drive with her engine turning over prettily before he joined me again.
“Good man, that mechanic of yours, son,” he grunted in approval; “doesn't waste time in talk—”
Once out on the turnpike, I let the car out full and we were alongside the hangar well inside of ten minutes. Milliken already had the old seaplane in the water, and when I saw anew how stubby her wings were, I had to stifle my misgivings all over again. She looked terribly inadequate to carry the only father I have. But before I had time to express my qualms, even if I had wanted to, the old man was out of the car and down on the jetty. With a nod to Milliken, he climbed into the cockpit, and there was nothing to do but follow him.
Milliken swung the propeller to contact, and I knew at once that, however patchy the structure of the Sieve might be, her heart was as sound as ever. The note of her engine was good to hear. When I felt the strain was right, I dropped the signal to the mechanic. Milliken released the patent mooring, and we shot out to sea with a muttered “fluff-flufter-fluff!” from the floats, as of big pebbles skimmed over the water. Then I pulled the stick, and the old bus took to the air like a bird. I let her climb east just far enough for the turn, then swung her into a dead course for the New York Battery, a hundred and thirty kilometres away.
It was the first time my father had flown with me, though I must say he had always shown an interest in my aeronautical research work and, before the sale of a few patents of mine had made me independent of him, had always been ready to dip his hands deep in his pockets to help me. In the years since the European War, where I suppose as a cub flyer I got the flying germ into my blood, my father had never tried me out as a pilot, and I had often wondered what opinion he had of me. But as I thought, that gray March morning, of the certainty with which he had depended on my help and of the way he had gone about the business, I couldn't help growing chesty as I realized how clearly he took my skill for granted.
As soon as we were properly set on our course, I took a look back at the old fellow. He was sitting humped up in the passenger's seat, with only his eyes and the tip of his nose showing through his voluminous wraps. A grim calm was eloquent even in those features. He caught my eye when I looked back at him, and he nodded serenely. I don't know how it was, but it dawned on me just then that I had a large-sized affection for my sometimes irascible sire, and I turned my attention to getting all I could out of the old bus for him. We flattened out to a nifty two hundred and fifty kilometres the hour.
I hadn't wasted any of the old man's time by asking him questions, but I'll confess that the robbery of the bank had roused in me a lively curiosity. The roar of the unsilenced engine put all conversation clean out of possibility, and I did not want to have him unwrap in that cold rush of air to put on the headpiece of the phone. So I had to keep mumchance and speculate about the affair.
There was enough material for speculation. The premises of the National Metallurgical, of which my father was president, were generally believed to be absolutely burglar-proof. The building on Broadway was comparatively new. Its safes and strongrooms were supposed to be the last word in appliances for the thwarting of cracksmen, and the president was immensely proud of them. Altogether, I came to the conclusion that this sudden flight towards the Battery and Wall Street was the result of some swindle by a forger or by a dishonest official, rather than of burglary. I knew it must have been something big to put the old man in such a hurry, but I was far from realizing then, with the old Sieve flattened out and roaring above the misty trees of Long Island, just how big a thing I was headed for. My father has since admitted that at the time his conception, too, of what the future held, came little nearer the truth than my own.
I must explain at this point in my story that what I write in the following pages can only be a personal version of a bewildering run of events that have since become history. I had the luck to be close to many of these happenings from the start—as the world saw it—and also to be in at the death. This must be my excuse, if any is needed, for trying to put together a connected story of what befell in a quick-moving and epoch-making period of six months. Nobody will deny that for this space the world was badly scared, and, now that the terror is past, and everybody breathes freely again, I can do no harm by telling what I know.
I may even do a little good. The flight with my father that chilly Monday morning in March was the beginning of my participation in a conflict that for clash of intellect, mystery, romance. and far-reaching consequences has made the World War of 1914-18 look by comparison like a rough-and-tumble in a back street.
As we droned along above the island, I had little but my thoughts to occupy me. The seaplane was behaving splendidly, and I had none of the trouble I had expected with her if I leave out a little manoeuvering that came when we hit a pocket in the air. In about twenty-five minutes the Woolworth Building loomed up on the horizon, dead ahead, and I swung a point or two south, so that its shape fell on the starboard bow. Next minute I had circled and was dropping northerly into the upper New York Bay, with Battery Park in front. Under forty minutes after my father had wakened me I was landing with him at the seaplane jetty west of the park.
There was quite a fleet of planes round the landing-stage, mostly the bronze-painted machines of the water division of the Air Police; speedy, sinister things they were, but trim enough to make my old boat look more like her nickname than ever. I had never seen so many police machines together at the Battery landing stage before, but I imagined they were there merely upon their lawful occasions.
The pierman, an old friend of mine called O'Grady, gave me my mooring ticket and would have held me inconveniently in gossip, but I shook him off and legged it up Battery Place in pursuit of my father, whose impatience forbade him to wait for me. It was lucky I overtook him, because a cordon of police had been drawn around the Wall Street area, east and west from Trinity Place to Pearl Street, and, I presently discovered, north and south from Beaver Street to Liberty Street. The police saluted the old man and would have stopped me, but he snapped one word at them, whereupon they stepped back and let me pass. The presence of so many policemen at such a distance from the bank made me begin to think that the robbery was something of an affair.
A Startling Tale
WE went right up Broadway, my father and I. As I walked behind him, I realized again his great bulk and, tall as I am, I felt for all the world like some faithful but skinny pup tagging at his heels. All about me were clusters of foot police round the doors of various buildings. I wanted to stop and find out what they were doing on guard so far away—as I thought—from the scene of the robbery, the National Metallurgical being up Broadway at the corner of Liberty Street, but I hung close to my father in case I were challenged. We arrived at the door of the bank.
The squad of policemen who were strung across the doorway made an opening for the president and myself, and I followed him right into his room. We were immediately joined by Jaxon, officer in charge of the armed guard which was mounted every night in the bank. Poor Jaxon looked like a man who had just come out of a bout of fever. He was in a daze.
“Well ?” the old man snapped.
Jaxon simply lifted his arms and let them drop in a gesture pitiful in its expression of helplessness—especially pitiful since the man normally was alert as a terrier and sharp as a needle.
“I don't know what to say, Mr. Boon,” he gulped. “I just can't understand it.”
A quick look at the man made my father suddenly grow kind.
“'Sit down, Jaxon,” he said. “Let's get to the bottom of this. When and how did you first realize that the bank had been robbed?”
“About five o'clock, Mr. Boon. I—I—woke up—”
“You woke up ! Do you mean to tell me you had been asleep?”
“I wish I could say—I musta been doped—me and all the other five guards”
“What! All six of you doped?”
“All of us, Mr. Boon,” Jaxon said, sullenly. “And what's more—it looks like everybody in the district has been doped— “
“Rubbish!” the old man barked. “Talk sense if you can, ]axon. Who could dope a whole district?”
“I wish I knew—and I am talking sense, Mr. Boon. As far as I can make out, everybody between here and Battery Park was asleep between three and five this morning. Yes—and what's more —this is not the only bank that's been robbed. The Sub-Treasury, the Guaranty Trust, the Trade Bank, and the Dyers' National—they've all been entered. All the lot of them.”
Jaxon slumped forward in his chair. The old man shot a look at me and signaled to know if I thought the guard was mad. I shook my head. Way back there on the Argonne I had seen infantry men get into the same sort of daze after a punishing fight. Jaxon had all the symptoms. He was sane enough, but a beaten and bewildered man.
Just then a detective came in, a headquarters man, and with him was the bank's own investigator. They both confirmed what Jaxon had said about the other banks, and both the detectives were as bewildered as poor Jaxon. They could make neither head nor tail of the affair, and when they had both finished, the man from Headquarters could only sit and shake his head, letting out staccato laughs and curses.
I was beginning to imagine I was still in bed and dreaming it all, and I could see that the old man—for all his poker face, was getting the same feeling. He got up quickly from his chair and started off to look round the building.
It was plain that entrance had been made into the bank through one of the windows next to the main door. A section big enough to pass a full-size man had been lifted clean out of it, and the steel astragals round the panes had been cut through as if they had been strips of cheese. I did not need the detectives to tell me that the cutting had been done by powerful oxyacetylene. I could see that plainly enough when I examined the edges of the removed section, which had been neatly set against the wall on the sidewalk.
Jaxon led the way to the door of the great vault. When the president saw what had been done to this elaborate piece of mechanism he grunted as if somebody had hit him.
There was a neat aperture cut in the central panel of the door, sufficient to let anyone step into the vault without trouble. The flame had sheared right through the machinery of the complicated locks, and there had been no attempt to find the easiest line. The hand that had done the work had simply cut out a chunk from the door, four square, and had not turned aside even for the gun-metal wheel handle. This had a segment shorn clean from it, and the severed fragment was lying on the floor. It was mighty good work even for oxyacetylene.
Without a word of comment, my father stepped into the vault by the opening, and I followed him. The compartments inside had all been broken open, and the floor of the vault was littered with bonds and securities that seemed to me to be worth stacks of money. I saw a pained expression creep into the old man's face, and I permitted myself the first question that morning.
“Bad?” I whispered.
“Bad!” he repeated soberly. “Lord, son—there will be a lot to do before we get over the badness of it!”
I always had thought my father would make a game loser, but the way he took the disaster filled me with admiration for his self-control. I couldn't say much to him then, for he is not the man you can readily offer sympathy to in words. I just sort of put my hand under his arm and gave it a bit of a squeeze, and I remember how it flashed on me that his biceps would have been a credit to a good heavyweight. The old man had a chunky brown face that had the appearance of having been modeled by a vigorous thumb, and had it not been for his thatch of silky white hair he would have looked, at the moment in the vault, for all the world like a bronze statue in a business suit. His fighting chin went up, and he gave me a short nod.
“It will take me some time to estimate the damage, Jimmy,” he said. “Just take a look round the district, will you, and bring back as accurate a report as you can of what has really happened. These fellows are too rattled to please me.”
“Right,” said I, and left him there.
A Little Investigation
THE first thing I did when I stepped from the vault was to get Jaxon into a corner and ask him about the doping idea. I shot questions at him, but got little out of him beyond the fact that from three till five o'clock he had been oblivious of everything. He had waked about five to find himself sitting on the floor of the reception hall with his back to one of the partitions. He had no memory of falling asleep, nor of sitting down. It had been as if those two hours had been cut clean out of his life.
The other guards told much the same story. The lack of detail in their accounts was maddening, and for a minute or two I began to consider the whole thing a frame-up. But beside the consideration— if the report of the whole district being doped were true—that the frame-up was unparalleled in the history of crime, the guards were all too sincerely bewildered to be lying. I could see that they were not acting a part, and that poor Jaxon, in particular, thought himself disgraced forever. He was heartbroken.
Jaxon had been with the bank for a quarter of a century, and his reputation for honesty and loyalty was unimpeachable. More than once his faithfulness had saved the bank from loss, and indeed there had been one occasion when he had been wounded by safe-breakers before he shot two of them in defense of his charge. The bank had presented him with a fine big gold watch, of which he was tremendously proud. He believed it kept better time than any clock in the State Observatory.
I mention Jaxon's watch because through it I discovered a curious thing. I was setting out to do the round of the district, when I found that I had left my own watch behind me. I looked at the clock in the main hall, and it seemed to me to be slow.
“Is that clock on time, Jaxon?” I asked.
“Ought to be,” he replied. “I checked it with my own watch last night. Let's see.” And he took his famous time-piece from his pocket. He pulled off the chamois cover in which he always carried it.
“Well, I'm dodblasted!” he exclaimed, as he looked at the half-hunter face. “What in hell's happened to my watch?”
The gold case was tarnished to a dull browngreen. From the look of it, one would have judged the watch to be a brass one that had lain for days on a sea-beach. Jaxon was bewildered, but I'll admit that my astonishment—if I did not show it—was even greater. From some little training in chemistry I could think of no reagent, even in the most upto-date laboratory, that had such an effect on gold. The incident set me thinking, and before I had got into the street I had discovered that the gold leaf, so plentifully used in the interior decoration of the bank premises, had tarnished much in the same way. I said nothing about this additional discovery to Jaxon. I kept the fact to myself, and left him looking round for polishing material.
As it chanced, the first person I met on Broadway was Dick Schuyler, who had been in the same flying squadron as myself during the European War. He was, and is still, a commander in the sea division of the Air Police, so I grabbed him to act as safe-conduct for me round Wall Street.
“What do you make of it, Jimmy?” he demanded straight off. “A scientific feller like you should have a theory.”
“I don't know a thing about it yet,” said I. “You cops should have more information than I have. Is it right that these other banks have been robbed?”
“The Subtreasury, the Trade, Dyers', National, and the Guaranty,” he said, making most of the mouthful. “There's a report, too, that the Post Office has been visited as well.” The extent of the affair was beginning to impress me. Dick Schuyler has a cheery, careless manner, but he is not given to speaking without the book, and this confirmation brought me to a realization of what the morning's outrage involved.
“But what were the police doing all the time?” I demanded.
“Sleeping, as far as I can make out,” he said dryly.
The details of the affair, as Dick told me them, were incredible. The first intimation that anything was wrong in the Wall Street district came when a policeman recovered consciousness to find himself lying on the sidewalk. He thought he had fainted or suddenly dropped into sleep, and in either case was afraid of losing his job, for they want neither sluggards nor heart cases on the force. He got to his feet, glad that he had not been discovered by his patrol, and he began to hurry along his beat. He had not gone far when he fell over the feet of somebody who was sprawled across the steps in a doorway, and he stooped over to investigate. He found it was his own inspector, and he had no sooner laid hands on him than the sleeper awoke. Dick did not go into details of what the cop said to the inspector, or vice versa, but it must have been mighty interesting. Anyhow, the pair joined forces and set off round the district.
Green Gold
THEY were half-dazed, the two of them, and to their badly working intelligences it seemed as if they had suddenly found themselves in a city of the dead. All along the sidewalks and in doorways, even in the middle of the streets, sleeping men were lying at intervals. Dick Schuyler wanted to bet me that there never had been as bewildered a pair of men in the history of the world as those two cops, but I would not take him.
It is difficult to bring things together in their right sequence. What I gather from the many accounts I got that morning is that suddenly the police headquarters became noisy with repeated telephone calls, as bank after bank reported it had been robbed. Squads of police were rushed into the area at once, but when they arrived the thing was over and the thieves had got clean away. I remember wondering what would have happened under the old system of direct alarms to police headquarters. But this system, of course, had been largely discarded after the scandal of 1930, when the police were proved to have been in collusion with the crooks who effected the big robbery of the Dyers' National. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened to the police if they had been rushed into the district during the unaccountable two hours.
The other four banks were in a like case to the National Metallurgical. For two hours in the morning the guards and watchmen had been asleep and could tell nothing. Something in the nature of oxyacetylene had been used to effect entrance to all the buildings concerned, and their strong-rooms had been cut open by the same means. The thieves had got away with an enormous haul while the district was fast asleep.
I got much of this information from Dick Schuyler as we were walking along, and I had the chance to confirm a lot of it first-hand. The neighbourhood now was filling rapidly, and automobiles and motorcycles were beginning to be frequent in the street. Newspaper men were everywhere, eagerly searching for information, but, beyond the one central inexplicable fact of the mysterious two hours, found little data for their writeups. One excited little reporter rushed up to Dick and myself, and danced round us, waving a notebook.
