We were sitting in the lobby of the Willard, Bill Quinn and I, watching the constant stream of politicians, pretty women, and petty office seekers who drift constantly through the heart of Washington.
Suddenly, under his breath, I heard Quinn mutter, "Hello!" and, following his eyes, I saw a trim, dapper, almost effeminate-looking chap of about twenty-five strolling through Peacock Alley as if he didn't have a care in the world.
"What's the matter?" I inquired. "Somebody who oughtn't to be here?"
"Not at all. He's got a perfect right to be anywhere he pleases, but I didn't know he was home. Last time I heard of him he was in Seattle, mixed up with those riots that Ole Hanson handled so well."
"Bolshevist?"
"Hardly," and Quinn smiled. "Don't you know Jimmy Callahan? Well, it's scarcely the province of a Secret Service man to impress his face upon everyone ... the secret wouldn't last long. No, Jimmy was working on the other end of the Seattle affair. Trying to locate the men behind the move—and I understand he did it fairly well, too. But what else would you expect from the man who solved that submarine tangle in Norfolk?"
Quinn must have read the look of interest in my face, for he continued, almost without a pause: "Did you ever hear the inside of that case? One of the most remarkable in the whole history of the Secret Service, and that's saying a good deal. I don't suppose it would do any harm to spill it, so let's move over there in a corner and I'll relate a few details of a case where the second hand of a watch played a leading role."
The whole thing started back in the spring of 1918 [said Quinn, who held down a soft berth in the Treasury Department as a reward for a game leg obtained during a counterfeiting raid on Long Island].
Along about then, if you remember, the Germans let loose a lot of boasting statements as to what they were going to do to American ships and American shipping. Transports were going to be sunk, commerce crippled and all that sort of thing. While not a word of it got into the papers, there were a bunch of people right here in Washington who took these threats seriously—for the Hun's most powerful weapon appeared to be in his submarines, and if a fleet of them once got going off the coast we'd lose a lot of valuable men and time landing them.
Then came the sinking of the Carolina and those other ships off the Jersey coast. Altogether it looked like a warm summer.
One afternoon the Chief sent for Callahan, who'd just come back from taking care of some job down on the border, and told him his troubles.
"Jimmy," said the Chief, "somebody on this side is giving those damn Huns a whole lot of information that they haven't any business getting. You know about those boats they've sunk already, of course. They're only small fry. What they're laying for is a transport, another Tuscania that they can stab in the dark and make their getaway. The point that's worrying us is that the U-boats must be getting their information from some one over here. The sinking of the Carolina proves that. No submarine, operating on general cruising orders, could possibly have known when that ship was due or what course she was going to take. Every precaution was taken at San Juan to keep her sailing a secret, but of course you can't hide every detail of that kind. She got out. Some one saw her, wired the information up the coast here and the man we've got to nab tipped the U-boat off.
"Of course we could go at it from Porto Rico, but that would mean wasting a whole lot more time than we can afford. It's not so much a question of the other end of the cable as it is who transmitted the message to the submarine—and how!
"It's your job to find out before they score a real hit."
Callahan, knowing the way things are handled in the little suite on the west side of the Treasury Building, asked for the file containing the available information and found it very meager indeed.
Details of the sinking of the Carolina were included, among them the fact that the U-37 had been waiting directly in the path of the steamer, though the latter was using a course entirely different from the one the New York and Porto Rico S. S. Company's boats generally took. The evidence of a number of passengers was that the submarine didn't appear a bit surprised at the size of her prey, but went about the whole affair in a businesslike manner. The meat of the report was contained in the final paragraph, stating that one of the German officers had boasted that they "would get a lot more ships in the same way," adding, "Don't worry—we'll be notified when they are going to sail."
Of course, Callahan reasoned, this might be simply a piece of Teutonic bravado—but there was more than an even chance that it was the truth, particularly when taken in conjunction with the sinking of the Texel and the Pinar del Rio and the fact that the Carolina's course was so accurately known.
But how in the name of Heaven had they gotten their information?
