“IT WILL BE observed,” noted the pharmacopœia, “that the size of the drops of different liquids bears no relation to their density; sulphuric acid is stated by Durand to yield ninety drops to the fluid drachm, while water yields but forty-five, and oil of anise, according to Professor Procter, eighty-five. It follows, then, that the weight of the drop varies with most liquids; but few experiments on this subject have been recorded, the oldest being contained in Mohr’s Pharmacopœia Universalis of 1845. More accessible to the American and English student are the results of Bernoulli”—and so on.
Godahl—the Infallible Godahl—did not have the printed page before him, but he had visualized it in one glance only a few hours before and the imprint was still fresh on his memory. Reduced to elementals, a drop of liquid varies in size from one-third to one and one-half minims. Godahl split the difference and called a drop and a minim synonymous for his purpose. Later, if he were so minded, he might arrive at precise results by means of atomic weights. He began a lightning mental calculation as he sat idly stirring his beer of Pilsen with a tiny thermometer, which the proprieter of this Hanover Square resort served with each stein of beer.
“It should be fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, my friend,” said the master of the house, who in passing saw that Godahl was seemingly intent on the thermometer. Godahl was not intent at all on the tiny thread of mercury; rather he was studying the drops of golden brown liquid rolling off the pointed end of the glass instrument. However, it was as much as one’s life was worth to dispute the proper temperature of beer at this eating place, and Godahl smiled childish acquiescence and explained that he was awaiting with impatience the rise of half a degree of temperature before he indulged his thirst.
“It should be just such a color,” he mused—“possibly a little more inclined to orange—and a little sirupy when stone cold.” And, with his head thrown back and his eyes shut, he completed his calculation: there should be sixty-one thousand, four hundred and forty such drops to the gallon—at ten cents a drop!
“Tut, tut!” he exclaimed to himself, conscious of feeling exceedingly foolish; it was so simple, so insolently obvious, like all great inventions and discoveries once they have been uncovered.
This was one of the three tasks he had dreamed of, each worthy to be the adventure of a lifetime—three tasks he had dreamed of, as a poet dreams of a sonnet that shall some day flow from his pen with liquid cadence; as an author dreams of his masterpiece, the untold story; as an artist dreams of a picture with an atmosphere beyond the limits of known pigments.
One was the Julius Tower, where at the bottom of a well lay thirty millions in coined golden eagles, hoarded by an emperor more medieval than modern, against the time when he must resume the siege of Paris. The second was the fabled chain of the Incas, one hundred fathoms of yellow gold, beaten into links; it lies purple with age in the depths of a bottomless lake ten thousand feet in the clouds of the Peruvian Andes. And the third—it was this nectar of the gods, more potent, more precious than the rarest of collected vintages. The Julius Tower and the fabled chain were remote—the one guarded by an alien army, the other guarded by superstition—but this nectar lay within a stone’s throw of where Godahl sat now studying, with the fascination of a great discovery, the tiny drops of liquid falling from the tip of the glass thermometer, each drop shaping itself into a perfect sphere under stress of the same immutable laws that govern the suns.
“Ach!” cried a voice of truculence behind him, and his precious mug of beer was unceremoniously snatched away from the hand of Godahl by Herr Schmalz. In his abstraction the master rogue had violated a rule of the house—the temperature of the brew had climbed to sixty. Godahl, with an amused smile, watched the testy old host adjust the temperature of a fresh mug to a nicety, and when the mug was returned to him he drank deep at the other’s insistent command.
“Every man to his own religion,” thought Godahl. “His is fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit; mine is gold!”
Godahl, swinging his cane with a merry lilt, picked his way up the crooked street under the Elevated to Wall Street. To the east the Street was lined with grimy warehouses; to the west it was lined with marble. To the west was the heart of gold. Godahl turned west. Every window concealed a nest of aristocratic pirates plotting and scheming for more gold. In the street the hoi polloi were running errands for them, enviously cognizant of the shiny silk hats and limousines of their employers. Gold bought everything the heart could desire; gold attracted everything with invisible lines of force radiating on all sides.
An express wagon was backed up to the curb and curious pedestrians were peering over each other’s shoulders, attracted and held spellbound by no more rare a sight than a pyramid of rough pine boxes, each as big as a shoebox, piled on the pavement. The boxes contained gold—ingots of gold. If the guards, who stood on each side of the sweating porters carrying the boxes inside, had not looked so capable it is more than likely that many individuals in the crowd would have remembered that they had been born thieves thousands of years ago, and fought madly for the possession of this yellow stuff.