“Say!” he yelled. “What do you know about this, eh? Were you eye-witnesses?”
“As far as I can see,” Dick told him, “eye-witnesses are just what there aren't.”
But he shot a quick account of what he had heard to the little man, and advised him to get after the foot police and the watchmen of the banks. The little man wanted nothing so much as a reasonable theory to explain the success of the raid, but we wanted that just as much as he did, and he went off with an openly exhibited contempt for our lack of imagination.
The further we went, and the more information we acquired about the affair, the thicker grew the mystery of it. The central fact was this—and all else was relatively unimportant in the face of it: that for two hours of the morning, between three and five, the financial district of New York had been peopled by men who, whether doped or otherwise rendered unconscious, might to all purposes have been dead, for all they saw. There was no clue to the identity of the gang that had contrived to break into five of the greatest banks in the city and get away with a fortune in gold and easily negotiable scrip. I heard that a finger-print had been found in one of the banks. But I imagined it would need more than that to lead to the recovery of what was then reported to be a staggering loss.
I had a talk with one of the policemen who had been in the district during the lost hours. In a general way I got nothing that was fresh out of his account, but he was a big Irishman who made me laugh with the unconscious humour that ran through his conversation, and I spoke with him long enough to get quite friendly with him. I was leaving him, to turn back and see how my father was faring, when suddenly I remembered something.
“By the way,” I said to the big fellow, “do you happen to have about you anything made of gold—a watch or a trinket of any sort?”
He grinned sheepishly behind a big hand.
“I've a bit of a locket,” he said, “with a photy av the girl in ut. She makes me wear ut next me heart. Don't laugh, an' I'll show ut to ye—”
I gave him my promise not to laugh, and he produced the trinket from under his tunic. He was much more surprised than I was to find it tarnished to a dull brownish green.
IT WAS around quarter past eight o'clock when I got back to the National Metallurgical. I found it difficult to realize that only an hour had passed since I had landed with my father at the seaplane jetty on the west side of Battery Park, and I had a feeling that the time should have been close to noon at least, for the hour had been crammed with incident and impression.
A number of the bank executives had arrived, and the place already had a flustered air of activity. The chief accountant was with my father, and judged by the look of him that he was a very scared man. Apparently he and the president had been calculating the bank's losses, for as I came into the room the old man drew a firm line under two rows of figures he had written on a small piece of paper.
“A good haul, Risbridger,” my father was saying casually. “Two hundred and fifty-three thousand, five hundred dollars in gold. Two hundred and thirty-four thousand, seven hundred in securities. But God knows they didn't take all we had. You had better see about broadcasting the descriptions and numbers of the securities, and inform the police. If the thieves have not succeeded in getting out of the country, we may get a line on them, should they attempt to dispose of the scrip. See to this at once, will you?”
The white-faced official scurried away, glad to have something to occupy his mind, and my father turned to me.
I told him everything I had picked up, and he listened without comment until I had finished.
“M'm,” he said. “That's a queer thing about the gold tarnishing. What do you make of it, son?”
“I don't know quite what to make of it,” I told him. “My mind somehow connects it with whatever was used to dope the watchmen and the police. The stuff would have to be distributed in such a way that its fumes could be breathed. The whole affair has such unusual features, it might even prove that if we were to discover what had sent everyone to sleep, we might land on the thing that tarnished Jaxon's watch and the policeman's locket. I don't know of anything that has such an effect on gold, nor of anything capable of producing the anaesthesia. I'm inclined to think some sort of gas was used. The first difficulty we're up against is that none of the sufferers were conscious of even the slightest smell.”
“Whew!” my father whistled. “A new gas, eh? If you're right, Jimmy, we're up against a big thing. When a gang of crooks can put the whole of the Wall Street district to sleep and get away with it, can you prophesy where the game finds its limit?”
“It opens up limitless possibilities,” I agreed.
“There's no saying where this morning's work will end,” the old man mused. “As it stands, if the other banks have been as easily entered as we have, there's the makings of a fine old panic.”
“If there's going to be ructions, dad—don't you think you'd better meet them in comfort? What about a bath and breakfast?”
The old man surprised me by letting out a sudden little laugh, with a queer note in it, as if some hidden chord in his memory had been struck.
“You're like your mother, Jimmy,” he said, after a pause. “You have her fair hair and grey eyes, and when you said that—I could fancy it was she who spoke. You see, son, life was pretty full of ructions in the old days, and you said the very thing she would have said when trouble was brewing. You don't remember your mother?”
I shook my head. My mother died when I was an infant, and I had never created any definite picture of her, to a great extent, because my father seldom spoke of her. I expect it was that he missed her too much. She had been dead close on thirty-five years, but I could see, even then in his presidential room, how much she still meant to him. He looked at me queerly, and I have never seen him so softened either before or since.
“No,” he said slowly. “You were only a very little fellow when—”
He broke off and lifted his shoulders in a sigh.
“You're right,” he said. “Breakfast's the idea.”
I anticipated that by this time there would be a jam in the subways and on the street cars, and as I wanted him to have as little physical exertion as possible, I telephoned for an automobile. While we waited my father issued instructions for carrying on in his absence.
When the car came, we rode uptown through the rapidly filling streets to a quiet hotel where he would not be recognized, and we both had a bath and shave before breakfast. I was wishing now that I knew enough about banking to stand by during the crisis I felt was imminent; not that I fancied my father could not stand alone, but I think my wish came largely out of the new realization of how much I cared for the old man. I wanted to be of some assistance, but I did not know just how. I spoke to him about it as we were finishing breakfast.
“Look here, dad,” I said. “I want to stand by. I can be of no use to you on the banking side, but I could be a fairly good watch-dog. If I can do anything to keep trouble some people off you, or if I can run errands or attend to the commissariat—just say the word. I'll do anything I can.”
“I know that, son,” the old man smiled, “but I'm well supplied with watch-dogs and messengers, who know my ways. No. Listen. I'll give you better than that to do. My hands will be full of the complications that are bound to rise from this raid on the banks, and I won't have time for anything else. In that tarnishing of the gold idea you've hit on something that maybe will give you further ideas, and I'd like you to follow up your theory of the gas and see what it leads to. You're an engineer, and you'll attack the problem from a different angle from that of the average detective. You can have a free hand in the matter of expense.”
The old man's suggestion almost took my breath away, and I fancy my face got red. I must explain that while my father and myself had been good enough friends up to this, our way had lain very much apart. He was devoted to his banking business, and I was immersed in aeronautical research. There had been times when we did not meet for months and when we came together again it had simply been, “Hullo, Jimmy!” and “Hullo, dad!” — pretty much as if we had parted overnight. I knew all right what I thought of him. What he thought of me had been another story. That he had a good enough opinion of me to hand me a job of this sort, and give me the run of his purse with it, put me in such a way that I could only nod acceptance.
“Good boy,” said he. “Now here's another point. During the day you'll be free to conduct your investigations, but I shall want you to fly me into the country every evening. I'm not going to stop in town and have the telephone buzzing in my ear all night. I'll keep Hazeldene open and live there. Can you do it?”
“Do it!” I cried. “Why, dad, there's nothing I'd like better—and if at any time I should be called away on this job, you'll find Milliken a first-class man.”
“That's settled then. I take it you have something better in your shed than the old seaplane you used this morning?”
“You bet. There's my own Merlin. Three hundred kilometres and more an hour are nothing to her. I'll have her tuned up for you right away. I can get you from the Battery to Hazeldene well inside the half-hour.”
“Bully!” said the old man, and rose with a cigar going strong. “Now I must get back to the back, son.”
Some Powdered Glass
WE drove back to the Metallurgical through streets that seethed with excited humanity. Newsboys were running about, offending the car with unlawful and raucous yells, flourishing newsbills that smote the eyeballs with their flaming scarelines. One journal, apparently despairing of adjectives sufficiently lurid to describe the reported enormity of the raid on the banks, had printed a sheet containing nothing but one large exclamation mark. Broadway was Babel. At every other corner policemen were trying to move on the crowds that inevitably clustered round each fortunate with a newspaper, and so dense was the press at the lower end of Broadway that it took two mounted men nearly a quarter of an hour to drive a path for the car through the last hundred paces to the bank door.
Once we were inside, I immediately got through to my mechanic, Milliken, on the telephone, and told him to tune up the Merlin. Wise fellow that he is, he had anticipated the order, and could promise to have the plane ready in a couple of hours. Next I spoke to the housekeeper at Hazeldene and arranged for the place to be kept open for my father and myself. In the ordinary way I lived in a hut close to the hangar and workshops on the beach, only joining my father at Hazeldene when he went there for the week ends. He had been at the cottage on one of these visits when the news of the robbery had pulled him out of bed for our flight this Monday morning.
I was on the point of stepping out to make what investigations I could when my father called me into his room. He had come upon an old Eastern piece of gold money which he kept as a curiosity in one of the drawers of his desk. It was not of the ordinary disc shape, but was like two little beans stuck together crosswise and turned over each other. I had seen it before as a shining piece of particularly pure gold, but now it was sadly dulled to a colour with which I was becoming familiar.
“You had better keep that, Jimmy, my father said. “I expect you'd like to have a sample of the tarnishing.”
I was glad to have it, and I wrapped it in a scrap of tissue paper before placing it in an empty matchbox to keep it from being rubbed. I intended to have the tarnishing analyzed in the hope that the result would furnish some clue to the anaesthetic used by the crooks, for to my mind the crux of the whole affair lay in the mystery of the two lost hours. This was the thing I determined to follow up in the best way I could. I had no other notion of where to make a start.
When I reached the street, the crowd in front of the bank was thining before the manoeuvres of the police, and I waited in the doorway until there was room to move. In a little I was able to cross Broadway, and it was when I had reached the opposite sidewalk that a slight accident happened to me which was the means of furnishing another step in the development of my theories.
To avoid bumping into a fellow who was hurrying past on the sidewalk, I stepped short on the curb. My foot slipped and I came down on my hands. I felt my palms sting, as though I had landed on some sharp sand, but when I stood up to brush the stuff off, I saw that my skin was full of little splinters of glass. It was no conscious alertness that made me look down on the curb, but just the ordinary human foolishness that always makes a fellow turn to look when he has trodden on a banana skin. My interest was caught by a smear of powdered glass along the curb and in the gutter—like the result of breaking an electric bulb, only bigger. There was something about the pulverization and distribution of the stuff that made me look closer still. I was suddenly taken with a notion of what the stuff stood for, and I swept a few grains of the powder together and wrapped them in tissue paper, placing the tiny packet beside the coin in the match-box. My next idea was to have a look round the outside, at least, of the other banks.
I walked down Broadway to the Guaranty Trust and, acting on the idea that was simmering in my head, I scrutinized the sidewalks and the roadway round about. I half expected to come upon another of the smears I had discovered opposite the National Metallurgical, but was disappointed. There had been, however, a fairly dense crowd all down Broadway that morning, and I was not ready to dismiss the possibility that the same sort of smear had been in the street sure enough, until the trampling of many feet had dispersed it.
By the Subtreasury, at the corner of Pine Street and Nassau Street, I had better luck. Here again the height of the curb had saved the smear of powdered glass from being completely obliterated. I took a sample of this, too, and numbered the package in which I folded it.
Next I went on down Pine Street until I came to the Dyers' National, but this time, although I worked as closely and as carefully as I could, I found no reward for my search. Remained then the last of the raided banks, the Trade Bank, and I walked round to take up my investigations there.
Right in the middle of Broad Street where it joins Wall Street, I found another sprinkle of powdered glass. Passing feet had made it very faint, but luckily the morning had been dry, and the traces left were unmistakable. I reckoned now that I had reasonable grounds on which to work out my notion, and I contented myself with picking up what I could of the powder on a finger-tip to test its nature. It had the same character as my two samples.
A Pop Added
BY this time I had four ideas firmly fixed in my head, and could not be quit of them; that the crooks had used an anaesthetizing gas; that this gas probably had tarnished the gold; that the gas, in liquid form, had been held in glass containers; and that the smears of powder outside the three banks were what was left of the containers after the release of the gas had shattered them.
These were a weirdly fanciful lot of notions, I admit, but like the rest of those concerned, I was more absorbed by the idea of the mysterious sleep that had fallen on the district during those two dead hours, than by the magnitude of the robbery itself. It was all guess-work, and probably mad guess-work at that, but at the time guess-work was about all anyone had to start from.
In any case, I thought the coincidence that smears of pulverized glass should be outside three of the robbed banks sufficiently strange to be worth working on, and in pursuit of the ideas it gave birth to I went in search of the policeman of the tarnished locket.
I was afraid he would have gone off duty, but my luck held, and I came upon him practically on the same spot where I had parted with him earlier in the morning. He had just been relieved and was going home. I walked with him up Broadway in the direction of the National Metallurgical.
“There is a point on which I'd like to ask you a question or two, McGrath,” I said.
“Shoot !”
“Before you fell asleep or became unconscious this morning, did you hear anything of an explosion?”
He stopped dead in his tracks to stare at me.
“Faith—now you mintion ut,” he said slowly, “I believe I did hear a bit of a pop. Nothing to startle ye, mind—just a quiet little pop, like ye'd be hearin' when a child burst a paper bag.”
“Where were you when you heard this pop, as you call it ?”
“Let me see, now,” he mused. “I'd be standin' right foreninst th' Exchange when I heard ut.”
“You didn't hear more than one?”
“I might have. But, d'ye see, ut was the sort av noise that might be comin' from the uptown traffic, and not at all the noise that would swing ye round to see what ut was.”
“How long after hearing the noise would it be before you became unconscious?”
“Now ye've got me, for ut's a thing I can't tell ye,” the big fellow said. “I'm told that I was asleep for two hours—but, if ye ask me, I say ut was a bare five minutes from hearin' the pop until I woke up and found myself lyin' on the sidewalk.”
“After the noise, did you become conscious of any peculiar odour—even of the slightest?”
“No, divil a whiff av any sort,” he said positively—then with a twinkle, “unless maybe what was left behind from the big cigars av the millionaires.”
“That might make your eyes water, but would hardly send you to sleep,” said I. “Before you became unconscious, did you see any haze or mist coming up?”
“There was nothin' but maybe a kinda blueness in the Street—” he began, then broke off: “B' the holy piper!” he exclaimed. “Come to think av ut, ut was an odd kinda haze, too!—like nothin' so much as the way the letters on me watch would show in a dark corner, or like wan av thim old fashioned matches would be if ye was to spit on ut in the dark—but more spread about and thinned down.”
“Ah, phosphorescent !”
“I wouldn't be puttin' a name like that to ut, so I wouldn't,” he said carefully. “If ye understand me, ut was almost too faint to notice. All I say is the Street looked like ghosts might “
“Thank you, McGrath,” I told him. “You've given me just what I wanted to know.”
“Is ut a bit av detectin' you're after?” he asked me. “Faith, Mr. Boon, ye've got things out av me that none av thim—polis or private—had the since to remind me av. One of me mates was sayin' that there's been some queer on-goin's up at the Post Office. Have ye heard anythin' at all about ut, Mr. Boon?”
I had forgotten Dick Schuyler's casual reference to the Post Office and my interest was reawakened.
“Commander Schuyler said something about-it,”
I said to McGrath. “Was the Post Office gassed and robbed, too?”