Callahan knew that the four principal ports of embarkation for troops—Boston, New York, Norfolk, and Charleston—were shrouded in a mantle of secrecy which it was almost impossible to penetrate. Some months before, when he had been working on the case which grew out of the disappearance of the plans of the battleship Pennsylvania, he had had occasion to make a number of guarded inquiries in naval circles in New York, and he recalled that it had been necessary not only to show his badge, but to submit to the most searching scrutiny before he was allowed to see the men he wished to reach. He therefore felt certain that no outsider could have dug up the specific information in the short space of time at their disposal.
But, arguing that it had been obtained, the way in which it had been passed on to the U-boat also presented a puzzle.
Was there a secret submarine base on the coast?
Had some German, more daring than the rest, actually come ashore and penetrated into the very lines of the Service?
Had he laid a plan whereby he could repeat this operation as often as necessary?
Or did the answer lie in a concealed wireless, operating upon information supplied through underground channels?
These were only a few of the questions which raced through Callahan's mind. The submarine base he dismissed as impracticable. He knew that the Thor, the Unita, the Macedonia, and nine other vessels had, at the beginning of the war, cleared from American ports under false papers with the intention of supplying German warships with oil, coal, and food. He also knew that, of the million and a half dollars' worth of supplies, less than one-sixth had ever been transshipped. Therefore, having failed so signally here, the Germans would hardly try the same scheme again.
The rumor that German officers had actually come into New York, where they were supposed to have been seen in a theater, was also rather far-fetched. So the wireless theory seemed to be the most tenable. But even a wireless cannot conceal its existence from the other stations indefinitely. Of course, it was possible that it might be located on some unfrequented part of the coast—but then how could the operator obtain the information which he transmitted to the U-boat?
Callahan gave it up in despair—for that night. He was tired and he felt that eight hours' sleep would do him more good than thrashing around with a problem for which there appeared to be no solution; a problem which, after all, he couldn't even be sure existed.
Maybe, he thought, drowsily, as he turned off the light—maybe the German on the U-boat was only boasting, after all—or, maybe....
The first thing Jimmy did the next morning was to call upon the head of the recently organized Intelligence Bureau of the War Department—not the Intelligence Division which has charge of censorship and the handling of news, but the bureau which bears the same relation to the army that the Secret Service does to the Treasury Department.
"From what ports are transports sailing within the next couple of weeks?" he inquired of the officer in charge.
"From Boston, New York, Norfolk, and Charleston," was the reply—merely confirming Callahan's previous belief. He had hoped that the ground would be more limited, because he wanted to have the honor of solving this problem by himself, and it was hardly possible for him to cover the entire Atlantic Coast.
"Where's the biggest ship sailing from?" was his next question.
"There's one that clears Norfolk at daylight on Monday morning with twelve thousand men aboard...."
"Norfolk?" interrupted Callahan. "I thought most of the big ones left from New York or Boston."
"So they do, generally. But these men are from Virginia and North Carolina. Therefore it's easier to ship them right out of Norfolk—saves time and congestion of the railroads. As it happens, the ship they're going on is one of the largest that will clear for ten days or more. All of the other big ones are on the other side."
"Then," cut in Callahan, "if the Germans wanted to make a ten-strike they'd lay for that boat?"
"They sure would—and one torpedo well placed would make the Tuscania look like a Sunday-school picnic. But what's the idea? Got a tip that the Huns are going to try to grab her?"
"No, not a tip," Callahan called back over his shoulder, for he was already halfway out of the door; "just a hunch—and I'm going to play it for all it's worth!"
The next morning, safely ensconced at the Monticello under the name of "Robert P. Oliver, of Williamsport, Pa." Callahan admitted to himself that he was indeed working on nothing more than a "hunch," and not a very well-defined one at that. The only point that appeared actually to back up his theory that the information was coming from Norfolk was the fact that the U-boat was known to be operating between New York and the Virginia capes. New York itself was well guarded and the surrounding country was continually patrolled by operatives of all kinds. It was the logical point to watch, and therefore it would be much more difficult to obtain and transmit information there than it would be in the vicinity of Norfolk, where military and naval operations were not conducted on as large a scale nor with as great an amount of secrecy.
