Air Wonder Stories, July 1929 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ARK OF THE COVENANT 13 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 pulve- rization 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 be- side 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 Na- tional 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 pow- dered 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 B- 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 con- tainers; 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 ex- plosion?” 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?” “T 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 positive- ly—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 be- came 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 jdark—but more spread about and thinned down.” “Ah, phosphorescent!” “T 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.” “Ts 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 ay. 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,” comnliclooolks.com