“No. I wouldn't say that. I haven't got the rights av ut yet, but ut's just queer on-goin's that's rumoured.”
“Ut's a queer affair, so ut is,” he went on, “and the more ye think av ut, the queerer ut is. There's me locket, now. D'ye think I can get the polish back on the thing? Not wan bit av ut. Ut's all pitted an' dirty-lookin'. What the girl will say, Hivin knows.”
“If you don't mind letting me have it,” I volunteered, “I'll give you enough to buy another like it, and something for the girl as well. I'm interested in it.”
“Have ut, and welcome,” said McGrath. “I'd been thinkin' I'd better get a new wan, an' say nothin' to Norah about ut, for I wouldn't like her to see ut that dirty. I know the store where ut was bought. Let me get the photy av her out av ut, an' ut's yours.”
He handed over the damaged trinket, and I gave him two ten-dollar bills. He was mightily pleased, for with the twenty dollars he could buy half a dozen lockets of the same kind, and when I turned into the bank he was grinning broadly as he went off to shoulder his way up the street. I added the locket to my tissue-wrapped trophies.
My next concern was to interview Jaxon and his five men again. Normally they would have left the bank by this hour, but they were still hanging around in some faint hope of cheering news. I collected the six of them in a spare room, and questioned them along the same lines as I had used with McGrath. They all reiterated their former statement that there had been no odour, but three of them, including Jaxon, recalled having heard a faint pop before dropping off to sleep, and their descriptions of the noise were, on the whole, fairly close to that given me by the policeman. Four of them, also including Jaxon, now positively remembered a faint luminosity, and the other two thought they did.
Jimmy Takes Counsel
I NOW took my exhibits, as the police would call them, and my theory uptown to a friend of mine who has a great reputation in chemistry and physics, a clever little fellow called Dan Lamont, so well off that he can afford to have a first-class laboratory, and keep a big staff of assistants working on valuable but unremunerative research. He is a perfect little wizard, and many a time I had gone to him to be pulled out when the physics side of my work had me bogged.
“Hullo, Jimmy !” he said, as soon as he saw me.
“What's the trouble this time? Won't the coefficients come unstuck from the dihedrals, or is it that the helicopter still refuses to copt?”
“You're wasted as a physicist, Dan,” I told him. “You ought to go into vaudeville as the Unfunniest Back-chat Comedian Alive. Haven't you heard about the robbery?”
“I'll bite—and then you can say your smart answer,” he grinned. “What robbery?”
There are days when Dan doesn't see a daily journal, and I guessed from his readiness to chaff that he had not heard about the banks. I told him.
As I expected, he at once showed the liveliest interest.
“Well, Jimmy!” he exclaimed. “What do you know about that? Most interesting; Christopher Columbus and the hard-boiled egg! Are you telling me that Wall Street was put to sleep for two hours while a gang of crooks helped themselves?”
“That's just what I do tell you.”
“Phew!” He stood up and stared at me. Then he took out his loose change and rattled it in his cupped hands—a trick he has when very excited.
“What makes you think the crooks used gas?” he demanded.
“I can think of no other way in which they could dope the district,” I said. “Can you?”
“They might have fixed the water supply,” he said softly. “No. Water isn't popular enough with the police and the watchmen to make that method effective. But, gas!”
“What's your kick at the gas theory, Dan?”
“Haven't you said that the people who went to sleep smelled no odour?”
“That's right. Not a thing.”
“Then there isn't any gaseous anaesthetic known could do it,” said Dan. “Let's see. The absence of odour rules out chloroform and ether straight off. Ethyl chloride—no—too smelly—and too lethal. You say nobody's dead?”
“Not a soul so far.”
“Queer, queer! Nitrous oxide has no smell, but its effects last barely a minute. There may be a gas could do it, Jimmy, but I've never heard of it. What makes you so keen on the gas idea, anyhow?”
I told him about the powdered glass, and showed it to him. Then I brought out the locket and my father's gold coin. Dan's excitement grew.
“This is mighty interesting, Jimmy—mighty interesting,” he purred. “I never heard of anything to tarnish gold in this way. Chlorine?—chlor—Hey?” he broke off as he examined McGrath's locket. “Who told you this was gold?”
“It is gold,” I insisted.
“Looks more like copper to me.”
“Oh, shucks, Dan! It probably has a large percentage of copper in the alloy.”
I brought forward the instance of Jaxon's watch, but he took little notice of what I said. He was off on some scientific daydream.
“This coin, too,” he brooded. “At first sight I'd say it was copper.”
“That's where you fall down, young fellow,” I said. “That coin was kept by my father as being a remarkably pure piece of gold. He had it tested.”
“May be so, my dear Jimmy—may be so,” he said absently. “I'll tell you what. I'll analyze this tarnishing. Leave the locket and coin with me. They look to me to be impure alloys of copper—both of them. Most interesting! I can think of nothing to affect gold so.”
“No more can I, Dan,” I said, “but I can think of none more likely to find out than yourself. When can I come back?”
“Eh? Oh—ah—yes! Come back, eh? Oh, sometime this afternoon,” he muttered, his gaze fixed on the coin and locket. “Gas, eh? Must think about it. Good fellow, Jimmy—to give me these. A new thing—mighty interesting. Good-bye, old man—”
He wrung my hand and made a bee line for his laboratory, with the coin and locket held out in front of him in his cupped palms. I chuckled to think I had made Dan Lamont so interested, for I knew that the chemistry side of any investigations I wanted to make was in the most skillful hands in New York. I had enlisted the services of a powerful ally.
An Official Whispers
THE next thing I had to do was to get the Sieve back to Long Island and see how Milliken was getting on with the Merlin, but on the way down to the jetty I stopped to look in at the Post Office. There was a jam about the place, and the counters were crowded up. I wrote the name of the bank on one of the cards under my own name—-which is the same as my father's—and handed the pasteboard to a messenger.
“Are you Mr. Boon?” he asked suspiciously. “I am,” said I.
“Who is it you want to see?” he demanded.
“Anybody in authority who has a minute to spare—”
“Will Mr. Glover do?”
“Fine,” I said. “Lead the way to Mr. Glover.”
He conducted me along a passage into a nest of private rooms and tapped at a door.
“Wait here” he said, and went into the room. He was out in a second.
“Mr. Glover will see you.”
A bald-headed man at a desk in the centre of the room looked up with an ingratiating smile as I came in, but when he saw me his grin froze, and he rose in angry surprise from his chair.
“What trick is this?” he demanded. “You are not Mr. Boon, sir! You are an impostor, sir—an impostor! Let me inform you that I am familiar with the appearance of the president of the National Metallurgical! I am an acquaintance of Mr. Boon!”
“That's fine,” said I. “Allow me to introduce to you his son, James Vandersluyt Boon, whose card you have in your hand.”
He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, then smoothed down, and held out his hand. I wondered at the change in his reception of me, but next moment it was explained.
“Of course, of course !” he said heartily. “I might have known!” He waved a hand at the flying-kit I still was wearing. “You are the young conqueror of the air, our modern Icarus—though I trust not doomed to the same fate. I trust not,” said the pompous ass. “Well, Mr. Boon, and what can I do for you?”
I told him pretty snappily that I wanted a line on what had happened in the Post Office that morning, explaining that I was investigating everything that seemed to have any connection with the robbery of the banks.
Mr. Glover looked hurriedly around the room, as if he were afraid somebody might be lurking in a corner. He dropped his voice mysteriously.
“This is, of course, strictly entre nous,” he said. “I can say nothing officially, you understand? It must go no further?”
I said I quite understand—and found myself whispering like a fool when I said it.
“Very well, then,” said he. “I will tell you, Mr. Boon. A very strange thing happened here this morning. Five little packages, extremely heavy for their size, were dropped into the local collection box during the night or in the early hours. The box was cleared at seven, Mr. Boon, and it was then that they were found. They would have escaped notice, I do not doubt, had it not been for the peculiar circumstance that they were all without the requisite stamps—unstamped, Mr. Boon! The sorter put them aside, and when he came to deal with them later, he found that there were also five bulky envelopes, similarly without stamps. Now, here is a curious fact, Mr. Boon”—with another apprehensive glance about the room—“both the envelopes and the packages were all addressed to important hospitals and research institutions in the city, an envelope and a package to each of five institutions!”
He leaned back to see the effect on me of this thrilling revelation.
“You amaze me, Mr. Glover,” said I. “Certainly a peculiar and suspicious circumstance.”
“Wasn't it!” Mr. Glover agreed. “The packages were all alike, and appeared to consist of heavy little boxes wrapped in corrugated cardboard and brown paper. Well, now. Naturally the Office was agog with the news of dastardly outrages in Wall Street, and the sorter somehow connected these envelopes and packages with the crime, Mr. Boon. He summoned his immediate chief, and the result of their colloquy was that packages and envelopes were held over for investigation by our police department.”
“Have they been opened yet?” I asked.
Mr. Glover looked pained at my lack of finesse.
“Not officially, Mr. Boon—not officially. Special authority is needed for that.” He dropped his voice to a whisper more confidential than ever. “But I can tell you—quite unofficially, of course—that the square packages contained black boxes of wood, inside which were what at first sight appeared to be lumps of solid lead. Closer investigation, however, proved these last to be lead cases with extremely thick sides.”
“What was in the lead cases?”
Mr. Glover shook his head.
“I cannot say,” he said ponderously. “But as I am inclined to think some outrage is contemplated, I should say—explosives! But, as you may know there is a special department of the Post Office primarily concerned with the handling of such contingencies, and at the moment, Mr. Boon, an investigation is going forward—behind closed doors!”
“You don't know what was in the envelopes?”
Once more Mr. Glover was pained at my bluntness.
“No. That I cannot tell,” he said severely. “You now have all the information I can lay at your disposal, Mr. Boon—and that, sir, I beg you to remember, is quite unofficial—and sacrosanct. It must not be bruited abroad!”
I admit that I saw little ground for connecting this mystery with the robberies round Wall Street, nor any need for secrecy. I was inclined to think Mr. Glover's love for the mysterious had led him into a fantastic interpretation of some silly joke on the institutions, but I thanked him with every appearance of being impressed, and took a speedy leave of him. I was not a little annoyed with myself for having wasted my time on the pedantic fool. But subsequent events, since made public, were to show me that Glover, for all his absurd pomposity, had got nearer the truth than I imagined, and that I had underestimated what was to prove one of the most surprising of a chain of happenings that ultimately were to baffle the whole world. Yet, as I say, at the time I thought the thing some ill-conceived joke on the institutions, or perhaps the result of an error on the part of some manufacturer's dispatch clerk, and I took little stock of it. Without pausing to look into the bank, I made for the seaplane jetty and the Sieve.
Round the landing stage now, in addition to the bronze-painted machines of the police, a number of privately owned boats were moored. Luxuriously appointed craft, with their closed cabins and the silk or brocade curtains on their windows, they made the old Sieve look more disreputable than ever; but when I noticed that one or two of these swell conveyances belonged to bank presidents like my father, I smiled to think that my old tub, like a mongrel pup to a dog-fight, had been first on the scene of action. And as I set the old girl skimming down the Bay, I smiled still more when I thought how ornamental all that swagger fleet would look, once I got back in its midst with my lovely silver Merlin.
She not only had the whole bunch beaten for sheer good looks, but—in the matter of speed—she was to the best of them what the hawk is to the peacock.
THE cluster of buildings close to Gardiner Bay, where we did our construction and experimenting, was beginning to find definition on the white margin of the sea, when there dropped from the clouds in front and above the Sieve a beautiful silver shape. It was the Merlin which Milliken had out for a trial flight.
Until that moment I had never seen her in the air. She was my design and had been built in the sheds on the beach under my supervision. Her tests had all been carried out at my hands, and she had never been in the air without me. Milliken had often handled her, but always with myself at his elbow. Until now he had not taken her up on a solo spin.
To see her so, as an outsider would, was a queer experience for me. I felt pretty much as a dramatist might if he saw a play of his acted for the first time. I wish I could write down just what that moment meant to me, but I can't. The clean look of the Merlin gave me a thrill. I wanted to fly her myself and be able, at the same time, to watch her from a distance.
It was something of a surprise to me to see her up in the hands of Milliken, though I couldn't say that he had exceeded his privilege. It was quite a natural thing for him to do, considering the way I trusted him. But even while I was admitting that he handled her splendidly, a sort of jealousy had hold of me for a minute or two. He passed me, and I signaled half angrily that I would land first.
The graceful silver shape swept dizzily over my bows, turned banking into a sideways loop round me, and righted again to come about after the clumsy oldSieve like a great, slim-winged bird. No, I'm wrong. There isn't a bird that could repeat the manoeuvre, and I had thought, until I saw Milliken do it, that only the Merlin and myself had the knack, but the mechanic had copied my stunt.
Stupidly annoyed, I planed down for the shore and flattened out to taxi up to the jetty. The mechanics ran out and brought the old seaplane to rest in the shed, and I disembarked to watch Milliken bring in the Merlin. She came down perfectly in the hovering flight that had been designed into her, and landed on the water so like some great seagull that the expectation was she would next fold her wings. It was gracefully done and by the time Millikenstepped ashore my jealousy and irritation were swept from me by a feeling of gratitude.
“What's she like, Milliken?” I asked.
“Oh, sir! Oh, sir!” he cried, ablaze with delight. “She's a dream! There's nothing to touch her on sea or land—and we made her, sir—we made her!”
Now Milliken, as a rule, is prone neither to call other men “sir,” nor to wax enthusiastic, and his excitement surprised me.
“You handled her well,” I said casually. “You've got the hang of that side loop all right.”
“Oh, that!” said Milliken. “Why, do you know, a baby could handle her. She's a credit to you, Mr. Boon—it's all in the design.”
This from Milliken was by way of an amende honorable. When I first introduced him to the design of the Merlin, and showed him the wing modifications that were meant to achieve the steep hovering which now distinguished her, he had thought the notion impossible. The idea had evolved from stalling, and he then had the old fixed idea that the only safe way of landing was to plane down on a thin angle and flatten. The idea of perfecting a continuous stalling, in which the machine got into neither tail nor nose dive, nor even into a spin, but simply floated to earth as a feather might, seemed mad to him. The principle is now a commonplace in aeronautics, and how Milliken and I arrived at it, very nearly at the cost of our lives, has little to do with the story I have to tell. I mention Milliken's apology to give just what sidelight it may on the man's character, for he wants some explaining.
If I know anything about Milliken, he will never bother to read these pages, even if he is told he comes into them—Shakespeare and real belles lettres are more in his way than this sort of production—so I may say what I like about him. In any case, I won't say anything that I wouldn't tell him to his own ugly old face if the need arose.
I have never met a man with as great a passion so carefully hidden as Milliken and his love for air machines, nor anybody with half his practical experience and skill. He has the strongest hands and the gentlest. No fractious nut is too firmly fixed for his spanner, and no adjustment too delicate for his fingers, and I am open to bet that he has never stripped a screw in his life. He looks about as broad as he is long—which, since he is little over five feet in height, is perhaps not saying such a lot—and with the most equitable of tempers the habitual expression of his face is one of untamed ferocity. If Milliken had wanted to, he could have cleared the workshops in quick time, and I have seen him rise under three big men, during a rag, and carry them off like so many feather pillows. Like most good men of their hands, he can control his fists. I take it he knows too well the power in them and behind them to use them unworthily.