Norfolk, Callahan found, was rather proud of her new-found glory. For years she had basked in the social prestige of the Chamberlin, the annual gathering of the Fleet at Hampton Roads and the military pomp and ceremony attendant upon the operations of Fortress Monroe. But the war had brought a new thrill. Norfolk was now one of the principal ports of embarkation for the men going abroad. Norfolk had finally taken her rank with New York and Boston—the rank to which her harbor entitled her.
Callahan reached Norfolk on Wednesday morning. The America, according to the information he had received from the War Department, would clear at daybreak Monday—but at noon on Saturday the Secret Service operative had very little more knowledge than when he arrived. He had found that there was a rumor to the effect that two U-boats were waiting off the Capes for the transport, which, of course, would have the benefit of the usual convoy.
"But," as one army officer phrased it, "what's the use of a convoy if they know just where you are? Germany would willingly lose a sub. or two to get us, and, with the sea that's been running for the past ten days, there'd be no hope of saving more than half the boys."
Spurred by the rapidity with which time was passing and the fact that he sensed a thrill of danger—an intuition of impending peril—around the America, Callahan spent the better part of Friday night and all Saturday morning running down tips that proved to be groundless. A man with a German name was reported to be working in secret upon some invention in an isolated house on Willoughby Spit; a woman, concerning whom little was known, had been seen frequently in the company of two lieutenants slated to sail on the America; a house in Newport News emitted strange "clacking" sounds at night.
But the alleged German proved to be a photographer of unassailable loyalty, putting in extra hours trying to develop a new process of color printing. The woman came from one of the oldest families in Richmond and had known the two lieutenants for years. The house in Newport News proved to be the residence of a young man who hoped some day to sell a photoplay scenario, the irregular clacking noise being made by a typewriter operated none too steadily.
"That's what happens to most of the 'clues' that people hand you," Callahan mused as he sat before his open window on Saturday evening, with less than thirty-six hours left before the America was scheduled to leave. "Some fellows have luck with them, but I'll be hanged if I ever did. Here I'm working in the dark on a case that I'm not even positive exists. That infernal submarine may be laying off Boston at this minute, waiting for the ship that leaves there Tuesday. Maybe they don't get any word from shore at all.... Maybe they just...."
But here he was brought up with a sudden jar that concentrated all his mental faculties along an entirely different road.
Gazing out over the lights of the city, scarcely aware that he saw them, his subconscious mind had been following for the past three minutes something apparently usual, but in reality entirely out of the ordinary.
"By George!" he muttered, "I wonder...."
Then, taking his watch from his pocket, his eyes alternated between a point several blocks distant—a point over the roofs of the houses—and the second hand of his timepiece. Less than a minute elapsed before he reached for a pencil and commenced to jot down dots and dashes on the back of an envelope. When, a quarter of an hour later, he found that the dashes had become monotonous—as he expected they would—he reached for the telephone and asked to be connected with the private wire of the Navy Department in Washington.
"Let me speak to Mr. Thurber at once," he directed. "Operative Callahan, S. S., speaking.... Hello! that you, Thurber?... This is Callahan. I'm in Norfolk and I want to know whether you can read this code. You can figure it out if anybody can. Ready?... Dash, dash, dash, dot, dash, dash, dot—" and he continued until he had repeated the entire series of symbols that he had plucked out of the night.
"Sounds like a variation of the International Morse," came the comment from the other end of the wire—from Thurber, librarian of the Navy Department and one of the leading American authorities on code and ciphers. "May take a little time to figure it out, but it doesn't look difficult. Where can I reach you?"
"I'm at the Monticello—name of Robert P. Oliver. Put in a call for me as soon as you see the light on it. I've got something important to do right now," and he hung up without another word.
A quick grab for his hat, a pat under his arm, to make sure that the holster holding the automatic was in place, and Callahan was on his way downstairs.
Once in the street, he quickened his pace and was soon gazing skyward at the corner of two deserted thoroughfares not many blocks from the Monticello. A few minutes' consultation with his watch confirmed his impression that everything was right again and he commenced his search for the night watchman.
"Who," he inquired of that individual, "has charge of the operation of that phonograph sign on the roof?"
