The Ark of the Covenant 
by Victor MacClure 


"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 



CHAPTER ONE 
The Coming of the Mystery 
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.