Milliken is the sort of mechanic who always has about him a lump of cotton waste, and as we inspected the Merlin that day—I suppose for about the thousandth time—he was rubbing the frosted aluminum of the fuselage and of the shuttered wings, or was polishing up the glass of the portholes. It was as if he could not get his darling clean enough, for he fussed about the machine like a mother over a spoiled child.
I am not going to say that the Merlin did not deserve all his affection. From the gleaming 1,000 h.p. radial engine, weighing just about half as many kilograms, to her rudder, and from wing-tip to wing-tip, she was all frosted aluminum, save only for a thin line of gentian blue that ran along her sides to spread out and cover her rear plane. Through the portholes and windows of the control cabin, a glimpse could be had of the sparrow's-egg blue that decorated her interior, of the shining nickel of the dials and controls. She looked the littlest thing. Yet at a pinch she could carry a dozen and a half fighting men. She seemed the most innocent and peaceable of machines, but her speed and her power of rapid manoeuvre made her just about the deadliest thing that ever took the air.
We could take off the whole top of the cabin above the blue line and fit a fighting top, and round the inside of the fusilage were set stanchions for sixguns. Two of these guns, the fore and aft, were belt-guns firing half-kiloshells, the forward one synchronized with and firing between the propeller blades. Beneath were hatches for bomb-dropping and torpedo release.
Of course, at the moment I'm writing of, when Milliken and I were standing byher on the jetty, all the fighting kit of the Merlin was unshipped. I had every permit from the government, but as the law forbade any private machine to carry armament and I did not want any inspectors dodging around until she was quite ready, her fighting capacity still remained secret. I was putting off the time when I would have to say she was perfect and would have to offer the design to the U. S. government, so she remained a peaceable machine ostensibly built for pleasure, and her fighting kit lay oiled and ready in the strong-room of the workshops.
The Bird Flies
AS I watched Milliken dance round his pet, I began to have an absurd feeling of guilt about taking her away. The mechanic was sure to be aggrieved, and I wondered how I was going to break the news to him. He stepped back and gazed at the machine with a rapt expression.
“Don't you think,” he said slowly, “that the band round her could be widened, Mr. Boon? I don't mean much, Ju-u-st a morsel. Ju-u-st about a sixteenth of an inch either side, to show up her lines prettier ?”
“I had a notion of widening the band considerably,” said I solemnly, to string him a bit, “about four inches altogether. Then I thought of bringing the blue right round the engine boss, and stenciling a wreath of emerald-green leaves round her nose, bringing the design right round with the band. Then perhaps a row of vermilion dots either side of the blue strip would brighten her up—”
He was gazing at me with his jaw dropped.
“Huh!” he said contemptuously. “Why don't you finish her off like a circus wagon and be done with it? Want to make her look like a swing-boat at a fair—-?”
He broke off and grinned.
“You got me that time,” he admitted.
“Looks like it,” said I. “You and your 'ju-u-st a morsel !' Come up to the office, Milliken. I want to talk to you.”
When I had finished telling him of the robbery and of my plans, he put a hand on each knee and scowled at me fiercely.
“Do you mean to tell me you're giving up your work here to go crook-hunting?” he demanded.
“You've said it,” I replied. “I've got to stand by the old man in the best way I can, Milliken. He's up against a big thing.”
He thought for a minute.
“Well,” he said slowly. “I don't know that I blame you. Your father's worth all you can do. But turning the Merlin into a private limousine—huh!”
“I have to give him the best I've got, don't you see?”
“Why don't you recondition the J. V. B. 7?” he asked. “She's quite a good bus yet, up to about three hundred kilometres per, and more of a passenger machine than the Merlin—plenty quick enough for your dad's purpose, I'd say. It'd be a shame to use the Merlin. You don't want everybody down at Battery Park swarming over the old girl, do you?”
“Wouldn't do them much good if they did,” said I, “but you're right. I'd rather they didn't all the same. I tell you what, Milliken. I'll take you with me to the Battery and you can fly the Merlin back. Then I'll phone you in the late afternoon and tell you when to come and pick my father and me up in the evening. Meantime, you can be putting the engine back into theSeven, and getting her into order. And, let me see—who is there among the men who could handle her for my father if you and I were otherwise occupied?”
“Young Didcot could. He has his ticket, and knows the Seven. He's a good pilot—only, a bit careful.”
“Didcot, of course,” I agreed, for he was a pupil of my own. “I like the careful streak in him, especially as it doesn't come from concern for his own skin. Well, that's the idea. We'll have a bite of lunch, Milliken, and then we'll get back to the Battery as quick as we can.”
Soon after noon Milliken and myself boarded the Merlin and set off for New York. The silencer was on, and before we had been in the air a couple of minutes she was nipping along quietly at three hundred and eighty.
“Let her out, Mr. Boon!” Milliken, the tempter, whispered in my ear. “Open the cut-out and let her rip!”
I pulled back the cut-out lever—and the air suddenly was hideous with noise. I opened the throttle carefully.
Breathless, we watched the speed dial. The pointer travelled in tiny jerks up the scale: three- eighty-five—six, seven, eight, nine—three-ninety! Gradually, steadily, and the roar of the engine now a screaming, rising note, the pointer crawled round the dial.
A quick look at Milliken, who was sitting in the toggled seat behind me, showed me his ugly old mug streaming with perspiration. His gaze was fixed on the speed dial, and his lips were moving. For myself, my jaws were clenched enough to hurt. Round, round went the pointer: Four-eighty-five—six, seven—back to six—seven, eight—eight—a little more throttle—nine, nine—four-ninety! Creeping, jerking, the pointer travelled—five hundred!
That was the extent of the dial. I had a curious fear that to open the throttle any more would be to burst something. The dial said five hundred, and that was the limit of endurance. I couldn't stand any more and I throttled down. The pointer went back quickly—and I whipped in the cut-out.
Milliken saw the movement, and his lips went quicker. But I could not hear him. My ears were still filled with the roar. The silence was appalling. I tried to speak, but could not hear myself. Then, gradually the sound of a voice came to me as from a great distance.
“Hell !—I knew she would! Heaven!—I knew she would!” it came. “By the holy old keeno, Methuselah, there's nothing to touch her. She's a daisy and a duck! Why'n hell can't they make six- hundred dials? You peach—oh, you little bird! Oh, boy!”
It was Milliken, the normally silent, unpacking his heart of words!
Eighteen minutes after leaving Gardiner Bay we were tying up at the Battery seaplane jetty, I had to shake Milliken to make him realize we were there.
“Wake up, Milliken! We're there!”
“Yes, yes. I know.” He cast a look of scorn at the fleet of machines round the jetty. “Look at them!” he cried. “Just you look at the pack of baby carriages! Oh, you bird!” he apostrophized the Merlin.
“Bird be damned!” said I. “There isn't a thing on land or sea that's like her!”
“Take her back, Milliken,” I told him, “before the rubbernecks get to prying—but don't for the life of you let her touch more than three-fifty at the very most. Go over her carefully. She may have strained something.”
I watched him take her out, and followed her until she was lost in the clouds. Then I turned and walked up to Broadway. It may be imagined that I was in high feather, for the Merlin had made the latest speed record look silly by an extra eighty kilometres an hour, and I knew very well that she had not been anything like full out. Given that amazing speed, her power of quick and easy descent her manoeuverability, and her quick climb, I had every reason to think my machine was a world- beater.
A feeling of great exhilaration possessed me as I walked up Broadway. My mind worked at amazing speed, and I found myself gathering impressions of the things around me quicker than I had ever picked them up before. The traffic appeared to crawl, and although I was whacking along as quickly as my legs would let me, I seemed to be travelling at a snail's pace. It was an uncanny feeling, I may tell you.
Five Calculations
MY father, when I got to him, had an astonishing piece of news.
“The stolen securities have been found !” he said right away.
“What! Where?”
“In the Post Office. The lot of them, from all five banks, in envelopes addressed to various hospitals and institutions—”
“Good heavens?” I yelled. “Then that ass Glover was right!”
“What's that?” my father asked in a bewildered sort of way. “Glover? Who's Glover?”
I told him of the interview with the Post Office official.
“It's a mighty queer affair, Jimmy,” he said, “and a mighty queer gang of crooks. They got away with a couple of million in securities—all of which have been recovered at the Post Office. In gold they've got away with about two and a half million—”
“If you get the scrip back, what's your total loss?”
“Two hundred and fifty-three thousand odd dollars in gold. It's a tidy sum, but in itself could not affect a bank like ours seriously. The danger is in the rumours that all our gold was taken and in the loss of public confidence.There might be a scare, and a run on the banks.”
“No sign of that yet?”
“Not so far, but the news hasn't got into the country yet,” said my father. “There's something of a panic in Wall Street already. The markets have all gone bluey.”
“I hope you're wrong in your prophecy, dad.”
“I hope I am,” he said calmly. “But the cheap press is working up a fine scare. A lot of harm will be done if they keep on with it. You'd think the facts amazing enough without distortion, but some of these newspaper fellows have let their imaginations run riot.”
A new point came to my mind.
“Two and a half million in gold, dad,” I asked him, “what would that weigh?”
“Eh, what's that? Let me see now.” He figured for a minute on a sheet of paper. “Over three tons, I make it.”
“Bother your old scale of weights,” I laughed.
“What's that in kilos?” ***
“You'd better figure it for yourself,” the old man said grumpily. “I've just worked the thing out from ounces troy to avoirdupois.”
“My word,” said I presently. “That's over three thousand kilos—three, nought, four, eight—to be exact. Say a man can heft twenty-five kilos at a time. That makes a hundred and twenty-two journeys to remove the stuff.”
“Trying to work out the composition of the gang ?”
“That's the notion. How long would you say it would take a man to carry twenty-five kilos from the strong-room to the front door?”
“How much is twenty-five kilos?”
“Fifty-five pounds, old scale—as near as doesn't matter,” said I.
“That's a pretty good rough guess for an ingot of gold,” the old man said. “Let me see now! Up the stairs—round-swing door—better make it three minutes for the double journey.”
“A hundred and twenty-two journeys of three minutes each makes it six hours six minutes to remove the stuff—that is, given that the other banks average the same for carrying distance. Even with old-fashioned oxyacetylene plant—and it seems to me something better was used—they could get into the banks and vaults in about fifteen minutes, but to cover any difficulties, as for instance the bursting of the internal compartments of the strongroom and such, let's say twenty minutes altogether. Five banks at twenty minutes each adds one hundred minutes to the total, and brings us up to eight hours working time.”
My father scratched his head at this.
“It was all done inside two hours,” he protested.
“Yes, I know,” said I, “but eight hours has to be distributed among a certain number of men. Four men could handle the work in two hours, were it not for the cumulated hundred minutes that must have been spent in breaking into the banks one after the other—supposing they had only one oxyacetylene plant. Let's say five men for a start and see how long they'd take to do the trick. Have you the actual figures of the gold taken from each bank ?”
He handed me a list. On a basis of journeys of three minutes each, adding twenty minutes for the breaking-in in each case, I worked out the bare time that five would need to handle the contract:
Nat. Met................... $ 253, 500 or 13 journeys........................... 28 minutes
Guaranty T. ............. 360, 250 ” 18 ”............................ 31 “
Subtreas. .................. 1, 056, 000 ” 52 ”............................ 52 “
Dyers' Nat. ............... 450, 100 ” 23 ”............................ 35 “
Trade Bank ............... 480, 250 ” 24 ”............................. 36 “
“Then five men with only one cutting plant couldn't do it?” said myfather.
“No, nor could ten men with only one plant do it inside the two hours. Ten men with two acetylene sets could, though. But fifteen men with three sets could do it better. One squad for this bank and the Guaranty, another for the Subtreasury, and a third for the Dyers' and the Trade.”
“M'm,” the old man murmured. “Well, how do you think they worked it?”
“The thing that stops our theorizing right off is the anaesthetic that was used. What puzzles me is that the thing is possible with poison gas, and that no crooks have hit on the dodge before. But say that some one has discovered a new general anaesthetizing gas leaving no ill effects. A big four-thousand-kilo truck— three and a half tons, dad— comes down Broadway, drops a gas bomb and five men in gas masks with a cutting plant at this bank. It drops another bomb by the Guaranty Trust. Goes on to the Subtreasury, where it drops another bomb and another five men. It drops a fourth bomb at the Dyers' and goes on to the Trade, where the last gang and bomb are dropped. It waits until the Subtreasury is cleared, then it picks up the stuff from theTrade and Dyers', Guaranty, National Metallurgical, with the men, then goes onto the Post Office and drops the securities in the box.”
“You think that's the way of it, do you?” said my father. “It sounds reasonable enough, especially as we know the district was not properly surrounded by the police until the two hours were over—”
“That's the point,” said I. “They might have used three trucks, or four—or even five. The thing must have been organized to go like clockwork in any case. If I were the police I'd be searching every garage in the city. The brain that organized the coup would see at once that to take the stuff into the country would be to extend the time in which they'd be in danger of capture red-handed on the open road.”
“It's a notion,” said the old man. “I'll phone it to the detective staff right off.”
“By the way,” I asked, “has anything come out about the boxes found at the Post Office?”
“Not a thing, so far. I haven't heard anything.”
“Then I'll go uptown and see if Dan Lamont has made anything out of the gold tarnishing. What time will you be ready to start for Hazeldene?”
“Make it seven o'clock.”
I left him at the telephone, and in passing out dictated a telegram to Milliken asking him to be at the Battery at seven.
The newsboys were still busy about the streets and were doing an enormous trade. I bought several of the staider journals before calling up an automobile to take me to Dan Lamont's. The first one I opened in the car had a piece of information that, if true, knocked the bottom out of my theory of the trucks straight away. It appeared from the accounts given by several individuals who had been driving automobiles in the smitten district that when the drivers became unconscious the engines of their vehicles had stopped. One man, who had been driving an electric truck, had switched off the power just as soon as he felt himself go faint.
To my mind the fact about the gasoline-driven cars strongly confirmed my idea of a gas. I imagined then that only some agent present in the air could have affected all the automobiles round Wall Street in the same way, and I was chagrined to see that the one vehicle driven by electricity in the district at the time was ruled out as evidence by the fact that its driver had stopped it himself. The street cars were of no value in this regard, because of their self-stopping devices. What would have happened to the truck if the driver had fallen asleep before he could switch off the power? I was inclined to think that only a wall or something of the sort would have stopped that truck, and that it would have come to a smash.
If my idea of a gas was right—and I could see no other explanation for the mysterious sleep or for the stopping of the internal-combustion engines of the automobiles—my notion that the thieves had used trucks for their coup was useless. There was the possibility, however, that knowing the effects of their gas on engines using the air to carburet the gasoline, the thieves either used electric lorries or had some specially arranged engines using compressed air. Such was my fantastic theory, based on a very crude mistake which with all my training I should have avoided. I ought to have had more sense.
A Dramatic Story
IT WAS beginning to be difficult to keep track of all the threads that were woven into the mystery, and I'll confess that right there in the automobile I was in something of a panic when I thought of the job I had taken on. Every new point that came up deepened the obscurity in which the whole affair was wrapped, and I was entirely in sympathy with one of the newspaper men whose business it was to write up the robbery. This fellow attributed the whole thing to a master criminal:
THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!
The Sleeping City.
BIGGEST BURGLARY IN HISTORY BAFFLES THE BULLS!