"Doan know fuh certain, suh, but Ah think it's operated by a man down the street a piece. He's got charge of a bunch of them sort o' things. Mighty funny kinder way to earn a livin', Ah calls it—flashing on an' off all night long...."
"But where's he work from?" interrupted Callahan, fearful that the negro's garrulousness might delay him unduly.
"Straight down this street three blocks, suh. Then turn one block to yo' left and yo' cain't miss the place. Electrical Advertisin' Headquarters they calls it. Thank you, suh," and Callahan was gone almost before the watchman could grasp the fact that he held a five-dollar bill instead of a dollar, as he thought.
It didn't take the Secret Service man long to locate the place he sought, and on the top floor he found a dark, swarthy individual bending over the complicated apparatus which operated a number of the electric signs throughout the city. Before the other knew it, Callahan was in the room—his back to the door and his automatic ready for action.
"Up with your hands!" snapped Callahan. "Higher! That's better. Now tell me where you got that information you flashed out to sea to-night by means of that phonograph sign up the street. Quick! I haven't any time to waste."
"Si, si, señor," stammered the man who faced him. "But I understand not the English very well."
"All right," countered Callahan. "Let's try it in Spanish," and he repeated his demands in that language.
Volubly the Spaniard—or Mexican, as he later turned out to be—maintained that he had received no information, nor had he transmitted any. He claimed his only duty was to watch the "drums" which operated the signs mechanically.
"No drum in the world could make that sign flash like it did to-night," Callahan cut in. "For more than fifteen minutes you sent a variation of the Morse code seaward. Come on—I'll give you just one minute to tell me, or I'll bend this gun over your head."
Before the minute had elapsed, the Mexican commenced his confession. He had been paid a hundred dollars a week, he claimed, to flash a certain series of signals every Saturday night, precisely at nine o'clock. The message itself—a series of dots and dashes which he produced from his pocket as evidence of his truthfulness—had reached him on Saturday morning for the two preceding weeks. He didn't know what it meant. All he did was to disconnect the drum which operated the sign and move the switch himself. Payment for each week's work, he stated, was inclosed with the next week's message. Where it came from he didn't know, but the envelope was postmarked Washington.
With his revolver concealed in his coat pocket, but with its muzzle in the small of the Mexican's back, Callahan marched his captive back to the hotel and up into his room. As he opened the door the telephone rang out, and, ordering the other to stand with his face to the wall in a corner—"and be damn sure not to make a move"—the government agent answered the call. As he expected, it was Thurber.
"The code's a cinch," came the voice over the wire from Washington. "But the message is infernally important. It's in German, and evidently you picked it up about two sentences from the start. The part you gave me states that the transport America, with twelve thousand men aboard, will leave Norfolk at daylight Monday. The route the ship will take is distinctly stated, as is the personnel of her convoy. Where'd you get the message?"
"Flashes in the night," answered Callahan. "I noticed that an electric sign wasn't behaving regularly—so I jotted down its signals and passed them on to you. The next important point is whether the message is complete enough for you to reconstruct the code. Have you got all the letters?"
"Yes, every one of them."
"Then take down this message, put it into that dot-and-dash code and send it to me by special messenger on one of the navy torpedo boats to-night. It's a matter of life and death to thousands of men!" and Callahan dictated three sentences over the wire. "Got that?" he inquired. "Good! Get busy and hurry it down. I've got to have it in the morning."
"Turn around," he directed the Mexican, as he replaced the receiver. "Were you to send these messages only on Saturday night?"
"Si, señor. Save that I was told that there might be occasions when I had to do the same thing on Sunday night, too."
"At nine o'clock?"
"Si, señor."
Callahan smiled. Things were breaking better than he had dared hope. It meant that the U-boat would be watching for the signal the following night. Then, with proper emphasis of the automatic, he gave the Mexican his orders. He was to return to his office with Callahan and go about his business as usual, with the certainty that if he tried any foolishness the revolver could act more quickly than he. Accompanied by the government agent, he was to come back to the Monticello and spend the night in Callahan's room, remaining there until the next evening when he would—promptly at nine o'clock and under the direction of an expert in telegraphy—send the message which Callahan would hand him.
That's practically all there is to the story.