“It should obey the laws of gravity and be subject to the stress of vacuum,” mused Godahl, still delighted with the obvious idea he had discovered over his beer in Hanover Square. “I think,” he wandered on ruminatively—“I think I shall reduce it to its absolute atom and beat it into a frieze for the walls of my study. Sixty-one thousand drops to the gallon! It should make a frieze at least four inches wide. And why not?” he thought abruptly, as though some sprite in him had snickered at the grotesque idea. It was in this way that the dead and buried races of the Andes prized the yellow metal—not as a vulgar medium of trade and exchange, but as a symbol of kingship, a thing to be possessed only by a king. They decorated the walls of their royal palaces with bands of beaten gold. It must have been very satisfactory, thought Godahl, pursuing his whimsical idea; at least—he added as an afterthought—for the kings!
He paused at the curb and his esthetic eye sought not the boxes of gold that lay on the pavement, but the exquisite lines of the little structure of which the barred door stood open to receive the treasure. The building was no bigger than a penthouse on the roof of any of the surrounding skyscrapers; yet, with its pure lines and its stones mellowed with the wash of time, it was a polished gem in a raw setting. It stands, as any one may see, like a little Quaker lady drawing her shawl timidly about her to shut out the noise and clamor of the world crowding in on all sides. On one side rises a blank wall twenty or more stories in height; on the other, the cold gray pile of the Subtreasury stands guard as stolid and sullen as the Great Pyramid itself.
The windows were barred, so that even a bird might not enter; the door was steel-studded; the very stones seemed to cluster together as if to hide their seams from prying eyes. The cornices were ample for a flood and the tiles of the roof were as capacious as saucers. Before the days when electrolytic chemistry came to the aid of the crude agencies of earth, air, fire, and water, the very smoke that emerged from the blackened chimneys was well worth gathering, to be melted down in a crucible to yield its button of gold. The whole represented the ideal of a stronghouse of a past age. It was the Assay Office of the United States that Godahl regarded.
“If,” thought Godahl delightedly, as his eye caressed the picture—“if it were painted on china I am afraid, friend Godahl, you would not sleep until the plate was secure in your possession.”
The hour of one was suddenly, stridently ushered in by a crash of steam riveting hammers, like the rattle of machine guns. Little apes of men, high in the air back of the little building, were driving home the last of the roof girders of a tiny chimney-like skyscraper, which in several months’ time was to absorb the functions, with ultramodern methods, so long and so honorably exercised by the beautiful little house in the street—the old Assay Office.
Godahl passed on and shortly was in his lodgings. There was mellow contentment here—something he prized above all things; and he sighed to think that he would not know this comfort again for weeks. That same day, as an expert electrician named Dahlog—with a pronounced Danish accent—he presented his union card and obtained employment at sixty cents an hour. Things worth doing were worth doing well in his philosophy; and, though he hated soiled fingers and callous hands and walking delegates, he must regard the verities.
The spic-and-span new Assay Office of the United States is sometimes described as the House Without a Front Door. Indeed, it has no front door; but it has two back doors, and gets along very well at that. In reality it occupies two back yards, balancing itself nicely on the party line between a parcel of land fronting on Wall Street and another on Pine. The Wall Street entrance is effected through the dingy halls of the now tenantless Assay Office of the olden time; on the Pine Street side a tall iron paling suggests to the passer-by that something more precious than bricks and mortar is contained within. There is a wicket gate of ornamental iron in the fence, wide enough to admit two men abreast, or to allow the passage of the hand trucks laden with boxes of gold and silver bullion. A long wooden ramp, uncovered—a temporary structure—connects the street with a window in the second story of the new building, which for the time is serving the purpose of a door.
Some day the precious parcel of land standing between the gaunt face of the new building and the street will be occupied by a pretentious façade, and then the magnificent plant that turns out pure gold day and night at the rate of some forty million dollars a year will be lost to view entirely. Now, to the street passenger it suggests nothing of its functions—suggests less, in fact, to the imagination than the pine boxes laden with bullion, whose appearance daily is always calculated to draw a breathless audience.