Master Mind Behind the Wall Street Mystery?
The imagination is staggered by the possibilities opened up by this morning's outrage on the five banks. If by wiping out the consciousness of the denizens of the Business Center of a Great City for two hours a gang of criminals can clean that area of all its movable wealth (for the loss was vastly exaggerated) who can foretell where such operations will stop? Millions of dollars have been lost in the robbery. Five of the most important banks in the country have been crippled. The criminal no longer is satisfied with guerilla raids on the law-abiding world. He has declared War!
Organized efficiency is the keynote of this startling coup. In the execution of their fell purpose the gang of criminals have not wasted a single movement. The attack was made with the precision that indicates a leader of genius. Behind it is the brain of a master crook, a Napoleon of Crime. The mind that could conceive the plan of doping a whole district by mysterious means and so organize the manoeuvres of his subordinates is not the mind of the ordinary denizen or the Underworld. It is the mind of a Warped Genius.
To connote the evidence is a matter of difficulty for there is no evidence to connote. The mind of the master crook has seen to that.
The writer goes on for half a column and succeeds in telling how bewildered heis. Then he draws a dramatic picture of the scene, as he imagines it, duringthe two hours:
...It is like a City of the Dead. About the silent streets recumbent forms of sleeping men are huddled in the doorways or are spread across the sidewalks. Here and there, with his useless club beside him, lies the blue-coated guardian of the peace. A faint gleam of white from another inert figure shows where the clubman has been overcome stricken down by the mysterious sleep that has fallen like death upon the idle and the occupied alike. Automobiles with their brilliant headlights throwing the level beams insisted upon by law are drawn up in the roadways and seem to carry cargoes of dead men. It is as though some intangible power had stopped all movement with the wave of a magic wand. From the elevated railway on Sixth comes the roar and hum of a passing train....
That was a point I had missed—and what about the subways?
. . . and from pleasure districts uptown is heard the quiet murmur of the traffic, the subdued echoes of moving people. Except for these, the silence is the silence of Death.
Suddenly under the pillared mass of a great building, a pinpoint of light emerges and it grows into a blinding glare. Oxyacetylene! It lights up a cluster of masked men and flashes off their goggles of blue glass. With unhurrying speed they do their work and in their unconcern cast no glance at the huddled forms around them....
There's a lot more like that, before he begins to tell of the first glimmer of dawn, in which shadowy companies assemble and break up, man by man, each going his own way—I suppose with twenty-five kilos of gold apiece! Well, I had not thought of a perfect army of crooks to manhandle the stuff. He finishes up on a great note, like an old-time “movie” subtitle:
And the Mind that conceived all this, the Arch-crook, the Master Criminal, brooded the while over the conquered City. For the thousandth time, maybe, he connoted his plan of campaign and smiled to think that it could not fail. The whole of civilized America lay at his mercy and he had the power, plus the will, to bring ruin and chaos to its prosperous centers. The wealth of the nation was his for the grasping.
Malign this personality must be, but is it the motive power of a new anarchistic movement against established order? Is it by any chance the Master Mind behind a recrudescence of the Idea we used to know as Bolshevism? Until the identity of this Napoleon of Crime is established, until he is immured in our strongest prison, he with his secret and mysterious weapons, has the wealth of the Nation at his Mercy!
If this Master Mind is to be beaten only a Master Mind can do it and we beg leave to doubt if the present Chief of Police, the spineless and supine Conrad Dickermann, fits the Bill!
With all my own theories gone astray I was, as I say, quite in sympathy with this writer in his bewilderment. What sort of crooks were they who were capable of relinquishing two million dollars in negotiable securities? It is true that there would have been some difficulty in disposing of the scrip, in the face of the broadcasting by radio of the descriptions, but the thing was not impossible. The newspaper man was right when he said that the robbery was a masterpiece of organization, for in whatever way it was effected, there must have been the slickest co-ordination between the members of the gang. Nor was he far wrong in attributing the organization to a “Master Mind.” Something of the kind was behind it all. Where neither he nor his fellows were at all helpful was in suggesting a reasonable explanation of the anaesthesia.
Philanthropy Abroad
I WAS hoping that Dan Lamont would perhaps have come on something that would help to explain the mystery, for I was certain that if any scientist in America was better equipped than Dan for making the discovery, he was so obscure as to be useless. Dan is a top-notcher.
I found the little chap in a great state of excitement, and as soon as he saw me he pulled out his loose change and began to rattle it in his cupped hands like mad.
“You've found the thing that tarnished the gold !” I exclaimed.
“No,” he said.
“Then you've hit on the dope that was used?”
“No.”
“Then what the devil's all the excitement about Dan?”
“Jimmy,” he said solemnly, “a wonderful thing has happened. At this moment there is in New York more radium bromide than was ever known to exist in the whole world!”
“Well, what about it?”
“What about it! What a phlegmatic ass you are, Jimmy! Don't you realize what it means?”
“No,” said I, merely to egg him on.
“It means that experiments in radio-activity, in physics, in therapeutics, can be carried on on a scale undreamt of up to now. It is immense! Great Christopher and the hard-boiled egg! Do you know what it means in money alone—the value of the stuff?”
“Thousands, I suppose?”
“Don't be a fat-head, Jimmy. It means millions, millions! Radium worth several millions of dollars was sent to five of the scientific and surgical institutes in the city this morning.”
It came to me in a flash.
“In square black boxes, unstamped through the Post Office!” I yelled.
“Yes,” cried Dan. “How did you know?”
“Because I just missed seeing them this morning,” I said. “Is there any clue to who sent them?”
“Not a thing,” said he. “Where they come from nobody knows. Just after you left me this morning, I was called up by the Post Office to go down there in a hurry. You know I'm supposed to be all right about explosives ever since I handled that I. W. W. outrage for them in 1925? Well, they had an idea that something of the sort was on again, and they called me in.
“When I got down there, I found a group of officials round five black boxes,containing heavy lead cases. I thought their explosives idea was mad, and I pried up the thick lid of one of the cases with a screwdriver. Inside the case was a heap of pinkish salts. I could hardly believe my eyes, for it seemed to me to be one of the radium compounds—either chloride or bromide—with the usual barium impurity in it. I got away from it, quick, and had them shutter all the windows. By good luck I had a tiny scrap of willemite in my pocket, and in the darkness, held above the salts, it gave off a lovely glow. I had no doubt. It was radium—heaps and heaps of it—and worth a fortune !”
“Was anything said about the envelopes ?”
“You mean the big envelopes with the securities stolen from the banks? That's the funny thing about the whole affair. No two of the envelopes or packages were addressed in the same handwriting. We tried to connect them up from the fact that they were all unstamped, but it was apparent that ten different hands had written the ten different addresses.”
“I think it binds it. Wouldn't you say that the crooks who broke into thebanks this morning sent the radium to the institutes?”
“Would you? You can be safe, perhaps, in assuming that the radium was sent by one individual, or group of individuals, and that the envelopes were sent by the thieves, but can you be certain that the two groups are identical? Is it likely that people capable of the Wall Street affair would be the sort to send radium round—like tea?”
“It sounds contradictory—but they sent the securities, that's certain,” said I. “And I've got a notion that the mind that could conceive the robbery, and the gas, and the sending of the securities, is quite capable of doing the other. I'm not going to lose sight of the possibility. Have you formed any opinion of how the anaesthetic was administered, Dan? Have you come on anything to explain the tarnishing of the gold?”
Dan rattled his loose change before replying.
“I haven't a ghost of a notion,” he said. “The whole thing's a complete mystery. But I have turned the entire laboratory to testing for the stuff that fixed the gold—and I'll explain the anaesthetic somehow—even if it means discovering one with the same powers myself. This thing's got me going!
*** The U. S. A. adopted the metric system for weights, etc., in 1930. Back
I DID not mean to leave Dan Lamont that afternoon until we had gone over all the points of the robbery very thoroughly. I have the greatest respect for my friend's mind.
One of the first things Dan did was to point out where I had made the very sap-headed break in my theorizing. When I told him that the sleep-producing gas was what had stopped the engines of the automobiles, he grinned at me in a sort of sarcastic way.
“Are you chemist enough to tell me what there is in the air that enables the automatic engine to combust its gasoline?” he asked.
“Don't be funny, Dan,” said I, and innocently answered him, “Oxygen, of course.”
“Clever fellow, he purred. “And now will you tell me what the human engine gets out of the air to help its combustion?”
Right there I saw where I had pulled the bone. It was obvious that a gas strong enough to deprive an automobile engine of its oxygen would have deprived humans of their lives.
I dare say I deserved all the chaffing he gave me, but he rubbed it in all afternoon.
By and by he was sprawling on the floor of his sitting-room, searching the newspapers for further information that might throw light on the mystery. He had managed to get his mop of flaxen hair so tangled up and over his eyes that he looked like one of those silky-haired Scots dogs.
“A clue, a clue, a clue,—let's find a clue,” he was chaffing me.”Let's find a clue on which to base a reasonable hypothesis, my dear Jimmy. I said, mark you, a reasonable hypothesis. The gas that stopped the engines doped the bulls! It may sound all right—but the reasoning is just what might be expected from a mere mechanic.
“Oh, shut it, Dan!”
He shut one eye and recited at me:
“The famous airman, looking for a gas, pulls a large bone and proves himself an—egregious mechanic!”
“You might have rhymed,” said I, and threw a cushion at him.
“Oh, that that brain which did the ether penetrate
Should ossify and fattily degenerate!”
he finished and threw the cushion back at me.
“I've found another curious robbery of last night that seems to have escaped you, you slug,” said he. “Come and look at this, Jimmy.”
I got down on the floor beside him. He had one of the stubby fingers of his childish hand on a paragraph in a newspaper. This briefly stated that five thousand litres of high-grade gasoline had vanished in some mysterious fashion, during the night, from one of the big containers in New Jersey belonging to the Standard Oil Company.
“That's a curious thing,” said I.
“It is a curious thing,” Dan agreed. “Somebody gets away from the financial district with over three thousand kilos weight of gold—and on the same night some one else gets away with five thousand litres of gasoline. What do you know about it, son?”
“Seems to be a craze for weight-lifting sprung up.”
“Looks like it,” he murmured. “Now, here's another funny story—”
He pointed to another paragraph tucked away on the same page. This reported the abstraction of a large amount of eatables from a big provision store, also in New Jersey, during the night, but here gold dollars had been left to pay for the goods taken away.
“You're not connecting those two things up with the Wall Street affair, are you, Dan?”
He took out his watch.
“It's now twenty minutes to four,” he said calmly. “We can be over beyond Newark inside the hour with my roadster, if you'll drive. We'll see if the things do connect up.”
At the gasoline station we got little information. Nobody could tell how thefuel had been taken. The station had been closed on the Sunday night, and had been left in charge of a watchman, the manager informed us, and thewatchman had sworn he knew nothing about it.
“Did the watchman by any chance confess to having fallen asleep?” I asked themanager.
“He swore he hadn't,” said that official, “but I expect he did. If he didn't, he's in league with the crooks, and the police have got him.”
“Stop a bit,” Dan Lamont interposed. “You're perfectly certain that thegasoline has been stolen? Isn't it possible that some mechanical device in the tank has failed, that the oil has slipped back to supply?”
“We thought of that,” said the manager, “and the mechanism has been thoroughly overhauled. But there isn't any doubt that the outlet pipe was opened in the night and the gasoline taken away.”
“The watchman is unshaken in his statement that he did not fall asleep?” Iasked.
“Oh, yes. He's fixed on that—but he might be lying, don't you see? He's supposed to be awake all night, and to make his rounds at definite intervals.If he had fallen asleep, he wouldn't like to confess it.”
“Where has he been taken to?” asked Dan.
“He's at the local station.”
“Right,” said Dan. “Let's go there, Jimmy.”
The watchman was an elderly Irishman, and just the type one would expect to find at the job. He was stubborn to begin with and refused to talk at all. It was the merest chance that Dan addressed me by my surname, and at that the old boy's attitude changed.
“Are ye Mr. Boon, the flyin' man?” he asked.
“That's me,” I admitted, “unless there's another of the name.”
“But are ye the Mr. Boon that has the works out at the top end av LongIsland?”
“That's me.”
“Well, ye've got a son av mine workin' for ye—name av McGinty!”
“McGinty your son?” said I. “Well, he's a good fellow, Mr. McGinty, and one of my best mechanics.”
“Ye make me proud to hear it, sorr,” said the old man. “He swears by you, so he does.”
After that, everything was easy. The old man admitted that he'd fallen asleep about one o'clock in the morning, but that he didn't understand how it happened. We pointed out to him that it would be better to confess to having fallen asleep, rather than leave the idea that he was in league with the gang that had emptied the tank. He then said he had been sound asleep between oneand three in the morning. We questioned him closely, and began to have little doubt that he was victim to the same dope that had put Wall Street to sleep. He had not heard of the bank robberies. We left old McGinty with the assurance that he was not to blame in any way, and that there was every prospect of speedy release if only he'd be frank to the questioning of the detectives in charge of the case.
Theories
DAN and I spoke to the officer in charge of the district, and got a promise from him that he would put the idea to the investigator who had the matter in hand.
“It's just as well that you've got that out of the old man,” said the police officer. “It seems to me that we're on the way to saving two of our bestmen.”
“How's that?”
“You'll have heard that Schomberg's Stores were broken into about two this morning?”
“Yes. To find out what we can about that is part of our business over here.”
“Well, you can hardly call the affair a robbery,” the inspector said, “what with money being left to cover the loss and damage to the Stores. But how the place was broken into without the complicity of at least two of our patrolmen, we don't know, and we didn't like the idea. After the news came out about the Wall Street affair, these two men came back with a confession that they'd been asleep, but we had a suspicion that they had only seized on the chance to clear themselves. It did seem a bit far- fetched that the gang that doped the folk around Wall Street, and got away with the haul, would bother to raid a New Jersey provision store and leave money to pay for what they took. But if the old man didn't know about Wall Street, before he admitted he'd fallen asleep, the chances are that he's telling the truth.”
“There was no watchman at Schomberg's Stores?”
“No, the place is shut up at night—nobody left on the premises.”
“Could we see two patrolmen in question ?” asked Dan.
“Easy,” said the inspector. “They sleep at the station, and are sort ofconfined to barracks.”
A short interview with the two policemen convinced my friend and myself that their story was true. They had concealed the fact of having fallen asleep in fear of losing their jobs, and it was only the news of Wall Street that had given them the courage to tell the truth.
Dan and I had heard as much as we needed and as we drove to the Cortlandt Street Ferry at an easy pace, my scientific friend weighed the thing up.
“They do connect up, Jimmy,” he said.
“I'm sure they do,” I agreed.
“They link up, so far, only through the use of the anaesthetic,” he went on. “But I can find no sane connection in the things stolen. Two and a half millions in gold, a hundred kilos of provisions, and five thousand litres of gasoline. It's a mad thing, however you look at it.”
“It's crazy,” I admitted. “Jackdaw crazy.”
“If we could find out what they wanted with such a queer collection,” said Dan,”we'd be on the track of what they are.”
“Suppose,” said I, “that it's a gang with headquarters in the country somewhere, a regular band of raiders operating on a large scale. They have a fleet of trucks, each equipped with the latest appliances for bank-breaking. They want the gasoline for the fleet of cars, and the provisions for feeding the gang—-”
“A concentration of that sort would immediately arouse suspicion in the country, Jimmy.”