"All?" I echoed, when Quinn paused. "What do you mean, 'all'? What was the message Callahan sent? What happened to the Mexican? Who sent the letter and the money from Washington?"
"Nothing much happened to the Mexican," replied my informant, with a smile. "They found that he was telling the truth, so they just sent him over the border with instructions not to show himself north of the Rio Grande. As for the letter—that took the Post Office, the Department of Justice, and the Secret Service the better part of three months to trace. But they finally located the sender, two weeks after she (yes, it was a woman, and a darned pretty one at that) had made her getaway. I understand they got her in England and sentenced her to penal servitude for some twenty years or more. In spite of the war, the Anglo-Saxon race hasn't completely overcome its prejudice against the death penalty for women."
"But the message Callahan sent?" I persisted.
"That was short and to the point. As I recall it, it ran something like this: 'Urgent—Route of America changed. She clears at daylight, but takes a course exactly ten miles south of one previously stated. Be there."
"The U-boat was there, all right. But so were four hydroplanes and half a dozen destroyers, all carrying the Stars and Stripes!"
"Mr Drummond! Wire for Mr. Drummond! Mr. Drummond, please!"
It was the monotonous, oft-repeated call of a Western Union boy—according to my friend Bill Quinn, formerly of the United States Secret Service—that really was responsible for solving the mystery which surrounded the disappearance of $130,000 in gold from the Philadelphia Mint.
"The boy himself didn't have a thing to do with the gold or the finding of it," admitted Quinn, "but his persistence was responsible for locating Drummond, of the Secret Service, just as he was about to start on a well-earned vacation in the Maine woods. Uncle Sam's sleuths don't get any too much time off, you know, and a month or so in a part of the world where they don't know anything about international intrigues and don't care about counterfeiting is a blessing not to be despised.
"That's the reason the boy had to be persistent when he was paging Drummond.
"The operative had a hunch that it was a summons to another case and he was dog tired. But the boy kept singing out the name through the train and finally landed his man, thus being indirectly responsible for the solution of a mystery that might have remained unsolved for weeks—and incidentally saved the government nearly every cent of the one hundred and thirty thousand dollars."
When Drummond opened the telegram [continued Quinn] he found that it was a summons to Philadelphia, signed by Hamlin, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
"Preston needs you at once. Extremely important," read the wire—and, as Drummond was fully aware that Preston was Director of the United States Mint, it didn't take much deduction to figure that something had gone wrong in the big building on Spring Garden Street where a large part of the country's money is coined.
But even the lure of the chase—something you read a lot about in detective stories, but find too seldom in the real hard work of tracing criminals—did not offset Drummond's disappointment in having to defer his vacation. Grumbling, he gathered his bags and cut across New York to the Pennsylvania Station, where he was fortunate enough to be able to make a train on the point of leaving for Philadelphia. At the Mint he found Director Preston and Superintendent Bosbyshell awaiting him.
"Mr. Hamlin wired that he had instructed you to come up at once," said the director. "But we had hardly hoped that you could make it so soon."
"Wire reached me on board a train that would have pulled out of Grand Central Station in another three minutes," growled Drummond. "I was on my way to Maine to forget all about work for a month. But," and his face broke into a smile, "since they did find me, what's the trouble?"
"Trouble enough," replied the director. "Some hundred and thirty thousand dollars in gold is missing from the Mint!"
"What!" Even Drummond was shaken out of his professional calm, not to mention his grouch. Robbery of the United States Treasury or one of the government Mints was a favorite dream with criminals, but—save for the memorable occasion when a gang was found trying to tunnel under Fifteenth Street in Washington—there had been no time when the scheme was more than visionary.
"Are you certain? Isn't there any chance for a mistake?"
The questions were perfunctory, rather than hopeful.
"Unfortunately, not the least," continued Preston. "Somebody has made away with a hundred and thirty thousand dollars worth of the government's money. Seven hundred pounds of gold is missing and there isn't a trace to show how or where it went. The vault doors haven't been tampered with. The combination of the grille inside the vault is intact. Everything, apparently, is as it should be—but fifty bars of gold are missing."