The walls are sheer, without architectural embellishment of any kind; it is, in fact, nothing more than the rear of a skyscraper, some day to be given a face.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon of a June day. The upper windows of the Assay Office stood open, and through the apertures there emerged a fine sustained hum, like the note of some far-away violin. It told the passer-by that the motor generators of the electrolytic plant within were churning at their eternal task of separating gold from dross.
A party of four men were in the act of leaving the place on the Pine Street side. One was the superintendent of the plant and another the master refiner, the two men responsible for the wealth within—two men whose books were balanced each year on a set of scales that will weigh a long ton or a lead-pencil mark with equal nicety.
A third man of the party was a Canadian government official who had come down from Ottawa to inspect this latest monument to the science of electrolytic chemistry. He was not interested in the Assay Office as a stronghouse—it had long ago passed into tradition that the Mint of the United States, with its accessories, is inviolable; and to ask whether this latest plant of its kind in the world were burglar-proof would be to laugh.
The fourth member of the party was the chief of a division of the United States Secret Service, who in passing through the city had run down to find out whether Guinea gold owed its peculiar color to a unique atomic structure or to the presence of a trace of silver. On the answer hung the fate of two rascals he had laid by the heels.
“No; you haven’t the idea yet,” the master refiner was saying to the Canadian official. “We superimpose a low frequency alternating current on the direct current for the purpose of shaking out the bubbles of gas that otherwise would prove very troublesome.”
“It is due to a small percentage of silver,” the superintendent was explaining to the secret agent; and the latter was gnawing his mustache in chagrin, for the answer meant that he had barked a ’coon up the wrong tree.
At this point an incident occurred, seemingly trivial in itself, the significance of which, however, struck the four with the force of a thunderbolt a few hours later on that momentous evening. It had to do with the secret agent’s enforced moderation in the matter of tobacco. His physician had ordered him to cut his nicotine allowance down to three cigars a day; and now, in the first throes of his abstention, he was as cross as a bear with a sore toe. The whiff of an Irishman’s cutty-pipe smote his nostrils as the little party passed through the gate.
Now there is something about the exotic fragrance of a well-seasoned cutty-pipe that induces in those who happen to be in its immediate neighborhood an almost supranormal desire for a puff of the weed. Whether it was the intensive quality of the tobacco itself, the ripeness of the clay cutty-pipe, or the fact that the cutty-pipe is subjected to a forced draft by reason of the extreme abbreviation of its stem—whichever of these elementary causes it might have been—the psychological effect was the same.
The secret agent stared vacantly about him. A mud rat—so the brown-jeaned scavengers whose business it is to scoop mud out of catch-basins are known—was igniting a fresh charge of tobacco in the lee of his mud cart, a water-tight affair of sheet steel. The tempted one drew a cigar from his pocket and regarded it with a scowl.
“It’s the vile pipe that scavenger is hitting up as though it were a blast furnace!” explained the secret agent guiltily as he bit off the end of the cigar. “This is my after-dinner pill; here goes!”
He searched his pockets for a match, forgetting that he had adopted the practice of traveling matchless to make life easier. He appealed to his three companions, but they could not scare up a match among them.
“What!” ejaculated the secret agent incredulously. “Do you mean to say there are three able-bodied men in one bunch who turn up their noses at tobacco! I have heard,” he went on, with infinite sarcasm, “of isolated instances—of individuals—like our friend, Doctor Pease, for example; but three men in one spot—I am amazed!”
It was true nevertheless.
“Will you honor me with a light?” said the secret agent, stepping over to the mud rat and touching him on the shoulder, interrupting that worthy in the act of dumping a scoopful of subterranean mud into the capacious bottom of his cart. “You seem to be the only man in my class around here,” he added facetiously. “We have a vice or two in common. My friends,” he said, airily indicating the three beside him, “are pale angels.”
The mud rat surveyed the four with an air of vague curiosity. He went through the pockets of his jeans, but his hands came away empty; so, with the free-masonry of smokers, he offered the other the live coal in his cutty-pipe for a light, which the agent accepted gracefully.
“A most remarkable mud rat!” commented the secret agent. “Did you notice that he wore rubber gloves? I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that he patronized a manicure on holidays!”
As a matter of fact, this particular mud rat did not confine his patronage of manicures to holidays. He had the finest set of fingers in Greater New York.
