Air Wonder Stories, July 1929 — page 23: what you’re looking at

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

THE ARK OF THE COVENANT 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 im- purity 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.” “T think it binds it. Wouldn’t you say that the crooks who broke into the banks this morning sent the radium to the institutes?” “Would you? You can be safe, perhaps, in as- suming 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 tobbery,.and the gas, and the sending of the securi- ties, 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 ad- ministered, Dan? Have you come on anything to explain the tarnishing of the gold?” Dan rattled his loose change before replying. “T 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!” CHAPTER FOUR Two Clues DID not mean to leave Dan Lamont that after- I noon until we had gone over all the points of the robbery very thoroughly. I have the great- est 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-produc- ing 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,” 21 “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 de- prived humans of their lives. I dare say I deserved all the chafing 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. “Tve 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 béside 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 van- ished in some mysterious fashion, during the night, from one of the big containers in New Jersey be- longing to the Standard Oil Company. “That's a curious thing,” said I. “Tt 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 ses 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 an- other funny story is 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. “Tt’s now twenty minutes to four,” he said calm- ly. ‘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 the fuel 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 the watchman had sworn comnlicloooks.com