"And each bar," mused Drummond, "weighs—"
"Fourteen pounds," cut in the superintendent.
Drummond looked at him in surprise.
"I beg your pardon," said Preston. "This is Mr. Bosbyshell, superintendent of the Mint. This thing has gotten on my nerves so that I didn't have the common decency to introduce you. Mr. Bosbyshell was with me when we discovered that the gold was missing."
"When was that?"
"Yesterday afternoon," replied the director. "Every now and then—at irregular intervals—we weigh all the gold in the Mint, to make sure that everything is as it should be. Nothing wrong was discovered until we reached Vault Six, but there fifty bars were missing. There wasn't any chance of error. The records showed precisely how much should have been there and the scales showed how much there was, to the fraction of an ounce.
"But even if we had only counted the bars, instead of weighing each one separately, the theft would have been instantly discovered, for the vault contained exactly fifty bars less than it should have. It was then that I wired Washington and asked for assistance from the Secret Service."
"Thus spoiling my vacation," muttered Drummond. "How many men know the combination to the vault door?"
"Only two," replied the superintendent. "Cochrane, who is the official weigher, and myself. Cochrane is above suspicion. He's been here for the past thirty years and there hasn't been a single complaint against him in all that time."
Drummond looked as if he would like to ask Preston if the same could be said for the superintendent, but he contented himself with listening as Bosbyshell continued:
"But even if Cochrane or I—yes, I'm just as much to be suspected as he—could have managed to open the vault door unseen, we could not have gotten inside the iron grille which guards the gold in the interior of the vault. That is always kept locked, with a combination known to two other men only. There's too much gold in each one of these vaults to take any chance with, which is the reason for this double protection. Two men—Cochrane and I—handle the combination to the vault door and open it whenever necessary. Two others—Jamison and Strubel—are the only ones that know how to open the grille door. One of them has to be present whenever the bars are put in or taken away, for the men who can get inside the vault cannot enter the grille, and the men who can manipulate the grille door can't get into the vault."
"It certainly sounds like a burglar-proof combination," commented Drummond. "Is there any possibility for conspiracy between"—and he hesitated for the fraction of a second—"between Cochrane and either of the men who can open the grille door?"
"Apparently not the least in the world," replied Preston. "So far as we know they are all as honest as the day—"
"But the fact remains," Drummond interrupted, "that the gold is missing."
"Exactly—but the grille door was sealed with the official governmental stamp when we entered the vault yesterday. That stamp is applied only in the presence of both men who know the combination. So the conspiracy, if there be any, must have included Cochrane, Strubel, and Jamison—instead of being a two-man job."
"How much gold did you say was missing?" inquired the Treasury operative, taking another tack.
"Seven hundred pounds—fifty bars of fourteen pounds each," answered Bosbyshell. "That's another problem that defies explanation. How could one man carry away all that gold without being seen? He'd need a dray to cart it off, and we're very careful about what goes out of the Mint. There's a guard at the front door all the time, and no one is allowed to leave with a package of any kind until it has been examined and passed."
A grunt was Drummond's only comment—and those who knew the Secret Service man best would have interpreted the sound to mean studious digestion of facts, rather than admission of even temporary defeat.
It was one of the government detective's pet theories that every crime, no matter how puzzling, could be solved by application of common-sense principles and the rules of logic. "The criminal with brains," he was fond of saying, "will deliberately try to throw you off the scent. Then you've got to take your time and separate the wheat from the chaff—the false leads from the true. But the man who commits a crime on the spur of the moment—or who flatters himself that he hasn't left a single clue behind—is the one who's easy to catch. The cleverest crook in the world can't enter a room without leaving his visiting card in some way or other. It's up to you to find that card and read the name on it. And common sense is the best reading glass."
Requesting that his mission be kept secret, Drummond said that he would like to examine Vault No. Six.
"Let Cochrane open the vault for me and then have Jamison and Strubel open the grille," he directed.
"Unless Mr. Bosbyshell opened the vault door," Preston reminded him, "there's no one but Cochrane who could do it. It won't be necessary, however, to have either of the others open the grille—the door was taken from its hinges this morning in order the better to examine the place and it hasn't yet been replaced."
