The Black Mask — page 14: what you’re looking at

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

— 7 The Man Who Was Seven Snedeker to know about it—yet. Not until we are ready to spring the whole story. He might go blabbing to the cops and spill our fat in the fire, - They would try to grab all the credit and nose in om the reward. Then where would our island be? We don’t want—” “For the love of Mike, Jim, can the soliloguy and get down to cases. What did you find?” : “T’m telling you fast as I can, ain’t I? Of course, if you want to call in every flattie on the force to share our pie or take it all away from us and put that island in the ‘too muchee bime- by’—” Peiperson threw up his hands in mock despair and Jim, grinning, got down to cases as exhorted. “T had gone over every inch of the vault—walls, floor, ceiling, every nook and corner—several times without see- ing a single thing out of kilter, and was standing thinking what to do next, wishing Daniels would shut up long enough to let me think uninterruptedly for a second, when I noticed one of the plates in the floor. “The vault is built up, Snedeker told me, of three-inch chrome steel plates, three feet square, bolted together un- derneath like those of a battleship and set in concrete. The vault, the whole building, in fact, rests on solid ground, Snedeker said, without cellar or space of any kind below the level of the street. Seems they were afraid of wa- ter in that locality. He had assured me that our burglars could not have broken in from underground whatever other route they may have taken. Of course, I took his say-so on this point for what it might be worth, and no more. _ “But as I looked at that plate in the middle of the vault floor I began to pect that his confidence was not any of the others. It was the appear- ance of the lines where it joined the four around it that made me kneel down for closer. examination. And, you know, I don’t stoop my proud stomach any more than I have to. Luckily Daniels was puttering around absorbed in his monologue of Gott- strafing all bank burglars and paying no particular attention to what I was doing. His opinion of detectives, I had gathered, was only one point bet- ter than it was of burglars. “What first had -attracted my atten- tion was no more than that the lines of demarkation between this particular plate and the others seemed a bit wider than the corresponding lines elsewhere and quite a bit dirtier, as if they were filled with greasy dust. When I knelt I found I was right about both—they were wider and they were dirtier. It was greasy dust or dusty grease and deeper than I could probe with my fin- ger-nail, though the similar lines near- by were not depressed over a few hun- dredths of an inch. “T confess that my hand trembled as I opened the blade of my knife and thrust it into those cracks—not in one place only but in a dozen, on all four sides of the plate. And each time it went clear in its full length without meeting any obstruction! I scraped out a little bit of that ‘grease’—I'll show it to you in a minute—and then smoothed over all the holes that I had made. What do you think of that, Sticking an ordinary knife blade through chrome steel!” “Let’s look at that sample of Carranaugh took his wallet from his pocket and from it a cigarette-paper- wrapped pellet of a greasy gray steel color. It was odorless, had the feeling and consistency of paraffine filled with small grit. | “And then?” asked Peiperson, laying