“Also,” noted the professional thief-chaser mechanically, “his horse, which is a little curbed on the nigh side, has the number 2-4-6 burned in its hoofs.”
“Yours must be a very interesting life,” commented the bland Canadian, who had never before had the good fortune to dally with a real secret agent.
“It has its drawbacks at times,” said the other, smiling over his cigar. “A man gets into this stupid habit of noting details, until at the end of the day his head is so muddled with facts for cataloguing that he can’t sleep.”
An hour passed; and still Pine Street, in front of the back window that is used as a door, gave no hint of the history then in the making to mark this day in the annals of crime. At the stroke of five the tall buildings vomited forth their hives of workers. The Wall Street District empties itself swiftly at this period of the year, when there are still several hours of daylight for sports afield before dinner for the army of clerks. Fifteen minutes later only a thin stream remained of the flood that had overflowed the sidewalks.
A pushcart man, catering to messenger boys and the open-air brokers of the curb, was resting on his cart taking stock of his day’s business. The mud rat who worked at his unsavory calling with the aid of rubber gloves was still industriously burrowing in the depths of the manhole; a white-suited street-sweeper, a son of sunny Italy, with his naturalization papers in his pocket, was pursuing his task to the tune of the Miserere, with an insistent accenting of the grace-note at the antepenult.
A policeman or two swung along the curb. A truck, with wheels as big as a merry-go-round, drawn by ten spans of horses, bearing a sixty-ton girder for the new Equitable Building round the corner, rolled past the scene like a Juggernaut.
One—even one with the sharp eyes of a secret agent—might have photographed the scene at this moment and still overlooked the obvious clew to the situation. The drama was in full swing. It was nearing the hour of six when the curtain came down on the big act—marked, as is usual, by the gentle tinkling of a bell.
On the seventh floor of the Assay Office a man was seen to stop his task suddenly at the sound of the bell, and to look at the switchboard standing on the west side of the room. He crossed the room hurriedly, disappearing; he reappeared at the window, staring blankly and rubbing his eyes.
Two miles away, one minute later, a liveried page, silver salver in hand, passed through the corridors and parlors of the Holland House, droning wearily:
“Mister Hamilton! Mister Hamilton!”
“They are paging you,” said the open-eared secret agent to the young master refiner. “Here, boy!”
“Telephone, sir—number sixteen!” And he led the master refiner to the indicated booth.
“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!
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 turned 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?”
An indulgent smile curled Hamilton’s lips.
“The process of extracting gold from mud is one of the simplest in chemistry and mechanics. And the joke is,” he went on, screwing up the corners of his mouth, “that when that crafty mud rat has manufactured it into bullion again he will probably have the supreme gall of bringing it here and asking us to buy it. The devil of it is that we shall have to buy it too!”
At this remote date the Assay Office officials are still in doubt whether they have repurchased their stolen treasure. It is worthwhile to say in passing that the surety companies responsible for the men responsible for the treasure of the Government Assay Office are still engaged in suing each other and the various contractors responsible for fitting and inspecting the interior of the new building.
The robbery undoubtedly had been planned and the properties arranged months ahead of time; but, aside from the fact that an expert electrician named Dahlog, who had been employed on the premises at odd times—a man with a pronounced Danish accent—turned up hopelessly missing, the case has not progressed. It promises in time to become as celebrated in court annals as the antique litigation of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce.
Whitaker seldom confessed his failures; but several months later, over cigars in the library of his friend Godahl the exquisite, he related the story—unabridged—of the most remarkable bit of thievery in his experience. It was his secret hope that the acute mind of this celebrated dilettante, who had many times pointed his researches with astounding analyses, might help to the solution. Godahl laughed.
“Let us go below the surface,” said Godahl. “Abolish the lure of gold and the world will be born good again. Your mud rat is the apotheosis of the pickpocket. How much better they managed the whole thing ten thousand years ago! To the remote races of the Andes gold was not a vulgar medium of trade and exchange. It was a symbol of kingship—a thing to be possessed only by kings.
“In my small way,” said Godahl deprecatingly, with a wave of his fine hands, “I have erected a monument to the Incas in this room. My frieze—have you noticed it? A poor thing! Where I have used grains of gold, they used pounds. But to me it symbolizes the same poetic idea. Will you join me in a fresh cigar? Ah! I beg your pardon! One’s physician is a tyrant!”