"All right," agreed Drummond. "Let's have Cochrane work the outer combination, then. I'll have a look at the other two later."
Accompanied by the director and the superintendent, Drummond made his way to the basement where they were joined by the official weigher, a man well over fifty, who was introduced by Preston to "Mr. Drummond, a visitor who is desirous of seeing the vaults."
"I understand that you are the only man who can open them," said the detective. "Suppose we look into this one," as he stopped, as if by accident, before Vault No. 6.
Cochrane, without a word, bent forward and commenced to twirl the combination. A few spins to the right, a few to the left, back to the right, to the left once more—and he pulled at the heavy door expectantly. But it failed to budge.
Again he bent over the combination, spinning it rapidly. Still the door refused to open.
"I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to help me with this, Superintendent," Cochrane said, finally. "It doesn't seem to work, somehow."
But, under Bosbyshell's manipulation, the door swung back almost instantly.
"Nothing wrong with the combination," commented Preston.
Drummond smiled. "Has the combination been changed recently?" he asked.
"Not for the past month," Bosbyshell replied. "We usually switch all of them six times a year, just as a general precaution—but this has been the same for the past few weeks. Ever since the fifteenth of last month, to be precise."
Inside the vault Drummond found that, as Preston had stated, the door to the grille had been taken from its hinges, to facilitate the work of the men who had weighed the gold, and had not been replaced.
"Where are the gold bars?" asked the detective. "The place looks like it had been well looted."
"They were all taken out this morning, to be carefully weighed," was Preston's reply.
"I'd like to see some of them stacked up there along the side of the grille, if it isn't too much trouble."
"Surely," said Bosbyshell. "I'll have the men bring them in at once."
As soon as the superintendent had left the room, Drummond requested that the door of the grille be placed in its usual position, and Cochrane set it up level with the floor, leaning against the supports at the side.
"Is that the way it always stays?" inquired the Secret Service man.
"No, sir, but it's pretty heavy to handle, and I thought you just wanted to get a general idea of things."
"I'd like to see it in place, if you don't mind. Here, I'll help you with it—but we better slip our coats off, for it looks like a man's-sized job," and he removed his coat as he spoke.
After Cochrane had followed his example, the two of them hung the heavy door from its hinges and stepped back to get the effect. But Drummond's eyes were fixed, not upon the entrance to the grille, but on the middle of Cochrane's back, and, when the opportunity offered an instant later, he shifted his gaze to the waist of the elder man's trousers. Something that he saw there caused the shadow of a smile to flit across his face.
"Thanks," he said. "That will do nicely," and he made a quick gesture to Preston that he would like to have Cochrane leave the vault.
"Very much obliged, Mr. Cochrane," said the director. "We won't bother you any more. You might ask those men to hurry in with the bars, if you will."
And the weigher, pausing only to secure his coat, left the vault.
"Why all the stage setting?" inquired Preston. "You don't suspect...."
"I don't suspect a thing," Drummond smiled, searching for his own coat, "beyond the fact that the solution to the mystery is so simple as to be almost absurd. By the way, have you noticed those scratches on the bars of the grille, about four feet from the floor?"
"No, I hadn't," admitted the director. "But what of them? These vaults aren't new, you know, and I dare say you'd find similar marks on the grille bars in any of the others."
"I hope not," Drummond replied, grimly, "for that would almost certainly mean a shortage of gold in other sections of the Mint. Incidentally, has all the rest of the gold been weighed?"
"Every ounce of it."
"Nothing missing?"
"Outside of the seven hundred pounds from this vault, not a particle."
"Good—then I'll be willing to lay a small wager that you can't find the duplicates of these scratches anywhere else in the Mint." And Drummond smiled at the director's perplexity.
When the men arrived with a truck loaded with gold bars, they stacked them—at the superintendent's direction—along the side of the grille nearest the vault entrance.
"Is that the way they are usually arranged?" inquired Drummond.
"Yes—the grille bars are of tempered steel and the openings between them are too small to permit anyone to put his hand through. Therefore, as we are somewhat pressed for space, we stack them up right along the outer wall of the grille and then work back. It saves time and labor in bringing them in."
