by Otto Penzler
“Yes; this is Hamilton. Who is this? Jackson, you say? It doesn’t sound like your voice. What’s that? Say that again. Come close to the phone, man—I can’t make out what you are trying——Empty, you say?”
The young scientist looked blankly at the narrow walls of the booth that held him. Then with a peremptory note in his voice:
“Who is this? Where are you? What is this tomfoolery anyway?”
He pressed the receiver to his ear, his heart thumping.
“Empty! The tank is empty? You are—crazy—man!”
Evidently the voice at the other end of the wire had become incoherent.
“Jackson,” cried Hamilton sharply, “you are lying! You are seeing things! Can you understand me?”
He waited for the answer, which did not come—only a suppressed gasp through the telephone. “Jackson!” he cried. “Listen to me! Turn round and walk to the tank; then come back and tell me what you see! … Boy!” he shouted through the half-open door of the booth. A dozen pages rushed for the door. “Tell Mr. Whitaker to come to me at once. He is the man with the red mustache who is sitting on the ottoman in the smoking-room.”
When Whitaker, the secret agent, thrust his head in at the door he was met by Hamilton bounding out. Hamilton’s face told the agent that something big was afoot, and as the other dashed out he followed. Hamilton picked up Banks, the superintendent, on the way out.
They left the Canadian gasping and alone. The nice little dinner for four that had been planned for the evening was off. The three officials were half a dozen blocks down-town in a taxicab before the Canadian guest of honor woke up to the fact that, as the whitefaced refiner had stated bluntly, something was afoot that was not his affair.
The street scene that met the eyes of the three, as they tumbled out of their cab in Pine Street and ran up the long ramp leading to the door, was much the same as when they had passed out a short time before—the same actors in different persons, that was all. It was not until three days later that the story leaked out, and crowds surrounded the block, gazing at the gaunt Assay Office as they were wont in lesser numbers to gaze at the rough pine boxes laden with gold.
While the dumpcart driver and the driver of a steel truck were disputing the right-of-way at the Nassau Street corner, a little group of dumfounded men stood about a huge porcelain tank on the seventh floor of the building. From their awed silence the tank might have been a coffin. The tank was empty!
Forty gallons of gold, held suspended in an acid solution of the consistency of good beer at just the right temperature, had evaporated into thin air—forty gallons—sixty-one thousand drops to the gallon—at ten cents a drop! Of it now there remained only a few dirty pools settling in the unevenness of the lining.
Hanging suspended like washing on the line were two parallel rows of golden shingles. On one line they were covered with canvas, black with the scum of dross; on the other, the precious metal, still wet and steaming, had formed itself into beautiful branching crystals. But the nectar—the nectar of the gods—through which the dense electric currents worked in their eternal process of purifying, selecting, rejecting—the nectar of the gods was gone!
III
The three officials looked at each other foolishly. Each in his own way, according to his lights and his training, was doing his utmost to grasp the idea that presented itself with the force of a sledgehammer blow.
According to the testimony of the switchboard, between the hours of four and six o’clock on this June afternoon, in the year of grace nineteen hundred and thirteen, forty gallons of piping-hot gold-plating solution, valued at ten cents the drop, six thousand dollars the gallon, a quarter of a million dollars the bulk, had been surreptitiously removed by a thief—undoubtedly a thief—so much was obvious—from the inviolable precincts of the New York Assay Office, adjunct to the United States Mint. Jackson, the assistant refiner on night duty, warned of the interrupted electric current by the bell on the switchboard, was the first to give the alarm.
At first blush it would seem that a ton of hay, wrapped up in one package, would be far easier loot as to bulk. Counting two grains of gold to a drop of liquor, the very weight of the stuff would have been over ten thousand troy ounces—over eight hundred pounds; and its bulk, counting seven gallons to the cubic foot, would have been nearly six cubic feet—the size of a very respectable block of granite. Yet eight hundred pounds, six cubic feet, of the stuff, a quarter of a million dollars, had unquestionably departed without leaving a trace of its path.
As has been said, the Assay Office possesses two perfectly serviceable means of exit and ingress—back doors, it is true; but still doors. The structure possesses possibly fifty windows. Whitaker raised a window and peered out. The walls were as sheer as the polished sides of an upright piano. That the intruder might have entered by a window was a childish suggestion, quickly dismissed.
The doors were at all times of day and night guarded by intricate mechanical contrivances, of which no one man knew all the secrets. In addition there were the human guards, with their army six-shooters of the peculiarly businesslike aspect that tempts one to refer to them as guns.
The three officials all tried to say something after a time; but the thing was beyond words so soon after the impact. The secret agent, trained for such occasions, was the first to collect his wits. He began examining the rifled tank. He had not gone far before he began to swear softly to himself. The tank was composed of porcelain in a steel retainer. He pointed to the two rods that ran parallel lengthwise of the empty receptacle. These two rods were covered with a saddle of yellow metal throughout their extent.
