CHAPTER TWO OF ARK OF THE COVENANT Clues and False Leads IT WAS around quarter past eight o'clock when I got back to the National Metallurgical. I found it difficult to realize that only an hour had passed since I had landed with my father at the seaplane jetty on the west side of Battery Park, and I had a feeling that the time should have been close to noon at least, for the hour had been crammed with incident and impression. A number of the bank executives had arrived, and the place already had a flustered air of activity. The chief accountant was with my father, and judged by the look of him that he was a very scared man. Apparently he and the president had been calculating the bank's losses, for as I came into the room the old man drew a firm line under two rows of figures he had written on a small piece of paper. "A good haul, Risbridger," my father was saying casually. "Two hundred and fifty-three thousand, five hundred dollars in gold. Two hundred and thirty-four thousand, seven hundred in securities. But God knows they didn't take all we had. You had better see about broadcasting the descriptions and numbers of the securities, and inform the police. If the thieves have not succeeded in getting out of the country, we may get a line on them, should they attempt to dispose of the scrip. See to this at once, will you?" The white-faced official scurried away, glad to have something to occupy his mind, and my father turned to me. I told him everything I had picked up, and he listened without comment until I had finished. "M'm," he said. "That's a queer thing about the gold tarnishing. What do you make of it, son?" "I don't know quite what to make of it," I told him. "My mind somehow connects it with whatever was used to dope the watchmen and the police. The stuff would have to be distributed in such a way that its fumes could be breathed. The whole affair has such unusual features, it might even prove that if we were to discover what had sent everyone to sleep, we might land on the thing that tarnished Jaxon's watch and the policeman's locket. I don't know of anything that has such an effect on gold, nor of anything capable of producing the anaesthesia. I'm inclined to think some sort of gas was used. The first difficulty we're up against is that none of the sufferers were conscious of even the slightest smell." "Whew!" my father whistled. "A new gas, eh? If you're right, Jimmy, we're up against a big thing. When a gang of crooks can put the whole of the Wall Street district to sleep and get away with it, can you prophesy where the game finds its limit?" "It opens up limitless possibilities," I agreed. "There's no saying where this morning's work will end," the old man mused. "As it stands, if the other banks have been as easily entered as we have, there's the makings of a fine old panic." "If there's going to be ructions, dad--don't you think you'd better meet them in comfort? What about a bath and breakfast?" The old man surprised me by letting out a sudden little laugh, with a queer note in it, as if some hidden chord in his memory had been struck. "You're like your mother, Jimmy," he said, after a pause. "You have her fair hair and grey eyes, and when you said that--I could fancy it was she who spoke. You see, son, life was pretty full of ructions in the old days, and you said the very thing she would have said when trouble was brewing. You don't remember your mother?" I shook my head. My mother died when I was an infant, and I had never created any definite picture of her, to a great extent, because my father seldom spoke of her. I expect it was that he missed her too much. She had been dead close on thirty-five years, but I could see, even then in his presidential room, how much she still meant to him. He looked at me queerly, and I have never seen him so softened either before or since. "No," he said slowly. "You were only a very little fellow when--" He broke off and lifted his shoulders in a sigh. "You're right," he said. "Breakfast's the idea." I anticipated that by this time there would be a jam in the subways and on the street cars, and as I wanted him to have as little physical exertion as possible, I telephoned for an automobile. While we waited my father issued instructions for carrying on in his absence. When the car came, we rode uptown through the rapidly filling streets to a quiet hotel where he would not be recognized, and we both had a bath and shave before breakfast. I was wishing now that I knew enough about banking to stand by during the crisis I felt was imminent; not that I fancied my father could not stand alone, but I think my wish came largely out of the new realization of how much I cared for the old man. I wanted to be of some assistance, but I did not know just how. I spoke to him about it as we were finishing breakfast. "Look here, dad," I said. "I want to stand by. I can be of no use to you on the banking side, but I could be a fairly good watch-dog. If I can do anything to keep trouble some people off you, or if I can run errands or attend to the commissariat--just say the word. I'll do anything I can." "I know that, son," the old man smiled, "but I'm well supplied with watch-dogs and messengers, who know my ways. No. Listen. I'll give you better than that to do. My hands will be full of the complications that are bound to rise from this raid on the banks, and I won't have time for anything else. In that tarnishing of the gold idea you've hit on something that maybe will give you further ideas, and I'd like you to follow up your theory of the gas and see what it leads to. You're an engineer, and you'll attack the problem from a different angle from that of the average detective. You can have a free hand in the matter of expense." The old man's suggestion almost took my breath away, and I fancy my face got red. I must explain that while my father and myself had been good enough friends up to this, our way had lain very much apart. He was devoted to his banking business, and I was immersed in aeronautical research. There had been times when we did not meet for months and when we came together again it had simply been, "Hullo, Jimmy!" and "Hullo, dad!" -- pretty much as if we had parted overnight. I knew all right what I thought of him. What he thought of me had been another story. That he had a good enough opinion of me to hand me a job of this sort, and give me the run of his purse with it, put me in such a way that I could only nod acceptance. "Good boy," said he. "Now here's another point. During the day you'll be free to conduct your investigations, but I shall want you to fly me into the country every evening. I'm not going to stop in town and have the telephone buzzing in my ear all night. I'll keep Hazeldene open and live there. Can you do it?" "Do it!" I cried. "Why, dad, there's nothing I'd like better--and if at any time I should be called away on this job, you'll find Milliken a first-class man." "That's settled then. I take it you have something better in your shed than the old seaplane you used this morning?" "You bet. There's my own Merlin. Three hundred kilometres and more an hour are nothing to her. I'll have her tuned up for you right away. I can get you from the Battery to Hazeldene well inside the half-hour." "Bully!" said the old man, and rose with a cigar going strong. "Now I must get back to the back, son." Some Powdered Glass WE drove back to the Metallurgical through streets that seethed with excited humanity. Newsboys were running about, offending the car with unlawful and raucous yells, flourishing newsbills that smote the eyeballs with their flaming scarelines. One journal, apparently despairing of adjectives sufficiently lurid to describe the reported enormity of the raid on the banks, had printed a sheet containing nothing but one large exclamation mark. Broadway was Babel. At every other corner policemen were trying to move on the crowds that inevitably clustered round each fortunate with a newspaper, and so dense was the press at the lower end of Broadway that it took two mounted men nearly a quarter of an hour to drive a path for the car through the last hundred paces to the bank door. Once we were inside, I immediately got through to my mechanic, Milliken, on the telephone, and told him to tune up the Merlin. Wise fellow that he is, he had anticipated the order, and could promise to have the plane ready in a couple of hours. Next I spoke to the housekeeper at Hazeldene and arranged for the place to be kept open for my father and myself. In the ordinary way I lived in a hut close to the hangar and workshops on the beach, only joining my father at Hazeldene when he went there for the week ends. He had been at the cottage on one of these visits when the news of the robbery had pulled him out of bed for our flight this Monday morning. I was on the point of stepping out to make what investigations I could when my father called me into his room. He had come upon an old Eastern piece of gold money which he kept as a curiosity in one of the drawers of his desk. It was not of the ordinary disc shape, but was like two little beans stuck together crosswise and turned over each other. I had seen it before as a shining piece of particularly pure gold, but now it was sadly dulled to a colour with which I was becoming familiar. "You had better keep that, Jimmy, my father said. "I expect you'd like to have a sample of the tarnishing." I was glad to have it, and I wrapped it in a scrap of tissue paper before placing it in a...
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