“I don't know so much about that, Dan. It might be quite an innocent-looking factory, or foundry, with accommodations for the men—-”
“Yes, asking folks to notice it by never dealing with the local stores—”
“Shucks, Danny!” said I. “Look at my own experimental shops. Right on a lonely strip of beach, and two or three kilometres from the nearest village. Except for a government inspector or two once in a way, nobody ever comes near me—and half my men live on the premises.”
“Yes, but your experimental shops don't come under the factory laws. None of your men belong to a trade union, you've told me?”
“That's right.”
“Well, if any gang of crooks got up a stunt such as you imagine, it would be difficult to escape detection in the ordinary routine of factory inspection.
“But, listen, Dan! If I wanted to go in for bank-robbery, it would be easy enough—given that I had a dope—-”
“Great snakes, Jimmy!” Dan exclaimed. “You're on the business for sure! Could you land that new bus of yours in Broadway?”
“I'll bet you five thousand dollars I do—with wheels instead of floats—-”
“What would your new bus carry?”
“In her present condition, without her fighting kit, about three thousandkilos, besides a crew of six.”
“Then two buses such as the Merlin could have made that robbery in Wall Street and Broadway possible?”
“Sure,” I said. “And, what's more, could be in the Rockies by this time—-”
“Then we're on the trail, Jimmy—”
“Yes—if we wash out the question of the gasoline, Dan. There's a difficulty there. And, besides, there's only one Merlin—unless somebody has stolen a march on me. But say that somebody has a design as good. It's not only a question of lift, remember, but of taking off down Broadway. But say the supposed machines could. Do you see them dropping into that New Jersey gasoline station and getting away with five thousand litres of oil? I don't. I don't see even five Merlins doing it.”
“What about a helicopter.”
“The helicopter is a washout as far as lateral speed is concerned. It hasn't been applied successfully to a plane yet.”
“Airship then?”
“More like it—but, phew !—you're getting up a whale of a theory, Dan!”
“I know that, Jimmy,” said he, “but it's a whale of a robbery.”
By this time we were at the ferry, and our discussion was shelved in the business of getting aboard the waiting ferry-boat. Once on Manhattan, we drove straight for the Metallurgical National. When Dan and I got into my father's room, we found the old man looking a bit worn.
“I won't be ready for you until seven, Jimmy,” he said at once. “And I've a lot to do before then. Wall Street has gone mad, and there isn't a thing on the list that hasn't dropped. There's been a run on the country branches of all five banks, and some of the others as well. I have a meeting of bank presidents at six.”
“Righto, dad,” I said. “We'll clear out—-”
“If Dan and you are on something new, why not bring him over to Hazeldene for the night, and let's do our talking there?”
“How about it, Dan?”
“Fine,” he said.
“But your analysis of the tarnishing?”
“My fellows can do the tests all right. I'll take a run up and see how they've got on, and fetch my kit down here.”
“I'll come with you, then. The landing-stage at seven, dad?”
“I'll be there, son,” and with a nod to Dan and myself he became immersed in his papers again. We were just going out of the door, however, when he called us back.
“Perhaps you'd better take the elevator to the top of the building and see the janitor, Klenski. He has some weird story about houses hanging from the sky, or something. He's no temperance advocate, Klenski, but you might get something out of it.”
Dan and I exchanged a look and bolted for the elevator.
The Tale of the Finn
UP on the roof, we found Klenski, a Finn, born in America, whose faded blue eyes, uncertain movements, and indistinct voice showed at once the soaker. The man was eaten into by alcohol.
“What was it you saw last night, Klenski?” I asked him, as soon as we'd got him out on the roof.
He pulled in the corners of his mouth, in an effort to stop the twitching of the lips that always preceded his speech.
“A cabin—like a rail'ay coach—smaller—'ging b'ropes f'm sky . . . “
“Where was this? At what time?”
He butted his head towards the railings on the parapet wall.
“There ?”
He nodded jerkily.
“What time was this, Klenski?”
“Las'ni—'smorning—s'm'time—coonsay . .. “
“About three this morning, maybe?” Dan insinuated.
Klenski turned to him gratefully, and chucked a jerky nod at him.
“What were you doing about at that time?” I asked him.
“G't up t'git s'm'thing—c'm'out see what s't night 'twas—saw cabin—like rail'ay coach c'min' down out'n sky on ropes—'slike that . . . “
He made a jerky downward gesture of the hand.
“Did you look up to see where the ropes came from?”
He shook his head and gazed at the concrete under our feet.
Dan pointed up at the sky, thinking the man did not understand. But the eyes of the Finn did not follow the hand, and we realized that the man could not bear to look up at the sky. I'd seen the same disability in an alcoholic before.
“Well, what happened then?” Dan asked gently.
“Went over to railings 'nd looked down. 'N blue wall came over my eyes. 'Sall. Went back t' bed. Cold.”
“Blue wall ?” said Dan. “What sort of blue wall?”
The Finn gazed at him pathetically.
“Blue wall,” he said in his gentle indistinct way. “Blue wall . . . other side 'frailings. Down—down— 'slike that . . . “
Again he made that downward gesture of the hand.
“Did you hear any noise?” I asked.
The lips twitched desperately, and a silly smile came into the Finn's face.
“Whisper—whisper—'sper. Binz-z-z!” he imitated. “'N I d'n' know any more, please.”
We left it at that, for it was painful to talk to the man, he had such terrible difficulty in talking—or even thinking.
“Dare we interpret the maunderings of that dipsomaniac into evidence for the airship idea, Jimmy?” Dan asked when we were in his roadster again.
“Let's,” said I, “and see what it leads to.”
“He got up for another drink, you know,” said Dan. “It might all be drunken imagination.”
“Possibly. The only concrete thing about it is the cabin—which might be the gondola of a dirigible.”
“And the blue wall, Jimmy—the blue wall? Some effect of alcohol on the eyes, maybe?”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Unless—unless what he saw was the side of the airship—- “
“Could an airship venture so low?”
“How can I tell Dan? If the crooks came out of an airship at all, it would be less likely to be spotted if it came as low as possible over the area of operations, where all the inhabitants were unconscious. The higher it remained, the wider the field from which it was visible. You've got to remember that the Metallurgical is only a little less than the Woolworth, and that the few overhead cables still in existence are well under roof height. Say your supposed airship had a width of just under thirty metres—there's nothing to stop it from nestling in Broadway.”
Dan let out a chuckle.
“Columbus! This is deep stuff, Jimmy. We'll have to do a lot of sleuthing before we're through.”
“I'll tell you what, Dan. I'm going to get Dick Schuyler on the phone and ask him to join us tonight at Hazeldene. With the old man and Milliken we'll have a fine old council of war—a regular powwow.”
“Has Dickie any sense?”
“You bet you,” said I. “Dickie not only has sense, but he knows more about lighter-than-air machines than I do. I don't favour that sort of flying at all.”
When we arrived at Dan's laboratory, he went off to see his research merchants who had been working on the tarnished gold. I didn't go with him, being on thephone to Dick Schuyler. I was lucky enough to find my man at home with his squadron, and he fell in with the idea of joining the party at Hazeldene.
“I'd like to come across on your new bus, Jimmy,” he said, “but I'm on duty again at five in the morning. I'll fly over on my own bus if you can berth her for me.”
“Tons of room, Dick,” I told him.
“When do you start for Hazeldene?”
“At seven from the Battery stage.”
“Right,” said he. “I'll start with you.”
“Very well, old son,” I said. “We'll wait for you at the other end.”
I heard a splutter come over the phone.
“Now, what the devil do you mean by that, Jimmy Boon?” Dick demanded. “I have to inform you that my bus is the quickest thing in the service.”
“Can she do five hundred per?” I asked casually.
“Good Lord !” he yelled. “Can the Merlin?”
“Start at seven and see for yourself,” said I, and rung off.
Dan came back just then, but had no discovery to report.
“My fellows are in the air,” he said. “That locket and coin of yours have got them going. There seems to be the faintest trace of a radio-activity filming the gold, but they have not determined what it is yet. I've indicated new tests, and they'll work late on them. The thing's a puzzle.”
He went off to pack a kit-bag, and while I waited I ran through some newspapers we had brought on the way up town. The columns were crammed with talk of the robbery, and it was evident that business was badly jolted. Every paper spoke of the “panic” on Wall Street, of the run on the branches of the banks, and none of them could make head or tail of the radium mystery. Since the passing of the Personal Liberty Laws, which restored to Americans the right, among other things, to drink when and where they liked, and what they liked, the newspapers had not shown such scare lines. But in all the mass of written stuff there was not a single helpful word.
The phone buzzer went, and I found my father at the other end of the wire.
Ready For Business
“SAY—is that you, Jimmy? Your father speaking. Is that new plane of yours up to picking a passenger off a liner which is now thirty-six hours away from Sandy Hook?”
“That'll be about fifteen hundred kilometres away—eh?”
The old man swore.
“Durn your new-fangled measures, son,” he said. “I make it nine hundred American miles—-”
“Same thing. When do you want him to be in New York?”
“Could you land him at the Battery at ten tomorrow?”
“Yes. I can pick him—or her—up in good time for that.”
“I said 'him,' Jimmy. Lord Almeric Plauscarden, deputy governor of the Bank of England, it is. He's on the Parnassic due off Sandy Hook on Wednesday morning.”
“Right. I'll do it.”
“Thank you, son. I'll radio him to expect you—when?”
“Just before six to-morrow morning.”
“Good. See you at the Battery presently.”
If the old man had patted me on the back physically, he would have pleased me less. There was something in the casual way he had proposed the trip, a certainty of my straight answer, that made me feel good and chesty. I'm sure if I had said no, he'd have taken it as casually.
The feeling had not worn off when Dan Lamont came back with a small kit- bag in his hand.
“What's the smug contentment for, Jimmy?” he asked. “Have you just heard that the President has resigned and that you've been offered the job?”
I told him, and his eyes lightened up.
“Say, Jimmy,” he pleaded, like any kid, “I'm coming with you, old man— you're taking me with you, aren't you?”
“It means starting about three in the morning, Dan.”
“That doesn't matter, Jimmy. I'd like to come along.”
I said he could, and he danced a little breakdown to show how pleased he was. Dan Lamont's an awful kid in some ways, for all his high position in the scientific world.
We drove down to the Battery in good time, and waited to see the Merlin come in. Dan's man drove the roadster away, and presently my father arrived. Dick Schuyler had his seaplane moored a little way along, and he waved his hand.
In a little time I spotted my bus like a dot in the clouds, as Milliken came speeding across Brooklyn, before turning north into the Upper Bay. He was flying good and high, and to an outsider seemed to be overshooting the point for making a safe angle. I took a look out of the corner of my eye at Dickie Schuyler, and he was standing up in the cockpit of his boat, yelling to attract my attention.
“What's the matter, Dickie?” I yelled.
“That your boat?”
“Yes.”
“That fellow's going to crash her—too steep an angle?”
I waved my hand serenely, and he dropped back into his seat to watch, open- mouthed. I fancy he expected to see Milliken turn back or spiral to the right height for planing into the landing-place, but he stood up to watch again when the Merlin began her hovering flight down. My father touched my arm.
“That's something new, Jimmy?” he asked.
“Two years' work in that, dad,” I said.
He just patted me on the shoulder.
The Merlin touched the water about twenty yards out, and taxied slowly up to the jetty. The landing-stage crew turned her, and we all got aboard, Milliken giving up the pilot seat to me. I waved my hand to Dickie Schuyler to show that I was ready, and we both took off together. In that particular flight we didn't go much above four hundred kilometres per, but we left the police boat well behind. In fact, the Merlin was berthed and we were all on the jetty waiting when Dickie landed.
“You've got some bus, Jimmy,” was all he said at that time—but he had a lot to say later on.
This projected trip out to the Parnassic knocked my idea, of making Milliken one of the council of war, clean on the head. I might have trusted another of my fellows to go over the Merlin preparatory to the flight, but I knew that Milliken would not let anyone else do it. An extra gasoline tank had to be shipped and fixed with new connections, and the job wanted a sure hand.
Milliken promised that everything would be ready by three o'clock, and picked out a squad of the more skilled mechanics to do the work. He took it for granted that he would come with me on the flight, and I knew that it would be useless to argue with him, but he agreed to take a bit of sleep when the job of fixing the extra tank was well in hand. So I had to leave it at that.
We had to let Dick Schuyler get off his opinions of the Merlin at dinner before we could fall to discussing the robberies seriously. And I am afraid that the dinner was unduly prolonged before I satisfied his curiosity by the aid of a whole thick pad of scribbling paper. The funny thing was that neither the banker nor the man of science seemed to be bored by the arguments. Dan and my father were as keen as a mustard box.
When at length we had the Merlin thoroughly explained, we were ready for coffee and other drinks in the smoking room, and there Dan and I put forward our theory of the robbery.
The Air Wins
“PINKERTON &Co.,” said Dick. “I'm pleased to meet you. I often wondered who you were. Well, well—so you're only you, after all!”
“Don't you think it's feasible?” I demanded.
“Ah, if you come to feasible—it's just feasible, Mr. Pinkerton—or are you the Co.?”
“I wish you'd quit kidding, Dickie,” I said. “Do you consider the notion reasonable?”
“Reasonable? Mr. Pinkerton, I—”
Then Danny and I both sat on him.
“I'll be good—I'll be very good !” he yelled presently. “Shurrup, Jimmy! Stop it! I'll be good!”
We let him go, and after telling us that we were a couple of thugs, he became very sound on weights and gases and hot air of that sort. He had the latest statistics about dirigibles at his finger-tips.
“I think you may discount the Finn's blue-wall idea. It would be very dangerous for a dirigible of any size worth talking about to come down so near the buildings. On a night like last night, with the wind there was, there would always be a good deal of drift, and a dirigible is not the sort of thing you can push away from a wall, as you do a ship's boat from a quayside.”
“I'm inclined to agree with you,” Dick went on, “that the Wall Street robberies are linked up with the gasoline and store affairs in Newark. The dope links them up. But why drag in an airship to explain the possibility of the job being done by one gang—to explain the need for the gasoline? I can't see an airship dropping down on Newark and not being spotted. You've worked out that one four- thousand-kilo truck could handle the gold?”
“That's right,” I said.
“How far is the gasoline station from the bay side?”
“Not far, but it stands on a canal running into Newark Bay.”
“That will do my business,” Dick said triumphantly. “Suppose we just put a jolly old motorship—not big—say about twenty tons—alongside our nice little gasoline station. On land, we have our four-thousand-kilo truck. The motor-ship drifts down to the gasoline station, and whangs in the dope—gas, or whatever it is, then proceeds to run a pipe up to the tank. It takes its fuel. In the meantime the gang with the truck is operating on Schomberg's Stores. When that is done, the truck moves off across the Hudson by the Cortlandt Street Ferry, which runs all night. It drops its dope in Broadway and down Wall Street. The gang bursts the banks and collects the goods, and off out of the district to a private wharf, say, on the Jersey City side of Newark Bay, to where the jolly little motor-ship has swum over. The little lugger is loaded with the booty, and drops down either side of Richmond—and there you are!”
“Now, do you know,” said Dan Lamont, “that's a very pretty story, Dickie—and very well told, too! But how do you get over the fact that all the automobile engines stopped in the doped district ?”