Suspended from the rods were hooks roughly cut out of the same sheet of metal. Suspended from the hooks on one rod were some fifty canvas sacks, each the size of a man’s sock. They contained crude bullion, from which the plating solution extracted its pure gold. On the other rod, suspended from similar hooks, were yellow plates ten or twelve inches long, varying from one-eighth to an inch thick, covered with a fine incrustation of yellow crystals, clustering together like grains of damp sugar.
“What is all this stuff?” he asked bluntly, turning to his companions who had sprung to his side when he exclaimed: “Is it gold?”
The two men nodded assent. It was solid gold, pure gold—even to the roughly hewn hooks. The very electrical connections were of gold.
“What’s it worth?” demanded Whitaker.
“I could tell you in a second from my books—” began the superintendent.
“Never mind your books! A million?”
The superintendent shook his head. He could not yet grasp details.
“Half a million?”
“Easily!” responded the refiner. “Yes; quite that, I should say.”
Whitaker lifted one of the incrusted plates, still wet from the solution in which it had been immersed so short a time before. He swung it on his finger by means of its golden hook.
“Doesn’t it strike you as a bit strange,” he said, “that a thief with wit enough to make away with six hundred pounds of your precious juice should have left behind half a million dollars in raw gold, lying loose in the middle of a room?”
This was a nut that for the time being resisted cracking. The secret agent said, “Humph!” and fingered his vest pocket for the interdicted cigar, which was not there.
“In emergencies,” he said absent-mindedly, “it is justifiable.” He turned to Banks and added: “See that no one leaves the building until I return. The first thing to do—it’s foolish, but it must be done—is to round up all your employees and bring them here. I suppose all of them knocked off for the day with a clean shower?”
Yes; all the men had passed through the changing room, emerging therefrom after a shower bath, a fresh suit of clothes and an inspection. Such is the daily routine.
Whitaker walked thoughtfully down the ramp to the street and sought out a shop where he might procure fuel for thought—cigars; long, strong, and black. Then he felt
better. As he turned into Pine Street from Nassau he noted a small boy, of the free tribe of street urchins, holding up one dirty foot and howling with pain.
Whitaker’s methodical mind noted that the foot was of a singularly blotched appearance, as though from a burn; but he had weightier things on hand than rescuing small boys in distress. The details of the start of the investigation were soon put through when he reëntered the office. Every employee of the institution was rounded up, though it was ten o’clock before the last startled porter was led protesting before the stern officials and put to the question. The trail was blank.
“It’s a blessed thing we have got you with us,” said Banks, who had been biting his finger-nails since the opening of the drama. “It kind of takes off the curse.”
He looked at Whitaker, truly thankful that so broad a pair of shoulders was there to take the burden.
“Humph!” said Whitaker, who was studying the toes of his shoes as though they contained the answer to the riddle. “It is quite evident,” he began, “that eight hundred pounds of gold, especially in a fluid state, did not get up and walk off without help. I think,” he said, rising, “that before we go farther I will take lessons in electrolytic chemistry. We haven’t lost much time on this case and we can afford to waste a few minutes getting at fundamentals.”
They retired to the seventh floor, the floor of the yawning porcelain tank; and in a short time Whitaker was in possession of the facts. It was a simple system, when all is said and done, this system of refining gold, which had been worked out by the greatest students of the time. The secret agent was put through the elementals of the process of transmuting gold from the alloy by means of the electric current.
“Very clever indeed!” remarked Whitaker. “Also, gentlemen, let me add that it is very clever indeed to lock up gold bars downstairs in safes that cost a fortune, and leave a tankful of the stuff standing in the center of an unprotected room like this.”
“But who could come seven stories up in the air and get away with stuff of this bulk?” querulously interjected Hamilton. “The thing is preposterous!”
“The preposterous thing,” said Whitaker, with his drawl, “has occurred—apparently under your very noses; and, from the looks of things, the fact that the liquor was steaming hot did not interfere with the plans of the thief in the least. What is that collection of pipes?”
He indicated a nest of black-varnished iron pipes running along the outside of the tank.
“Those are the conduits to carry the electric wires,” explained the master refiner.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he exclaimed aloud and leaped into the empty tank, running his fingers with feverish haste over the conduit outlets.
“By Gad! I have got it!” he cried, his voice a high falsetto under stress of his excitement. “Hand me a portable light—quick!”
With an electric bulb at the end of a portable cord, he inspected every inch of the tank, more especially the outlet boxes of the electric wires. Four tubes were required to carry the electric current.
There were five. The fifth was empty of wires. So cunningly concealed it lay behind an elbow-joint that only eyes sharpened by an idea born of genius could have detected it. With a cry of triumph, the refiner dashed to the door and down the stone stairs. He was at the panel of the switchboard in the converting-room, where the electric current is properly tuned for its task of assaying. There were only four conduits leading from the upper floor—the fifth had lost itself somewhere among the studdings and joists of concrete and steel.
The astonished Whitaker, finding his recently acquired knowledge insufficient to follow the leaping mind of Hamilton, finally seized that individual and cornered him.
“What is it?” he cried.
“It’s as plain as the nose on a man’s face!” cried Hamilton. “That fifth tube! Good Heavens! man, are you so stupid? That fifth tube could drain that tank of its last drop by siphoning it out!” He broke away, cheering. “They have taken our gold out of the tank, but they haven’t got it away from the building yet. Find out where that fifth tube runs to and there you will find our gold!”
Through the simple means of a siphon their forty gallons of precious liquor could have been removed through an aperture scarcely larger than a pinhole. The dawn was beginning to break. Whitaker’s mind, clogged by its abnormal meal of technical details, was beginning to run cleanly again.
“Stop!” cried Whitaker. “I am in charge of this affair. I want you to answer my questions. In the first place,” he cried, seizing the refiner by the arm and twisting his hand above his head, “what is the matter with your hands?”
Hamilton’s hands, where he had been pawing about in the electrolytic tank, were stained brown, as though from cautery. They were drawn with pain, though in his excitement, up to this moment he had not noticed it.
“Cyanide of potassium!”
“Where did it come from? Quick!”
“Oh, you fool! The tank—the tank, of course. The process—I went all through it with you. The tank contained chloride of gold dissolved in cyanide of potassium!”
“Does it hurt?” inquired Whitaker, with an irritating slowness.
“Hurt! Do you think you can take a bath in red-hot acid and—— Help me trace that extra tube. How the deuce do you suppose that tube ever got there?”
Instantly the picture of a small burned foot came before Whitaker—an inspiration. He held the struggling Hamilton as in a vise.
“If you will sit still three minutes,” said Whitaker, his eye gleaming and a forbidden cigar cocked fiercely, “I will guarantee to lead you to the place where your precious gold is—or was; I won’t promise which. Or, here—come along with me!” he said as an afterthought; and the pair started for the street on the run.
Whitaker came to a stop on the corner where he had seen the barefooted boy yelling with pain.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a wet spot on the pavement where a liquid had collected in the ruck about a sewer opening. Hamilton dug his hands in the dirt and sprang up with a cry. In the mud were tiny needles of an orange yellow color.
“There it is! There’s our gold!” he cried ecstatically; and then, with a despairing gesture: “In the sewer!”
Whitaker was taking advantage of the refiner’s desolation to quiz an interested policeman. Yes; it was a fact that a steel dumpcart and a steel derrick wagon had brushed hubs at this corner about six o’clock, and that the shock had washed as much as a bucketful of mud out of the dumpcart.
Did the policeman happen to have the names of the drivers? He did, because there had ensued quite a flow of language over the accident, but no arrests. The derrick wagon belonged to the Degnon Company; and the dumpcart was one of the wagons of the General Light and Power Company. Whitaker broke into an easy laugh.
Half an hour later the foreman of the stables of the General Company was on the carpet before the fierce cigar. Could he produce Dumpcart Number Thirty-six, to which—Whitaker blew rings about his head—was attached a horse with a slight curb on its nigh hind leg? The horse—Number 2-4-6—was driven by a man who wore rubber gloves. Thus the expert thief-catcher.
“Simple as falling off a log!” Whitaker’s gesture seemed to say as he put the question to the stable boss. Then he said:
“It all goes to show that the average thief loses in the long run in the battle of wits, because he leaves some apparently inconsequential clew on his trail—some tiny clew that is as broad as a state road to a trained intelligence. If, for instance,” he said, forgetting for the moment the man standing before him twirling his hat in his hands—“If, for instance, that mud rat had not played on my one weakness, by blowing the smoke from his infernal cutty into my face, the chances are that he would have given me a long chase.”
“The mud rat!” exclaimed the two officials in unison.
The trained intelligence accepted their implied and wondering admiration of his powers of divination with a nod, and turne
d again to the stable boss.
“Now, my man!” he said. “I want Dumpcart Number Thirty-six, the man who was driving it this afternoon, and the horse here at the gate in fifteen minutes. I will send one of my men with you.”
“If you can tell me where to lay hands on it, sor,” said the stable boss, still rotating his hat, “I would be much obliged to you, sor. Dumpcart Thirty-six was stolen from the stables this noon, and we had just sent out a general alarm for it through the police when your man nabbed me.”
At this point in the prosecution of the investigation of the looting of the Assay Office of its liquid assets the irresistible force of the trained intelligence in charge met with an immovable post. It never got much farther. The missing wagon was found—abandoned in the Newark meadows—the humane driver having provided the horse liberally with grain and hay before departing.
Curiously enough, the interior of the wagon had been coated with some acid-proof varnish. In the bottom, crystallized by the cold, was a handful of needles of gold, to show that Dumpcart Number Thirty-six was indeed the receptacle in which the thief had carted off forty gallons of gold worth ten cents a drop.
It was a simple matter to trace the mysterious pipe from the gold tank through the junction boxes of the electric system to the electrical manhole in the street. Evidences were numerous that this extra conduit had been installed by the far-thinking thief at some time during the period when the building was in process of erection. In the bottom of the manhole were found a few pints of the precious stuff that had been siphoned down through seven floors to the street by the adroit expedient of breaking open a concealed plug.
“I must confess I am not much of a scientist,” said Whitaker a week later; “and before we turn the page on this subject I want to find out one thing: Admitting that our dumpcart friend got away with a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of gold in the form of mud, what value would it be to him? How could he get the gold out of it?”