“Ours is a special automobile ours is! Maybe it's an electrically-driven truck—”
“It now appears,” my father interposed, “that the street cars down Broadway were stopped below Post Office Square, nobody knows how.”
We all turned to stare at him, for we had almost forgotten his presence, he was so silent. Dan was the first to recover.
“That washes out your electric truck, Dickie,” he said.
“You can have your airship,” Dick said. “When you get crooks that can dope a whole district, stop automobiles and electric cars, spread stickfast, so to speak, on all movement for two hours over an area of a square kilometre—what's to prevent them having an airship that can nestle down on Broadway? Have your airship—but do think tenderly of my little motor-lugger. I was so fond of it.”
“What do you think of it, Mr. Boon ?” Dan asked my father.
“I think the difficulty of concentrating, and of getting away undetected, points to an approach from an unexpected quarter—so I say the air. The Finn's dream is too exact to be alcohol. It's simple. Just a cabin coming down from the air—then a blue wall—and some noises that to my layman ear sound uncommonly like machinery. No alcohol dream that. So I say the air. Seems to me that whatever theory you try to develop, you always get about half-way with it. But I have a hunch that the solution will be found in the air. Dick showed more surprise over Jimmy's new seaplane than over the whole robbery. Why?”
“Because Jimmy has evolved a new principle, sir,” said Dick.
“Well, Jimmy hasn't got the monopoly of brains in the world. Maybe somebody's evolved a new principle for dirigibles,” said the old man. “I'm going to have one more drink. Then I'm going to bed. And if for-once I may play the heavy father, I'll advise you all to do the same. Seven hours from now, Jimmy has got to be six hundred miles out at sea.”
“So have I,” said Dan Lamont proudly.
We all had another drink, and the old man told us exactly how he got on the long green in four and holed out with a handsome putt for a five.
IT WAS three o'clock on the Tuesday morning, and Dan Lamont and myself were standing in the porch of Hazeldene with my father. The roadster was purring out on the avenue. The old man had the flimsy of a radio message in his hand.
“Lord Almeric will be ready for you, and asks that you will pick up an extra passenger if possible,” he said, “most likely his secretary. Can you do it?”
“Sure,” I replied. “That will be all right. Did he say anything about the ship's probable position at six o'clock?”
“No. Here's his message—you'd better have it. And here's a note I have written to Lord Almeric.”
“You'd better have an automobile waiting for him and his secretary at the Battery from nine o'clock. We may make good time—it is fine flying weather.You'll be all right with Didcot on the Seven going across, dad. Well, so long!”
“So long, son! 'Morning, Dan!” my father said. “Look after yourselves. You're fixed all right for food?”
“Milliken is sure to have everything fixed,” I told him.
Just then Dick Schuyler, in a dressing-gown, came out of the house.
“I've just been through to headquarters,” he said. “There isn't much ice about, and flying conditions are good, Jimmy. You should pick the Parnassic up in no time.”
“Thanks, old man. Well, so long!”
We roared down to the sheds in quick time, and found the Merlin afloat and ready, shining like silver under the arcs. Milliken had everything prepared, from extra wraps and food for the passengers, down to easy chairs in the cabin, and the fixing of the tank had been done in very workmanlike fashion. We were good for three thousand kilometres.
We took off at three-fifteen, and I laid the course on a point or two north of east, quickly bringing the Merlin up to a steady four hundred kilometres the hour. It was reckoned that we should sight the Parnassic at a point six hundred and fifty kilometres east of Cape Cod, and two hundred and fifty south of Halifax, which gave us a thousand-odd kilometres of an outward voyage.
It would have been easy that morning to fly by the stars, they were so clean and bright. Their light was reflected in a dusky sheen off the sea below. To the north, the Great Dipper was poised on the end of his handle. What clouds there were about were the merest wisps, and there wasn't a trace of fog.
Danny, wrapped as if for a journey to the North Pole, sat at my side, a little behind where I was in the pilot's seat, and he leaned forward in interested silence to watch every move of my hands, but his eyes were shining with delight at his adventure. The murmur of the silenced engine came to us on a beautiful liquid note which showed clearly how thoroughly Milliken and his men had done their work. That excellent artificer sat on the floor at Danny's feet and leaned against the side of the cabin, his head cocked sideways to listen intently to the voice of the engine. There was nothing to do, for the Merlin was flying like an angel.
The lights of steamer after steamer appeared faintly on the skyline, neared, and passed under us out of sight. On our port bow the coastwise lights winked and glowed, until at last Nantucket fell far astern, and in less than an hour's flying we had passed to the south of Cape Cod. When the clock on the control-board showed four-fifteen, I turned to Milliken.
“Let down the aerial,” I said, “and see if we can pick up the Parnassic.“
It was characteristic of the man that he knew the call and the wavelength without having to ask, and it was without any comment but a quick nod that he lowered the aerial and fixed the receiver to his ears. In a minute the cabin was filled with the blatter of the radio.
“PNC! PNC! PNC!”
He waited a little and repeated the call, then suddenly switched to the open receiver of the radiophone. A strange voice issued from the box and filled the cabin.
“There's something the matter with the Parnassic's wireless,” said the voice, “gone phut, or something. Who's calling her, anyhow?”
“This is the seaplane Merlin,” said Milliken. “Who are you?”
“British steamship, Maramba,” the voice replied.
“Where are you?” Milliken looked at me.
“Two hundred kilometres or so due east of Cape Cod,” I told him, and he repeated it into the transmitter.
“Looking for the Parnassic?”
“That's the notion,” said Milliken.
“She should be somewhere round 43deg. north, 60deg. west. I say, there's something the matter-in this blinking ocean this morning—ghostses or something—gives you the creeps. Well, cheerio, Merlin!” said the English voice. “Is it cold up there?”
“Not a bit of it, thanks,” said Milliken. “Cheerio, Maramba!”
“Cheerio and good luck!”
Milliken looked to me for instructions.
“Wait fifteen minutes, Milliken, and try her again,” I told him. He pulled up the aerial, and almost without thinking what I was doing I opened the throttle. The hand of the speed-dial went steadily round to four-fifty, as the Merlin lunged forward with a keener note.
“What's that glow that comes and goes on the horizon away to the left?” asked Danny, when fifteen minutes had elapsed.
“It must be the light on Cape Sable,” I said, with a look at the height register, which showed we were three thousand odd metres above sea level. “About a hundred and sixty kilometres away.”
Milliken was letting down the aerial again, and soon the radio once more was spluttering its “PNC! PNC! PNC!” But save for the steady song of the engine, no sound greeted our ears. Milliken tried again, and again, without result. An uneasy feeling took hold of me.
“Haul in the aerial, Milliken,” I said. “I'm going to let her go full out. Clamp the telephone receiver to your ears, Dan.”
Milliken spun the drum round, and turned to help Dan with the cap-receivers, which would cut out all noise except what could come through the phone, and then he did the same for me. When we were all fixed, I opened the cut-out, and gave the Merlin full throttle. The dial hand jerked round to five hundred kilometres and stayed put, for that was the limit of its register—but I knew we were going well over the five hundred.
It was now fifteen minutes to five, and a cold grey had crept into the horizon ahead. Steadily, steadily, as we sped into the dawn, the light paled into silver and primrose, the floor of the sea passed from dull blue into a living purple flecked with green and silver. Minutes passed, the hand of the clock on the control-board dragging heavily, and again I felt that curious alertness of perception which I had experienced on and after the flight of the day before. It was more than alertness. It was an anticipation of things that were about to happen.
And now, with the coming of the light, visibility decreased as a haze began to grow over the face of the sea. We dropped on a long angle to fifteen hundred metres. Here and there, the sea was dotted with steamers which, though visible to us, must have been out of sight of each other. These we could see were freighters and small liners.
All three of us in the cabin of the Merlin were staring ahead, expecting to sight the great mass of the Parnassic at any moment, for the time was now well past five o'clock. As far as one could judge, we were nearing the position where the liner could be expected, but the haze below us was thickening quickly and, every minute, was lessening our range of vision. Soon it would mean casting circles in search.
Suddenly Milliken touched me lightly on the shoulder and pointed. Ahead of us, four masts and three funnels pierced the mist. I throttled down and whipped into the silencer, then hovered down into a steep angle. We were over the ship in a few seconds.
“There's something the matter there, Mr. Boon,” said Milliken. “There's no way on her, and she's rolling broadside on.”
“My God!” cried Dan Lamont. “She has been abandoned!”
A Close Shave
THERE was something terrifying in the helplessness of the great liner. Broadside to the rollers, she lay sluggishly, swaying and veering amongst the oily hummocks, and about her was the silence of death itself. Not a soul stirred on her decks, and the thin wisp of steam that curled from one of her smoke-stacks was the only thing about her that moved.
I know that my hands were shaking on the joystick, and it was all I could do to master the sick feeling that was creeping over me. We circled round her as slowly as we could, and coming as close as we dared.
“Look!” I said. “There are dead men lying on the bridge!”
“God in Heaven!” Dan Lamont cried, white to the lips. “What can have happened to them?”
“I don't know,” I muttered, “but we'll find out.”
I swung the Merlin closer still to the liner.
“What are you going to do, sir?” Milliken cried apprehensively.
“I am going to put the Merlin aboard her, if I can.”
“You'll smash her, sir!”
“Maybe,” I said madly, “but we're going aboard.”
“Don't try it sir! For God's sake, don't try it!”
“Shut up! Milliken!” I said crossly—then realizing that he wasn't thinking of his own skin, but of his beloved Merlin, I grinned at him feebly. “It's all right, Milliken, I won't do anything rash. Let's reconnoitre.”
It was out of the question to try and bring the Merlin alongside the heaving freeboard of the liner. We would have had our wings smashed for a certainty. Nor was there space available to land on any of the decks, cluttered as they were with ventilators and deck gear. The only likely place to bring her aboard was on what appeared to be a long stretch of canvas covering the promenade deck astern, and it was a question if that would take her weight. Fortunately, there was no cordage much aft of the jiggermast, except for one stay coming down to the stern-post, and all halyards were reeved close to the mast. A ventilator or two pierced the awning.
Though it was a terribly risky thing to attempt with the ship rolling as she did, it was the only chance, and I told Milliken what I proposed to do.
“All right, Mr. Boon,” he said. “There's nothing else for it—if we are to get aboard. I don't blame you.”
“What about you, Dan? It's a hundred to one you'll be smashed or spilled into the sea.”
“That's all right, Jimmy. Go ahead with it.”
“I'll get down on the floats, Mr. Boon,” said Milliken; “might be handy to brace her if she topples.”
He fetched out a length of rope and cut it in two, then, taking off his coat, he slid through the hatch to the port-side float.
I was depending on the Merlin's power of hovering to pull the thing off, so I took her up a bit to one side astern of the ship, gauging the distance to miss that after-stay. The ship, rolling horridly, came up to meet us. We were over the awning, then it veered from under us—I thought we'd missed it, when—back it swung—slowly. I flicked the rudder round to bring us into line with the ridge of the awning. We landed with a grinding shudder, then heeled sideways as if we'd never right. I had quite made up my mind that we were going to crash over on our back in the sea below—but after a sickening moment or two of suspense we righted!
Dan, flat on the floor, with his head poked out of the hatch, let out a yell.
“By Christopher, Jimmy!” he shouted. “Did you see that?”
“What?”
“Milliken! Oh, you Milliken!”
It was Milliken who had saved us. Lying on the float, he had seized hold of one of the ventilators as we settled, and, with those amazingly powerful arms of his outstretched, had braced us as we toppled, otherwise we would have crashed overboard. Few men living could have done it. When I got down on top of the awning, my mechanic was composedly tying one of the float struts to the ventilator, and a very white face was all he showed of the superhuman effort he had put out.
“Not much damage done, Mr. Boon,” he said quietly. “Except that the starboard float has sprung a bit, I think.”
“Good for you, Milliken,” was all the thanks I dared give him for saving our lives. “You stopped us from going overboard.”
Luckily for us, the canvas of the awning was stretched over stout boards, strongly supported, and these were sufficient to take the weight of the seaplane. Milliken lashed the opposite strut to another ventilator, and we all climbed down to the deck.
The ship still was held by that awful silence, unbroken save for the lap-lapping of the sea about her, and I fancy all three of us were gripped by a sense of overwhelming awe as we went down the companionway, making for the gangway swung across the after well. From the gangway we saw, down below us, a number of seamen sprawled inertly in the scuppers and about the hatch. We called down to them, but they did not stir, and our voices, unnaturally thin, came back to us in eery echoes from the open hold.
“Let's take the bridge first,” I said.
All Asleep
WE ran up the ladders to the lower bridge, and in the chart-room we saw an officer lying on the floor in a heap. Dan went into the chart-room, while Milliken followed me to the upper bridge. Here we found two officers huddled behind the high canvas dodger, and in the wheelhouse behind, two seamen lay together, one of them face downwards with his arm rove through a quadrant of the wheel.
It was as if the ship had been struck by a sudden plague. I don't know how Milliken felt about it for his ugly old face was a mask of stolid calm, but shivers were running up and down my spine. I kneeled beside the officer next to me.
“He's breathing, Milliken!” I cried, and I gently shook the supine figure by the shoulders, but with a sigh the man only settled back more closely against the rails.
“Try the other man,” I told Milliken.
My mechanic stepped over, and gently raised the officer—he was the chief—into a sitting position against his knee. The man opened his eyes and blinked at us, then with amazing suddenness was wide awake.
“What the hell?” he said, and staggered to his feet. “Who are you? What are you doing on the bridge? Get off the brid—” His gaze fell on his brother officer. “Here! What have you been doing to Barr? You've killed him!”
He was a huge man, and he made a move towards me with a look that was not very pleasant.
“Don't be silly,” I said, as quietly as I might. “He's asleep—the same as you have been.”
“What's the matter with the ship? God! She's adrift! What—-” He stared at us, and passed his hand over his head. “Lord! I remember now— but it was dark then—-”
Meantime Milliken had managed to waken the younger man, and just then Dan came up the ladder with the officer who had been lying on the floor of the chart-room. Only by his braided cap could one tell he was the captain, for he was in pyjamas with a thick blanket-coat over them
“What's the matter, Mr. Boscence?” he demanded wildly. “It is two hours since we hove to—just before six bells in the middle watch—I've been asleep—or unconscious. This gentleman—what has happened to the ship?”
“I don't rightly know, sir,” the chief said, passing his hand over his head bewilderedly. “There's something queer here—-”
The captain stuck out his white torpedo beard.
“Get some way on the ship. Ring down—” He whirled round to the wheelhouse as he spoke, and broke off. “For the love of God—look at the steersmen! What's come over the ship?”
I nodded to Milliken, who ran into the caboose and woke the seamen quite easily.
Dan looked at me in a dazed sort of way.
“Jimmy!” he gasped. “It's Wall Street all over again! You'd better explain to the captain.”
“Where do you come from ?” the captain demanded. “How do you get aboard my ship? You're not passengers.”
“You're Commodore Sir Peter Weatherly, aren't you, sir?” I asked.
“That's me,” he snapped.
“I'm James Boon, Sir Peter,” I explained. “I've come out on my seaplane, the Merlin, to take Lord Almeric Pluscarden on shore. We found your ship adrift, and I managed to land my machine on your awning aft there. The whole ship has been doped, sir.”
“Ring down to the engine-room, can't you, Boscence?” the commodore said to his second in command, ignoring me. “We must have some way on her.”
“I have done so, sir,” the bewildered chief officer replied. “I get no bell back from them.”
“If I might suggest something, Sir Peter,” I ventured. “Let my mechanic, Milliken, go round with your officer here,” indicating the younger man, “and waken up the crew.”
For a moment he stared at me as though trying to collect his thoughts, then he nodded briskly.
“Do that, Barr,” he ordered. “Wake the crew—though what on earth they should be asleep for beats me. And you, young man—Mr. Boon, you say you are—perhaps you'll explain as much as you can of this business.”
“This is my friend, Mr. Dan Lamont,” I said. “He will bear out what I tell you, sir. But first, let me ask you to walk to where you can look into the after well—-”
“Come along, then—this way!”
He led the way down to the boat deck, and made for the rail over the well.
“God in Heaven!” he exclaimed. “My men! Are they dead?”
“No, sir,” said Dan. “I imagine they're asleep as you have been. They'll waken easily.”
“Come to my cabin, gentlemen,” said the sailor. “I'm all adrift. I simply can't understand this thing at all.”
I must say that I admired the grip he had of himself, and his acceptance of what must have been a bewildering situation. He was alert and businesslike as he led the way back to the lower bridge.
“Mr. Boscence,” he called up to the chief officer. “The first thing to do is to get some way on the ship. Give Mr. Barr a hail, and tell him to turn out all the engine-room staff not on duty, and to send them down to—to wake their fellows. Tell them not to interfere with any of the passengers who may be on deck or in the saloons. Pass the word to such of the crew as may be stirring. Do you understand?”
“Aye, sir!”
He turned to Dan and myself.
“You'll forgive any lack of courtesy in your welcome, I am sure. You were not expected to appear in circumstances such as these. Come with me, please. We won't go to my cabin. I must look after the ship. You can tell me what you know as we go along.”
We followed him below, but when we came to the smoking-saloon, and found there a number of passengers huddled like dead men round the card tables, or sprawled out on the floor, it was too much for the captain.
“It is no use. I must get the hang of the thing first of all,” he said.”You'll have to tell me what it means. This morning at three o'clock I was called out of my bunk by word that a red riding-light was floating on the sea ahead. I turned out, and was immediately met by a message that had come over the wireless phone. It came from the U. S. battleship Argonne—or was supposed to come from her: 'Heave to immediately. Danger.' I passed the word to the bridge to obey the order, and made to follow. I had no sooner reached the chart-room— I wanted my binoculars—when—well—the next thing I remember is being spoken to by this young man—Lamont, did you say? That's my side of it. Now, as clearly and as quickly as you can—what do you know?”
With as few words as I could, I told him about Wall Street, of the mysterious sleep, and how the thieves had got away with two and a half millions in gold.
“There was something about that came over the wireless yesterday,” said the captain. “It's a very mysterious thing. You say that the folk round WallStreet were chloroformed—or whatever it is — just as we've been?”
“Exactly, sir.”
“Then—by thunder—they've been after the specie I'm carrying—a half a million sterling in gold!”
Piracy
HE darted off through the saloon doorway, and down an alleyway, Dan and I close to his heels. He stopped at a cabin labelled, “Purser,” and banged on it, trying the handle at the same time. A fat little man opened the door, and blinked sleepily at us.
“Quick, Strachan!” yelled the captain. “The second key of the strong-room! Hurry, man!”
“What's the matter, sir ?”
“Damn it, man! Don't argue! Put on some clothes and bring the key of the strong-room as fast as you can. Hurry!”
He turned and banged past us back the way he had come, and up a companionway, Dan and I tagging after him. We followed him into his suite, beyond which was the strong-room. He needn't have worried about the key. Right in the middle of the steel door was a yawning hole, through which we saw, in a brilliant blaze of electric light, the disorder of smashed wooden cases.
“Piracy, by God!” gasped Sir Peter. “Piracy on the high seas—and on my ship! It can't have been done from aboard the ship—they'd never get away with that weight of gold—half a million!”
“Florins?” asked Dan.
“Florins be damned!” said the captain. “Tenflorin pieces. Sovereigns!”***
“Phew! Nearly two and a half million in American dollars,” I said—the British florin standing at that time at 2.42—“just about as much as they got out of Wall Street!”
“Tell me, Mr. Boon,” said the captain. “When you sighted us, was there any craft near us?”
“Nothing within forty kilometres of you, Sir Peter—and certainly nothing up to doing that distance in the hour.”
“That cuts out an hour, leaving one for some craft to do the job in. They must have been damned smart!”
Just then the purser came running in, and when he saw the strong-room door, he let out a wail of despair. Sir Peter cut the lamentations short.
“Step down to Lord Almeric Pluscarden's cabin, Strachan,” he said. “My compliments to him, and will he come here at once?”
“But the strong-room, sir!—the strong-room! It has been broken into!”
“Dammit, Strachan!” the captain said testily. “We can see that. Kindly take my message to Lord Almeric. Crying won't help us.”
He turned to a telephone on the wall of the cabin.
“Lucky the exchange is automatic,” he said grimly, “or I wouldn't be able to get through to my bridge, I suppose. That you, Boscence? Any report from the engine-room? Good! Now the first morning watch will come on duty, and be relieved at eight as usual. Carry on!”
“The engine-room reports a good head of steam,” he turned to us and said. “The automatic oil feed in the stoke-hold has been going on all the time. Ah, the engines!”
We felt the vibration of the ship's engines under our feet as Lord Almeric Pluscarden came into the cabin. I had expected somehow to see an elderly man, probably white-haired and rubicund, but the newcomer was a slenderly built, dark-skinned, dark-haired man, apparently of about forty-odd, alert in manner, and athletic-looking. I found out later that he was close on sixty.
“Hullo! What has happened, Weatherly?” he asked at once, when he saw the ravished strongroom.
“I'm damned if I know, Lord Almeric,” said the captain, with a finger pointed at the spoiled door, “but that's the chief thing that has happened. How it came about—well here's your pilot, Mr. Boon, and his friend, Mr. Lamont. They've got a story that'll take your breath away.”
“Kind of you to put your machine at my disposal, Mr. Boon,” said Lord Almeric. “I'm afraid you've had a cold flight. Very sporting of you to accompany him, Mr. Lamont. I'm grateful to you both. And now—this story?”
Between us Dan and I told of the Wall Street robberies, of our theories, and of our coming to the Parnassic. Lord Almeric asked a shrewd question or two, then Sir Peter gave a fuller account of the stopping of the ship.
“I am very much a layman in aeronautical matters,” Lord Almeric said when we had finished, “and I do not know if there are any other points to be made for or against your idea of the airship—beyond those you make yourselves. I must say you put a fair case, which is considerably strengthened by this act of piracy. Whatever may be the mode of operation, we are certainly faced by a remarkable organization. But I should not, if I were you, Weatherly, dismiss the possibility of the gold still remaining on the ship. I suggest that a thorough search be made of the ship and of the passengers' baggage. You will not, of course, except my luggage from examination.”
“Surely, Lord Almeric—” the captain protested.
“I insist,” said the other, “and I am sure that Miss Torrance will say the same. Miss Torrance,” he explained to me—“if you can take her—is your other passenger, my niece and secretary.”
“Only too glad, Lord Almeric,” said I, a little taken aback at the idea of carrying a woman. “But I'm afraid we damaged the starboard float getting aboard, and if we have to come down on the way back—well—it'll be a bit inconvenient. We'll get wet, at least.”
“You don't anticipate a forced descent, Mr. Boon?”
“No,” I said, “but you never know your luck. Then there's the difficulty of taking off from the awning.”
“Bless my soul,” said Lord Almeric, “you don't mean to say that you put your seaplane aboard on the awning ?”
“I did—and I'm afraid I've ripped off some of your canvas, Sir Peter, in doing it.”
“I'll worry about that, young man,” the captain said, “when somebody has ripped a slab off the strong-room door, and ripped five million florins off my ship!”
He glared at the damaged door, tugging his little beard the while as if to drag from it some solution of the mystery.
“Fifty years I've been at sea,” he said thickly, “man and boy, and, by thunder, I've never come across anything like it! It's bewildering—exasperating—God, it's heart-breaking! On my ship—Lord Almeric on my ship! The disgrace of it!”
“Peter Weatherly,” his lordship said, with something that was good to hear in his voice, “this piracy concerns me, as a governor of the Bank of England, very nearly—and I can tell you that for my own part not one atom of blame attaches to you.”
“But I stopped the ship, my lord, and gave the blighters their chance—-”
“For Heaven's sake, Peter,” Lord Almeric said in an altered tone—equally good to hear—“get the ridiculous notion out of your head that anybody is going to pick a bone with you over anything you've done!”
He went over and put a hand on the sailor's shoulder to shake him.
“Be assured, old friend,” he said. “It will take more than this to shake the clean record of fifty years!”
“But it's such an exasperating thing! It leaves a fellow so helpless! I'm going through the ship with a fine sieve presently, but I feel it in my bones that whoever has swiped the kopecks has got clean away. Still, it has to be done. We can't leave anything to chance.”
“That is right,” said Lord Almeric. “And now, I suppose I'd better be getting a start made. I shall put what you say to Miss Torrance, Mr. Boon—but if I know anything of her, it won't deter her from joining us. But you must have some breakfast—”
“There's plenty to eat on the Merlin, Lord Almeric,” said I, “and if the lady is coming, and won't mind picnicking for once—why, we'll get away as soon as Sir Peter will permit us.”
“I shall have to go over your boat for form's sake,” said Sir Peter. “Come along. I'll do it now, and then we'll see what we can do to get you off without mishap.”
Another Blow
IT WAS difficult to imagine, when we were on deck again, that only half an hour gone the ship had been peopled by folk apparently dead. The seamen were washing the decks and going about their ordinary work pretty much as if nothing had happened. If there was a tendency to get to work in pairs, it was nothing to notice, and the demeanour of the men spoke well for the discipline Sir Peter kept on his ship.
“By thunder, young fellow,” said the captain, when he saw how the seaplane lay, “you re not lacking in nerve! It must have been a ticklish business.” And he added vulgarly: “She's as snug as a bug in a rug!”
“It'll be a job to get her off,” said I. “I hope you won't mind putting on a few of your hands to turn her, sir?
“As many as you want,” he said, “or as many as the awning will hold and bear the weight off. I'll take a look inside—so that I can give you clearance papers.”
He went up into the body of the machine, while I had a look at what Milliken was doing. Stout fellow that he is, he had rousted out the ship's smith, and together they had patched up the float where the aluminum had parted from the framework. If a little cockled, the float was as seaworthyas ever.
Sir Peter came down from the cabin, and opened the floats.
“I have to do it,” he apologized, “for your sake as well as my own.”
“That's all right, sir—and if when you get to New York you need any help in giving evidence to the police, you'll find me at the National Metallurgical Bank— Mr. Lamont and my mechanic, too.”
“Thanks, young man,” said the sailor. “Now about these hands you want. Here you—Clarke!” he said to a seaman who was standing by. “Nip along to the officer on duty. My compliments, and will he kindly muster as many hands aft as he can spare?”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
I will say for the British seaman that he is a handy fellow. The Merlin was no small weight, but Milliken and a quartermaster, with the aid of a score of men and a few rollers, soon had the seaplane round with her engine pointing to sea on the port quarter. It was now a question whether we should risk taking off with our passengers aboard or get safely afloat—which was not at all a certainty— and pick them up from one of the ship's boats.
Lord Almeric appeared with his secretary, and she—well—-
If I had thought of the secretary at all, I had thought of her as one of those efficient women, hard, competent—the sort of woman one can admire for qualities one would rather see in men. But Miss Torrance was just sheer girl. The littlest thing, until you got a good look at her, and then you saw that it was her ways rather than her size that gave the impression. She had the same clean look as my Merlin—silver and blue—only her hair was gold—and there was nothing the least bit cold about her. I was willing to bet that she was as competent as any he-woman alive, for when I took hold of her neat little hand on Lord Almeric's introduction, I was reminded somehow of Milliken's clever fist.
I spoke to Lord Almeric about taking off.
“I take it that you don't think you'll come a purler?” he asked.
“There's a good chance that we may,” said I. “I shouldn't like to have a lady aboard—-”
“You will make me feel extremely uncomfortable, Mr. Boon,” Miss Torrance interposed, “if you don't treat me exactly as you would a man. We won't sink, if we do capsize?”
“Oh, no.”
“Then it seems to me that we ought to risk it. Sir Peter has been delayed enough without having to put off a boat for me. Please don't consider me.”
I looked into her eyes. She was as genuine as the Koh-i-noor.
“Thank you,” I said. “Will you please step aboard, then?”
We said our good-byes, and we all climbed aboard save Milliken, who stood on a float to swing the propeller and to give the signal for release.
The score of men took hold of her wherever they could. Milliken swung the propeller. Contact! Full throttle. The Merlin gathered strength and began to slide. I waited until the ship began to rise on our side, then dropped my hand to Milliken—and we shot out over the water. Next moment we were circling the Parnassic to a cheer that was led by Sir Peter Weatherly himself, who stood sturdily on his damaged awning, and waved his braided cap in hearty farewell. The great ship began to gather way as we sped ahead of her.
Milliken climbed through the hatch with his usual air of complete calm, and began to be busy with hampers of food. Presently, eating a sandwich the while, he silently ousted me from the pilot's seat so that I might break my fast.
Naturally the main topic of conversation as we ate sandwiches and drank hot coffee was the piratical raid on the liner, but we soon exhausted the subject for lack of explanation of the mysterious sleep, and Miss Torrance then wanted to know what everything on the Merlin was for. Old Milliken, with a grin all over his ferocious mug, nodded at the wireless set. It was a bright idea and, having lowered the aerial, I fixed the receivers over her ears, switching into the phone attachment.
“I can hear some one talking,” she laughed delightedly, “and he's got the loveliest gruff voice! Oh, take this quick, somebody—something has happened to another ship!”
I stopped her from taking off the cap, and switched into the open receiver.
“Yes, sir!” came the harsh voice, with an unmistakable New England twang. “U.S. oil-carrying steamer, Westbury. We were slowed down by a red riding-light floating ahead of us, and a message came from the battleship Argonne, telling us to heave to because of danger ahead. At eight bells of the middle watch, sir. Since then we don't know a dern thing of anything, except that our forrard tank is short of three thousand litres of the highest grade aviation spirit by the gauge. Yes, sir. And there ain't a man on the ship, sir, that can say what was doin' in the last two hours. An' what I wanna know, sir, is—what the roustin' hell's bells of Jeeroosalum the United States navy's plain' at with one of the United States oil-freighters? I wanna know what prinked-up, bullion-ornamented, lime-juice-weaned sonofagun in a skin-tight u-ni-fo'm has had the sass—-!”
The rest was verbiage. I dissed the radio and looked at Dan and Lord Almeric, who were sitting side by side, open-mouthed. His lordship was the first to speak.
“Farragut, by Jove!” he said. “Piracy plus the knowledge of the twentieth century!”
To be continued in Vol.1 No. 2 of Air Wonder
***In 1932, when Britain and the U. S. A. adopted the metric system for weights and measures, the florin of 100 farthings became the British unit of money in a new decimal coinage. Back.