"Is this the way the door of the grille ordinarily hangs?"
Bosbyshell inspected it a moment before he replied.
"Yes," he said. "It appears to be all right. It was purposely made to swing clear of the floor and the ceiling so that it might not become jammed. The combination and the use of the seal prevents its being opened by anyone who has no business in the grille."
"And the seal was intact when you came in yesterday afternoon?"
"It was."
"Thanks," said Drummond; "that was all I wanted to know," and he made his way upstairs with a smile which seemed to say that his vacation in the Maine woods had not been indefinitely postponed.
Once back in the director's office, the government operative asked permission to use the telephone, and, calling the Philadelphia office of the Secret Service, requested that three agents be assigned to meet him down town as soon as possible.
"Have you a record of the home address of the people employed in the Mint?" Drummond inquired of the director, as he hung up the receiver.
"Surely," said Preston, producing a typewritten list from the drawer of his desk.
"I'll borrow this for a while, if I may. I'll probably be back with it before three o'clock—and bring some news with me, too," and the operative was out of the room before Preston could frame a single question.
As a matter of fact, the clock in the director's office pointed to two-thirty when Drummond returned, accompanied by the three men who had been assigned to assist him.
"Have you discovered anything?" Preston demanded.
"Let's have Cochrane up here first," Drummond smiled. "I can't be positive until I've talked to him. You might have the superintendent in, too. He'll be interested in developments, I think."
Bosbyshell was the first to arrive, and, at Drummond's request, took up a position on the far side of the room. As soon as he had entered, two of the other Secret Service men ranged themselves on the other side of the doorway and, the moment Cochrane came in, closed the door behind him.
"Cochrane," said Drummond, "what did you do with the seven hundred pounds of gold that you took from Vault No. Six during the past few weeks?"
"What—what—" stammered the weigher.
"There's no use bluffing," continued the detective. "We've got the goods on you. The only thing missing is the gold itself, and the sooner you turn it over the more lenient the government will be with you. I know how you got the bars out of the grille—a piece of bent wire was sufficient to dislodge them from the top of the pile nearest the grille bars and it was easy to slip them under the door. No wonder the seal was never tampered with. It wasn't necessary for you to go inside the grille at all.
"But, more than that, I know how you carried the bars, one at a time, out of the Mint. It took these three men less than an hour this afternoon to find the tailor who fixed the false pocket in the front of your trousers—the next time you try a job of this kind you better attend to all these details yourself—and it needed only one look at your suspenders this morning to see that they were a good deal wider and heavier than necessary. That long coat you are in the habit of wearing is just the thing to cover up any suspicious bulge in your garments and the guard at the door, knowing you, would never think of telling you to stop unless you carried a package or something else contrary to orders.
"The people in your neighborhood say that they've seen queer bluish lights in the basement of your house on Woodland Avenue. So I suspect you've been melting that gold up and hiding it somewhere, ready for a quick getaway.
"Yes, Cochrane, we've got the goods on you and if you want to save half of a twenty-year sentence—which at your age means life—come across with the information. Where is the gold?"
"In the old sewer pipe," faltered the weigher, who appeared to have aged ten years while Drummond was speaking. "In the old sewer pipe that leads from my basement."
"Good!" exclaimed Drummond. "I think Mr. Preston will use his influence with the court to see that your sentence isn't any heavier than necessary. It's worth that much to guard the Mint against future losses of the same kind, isn't it, Mr. Director?"
"It surely is," replied Preston. "But how in the name of Heaven did you get the answer so quickly?"
Drummond delayed his answer until Cochrane, accompanied by the three Secret Service men, had left the room. Then—
"Nothing but common sense," he said. "You remember those scratches I called your attention to—the ones on the side of the grille bars? They were a clear indication of the way in which the gold had been taken from the grille—knocked down from the top of the pile with a piece of wire and pulled under the door of the grille. That eliminated Jamison and Strubel immediately. They needn't have gone to that trouble, even if it had been possible for them to get into the vault in the first place.
"But I had my suspicions of Cochrane when he was unable to open the vault door. That pointed to nervousness, and nervousness indicated a guilty conscience. I made the hanging of the grille door an excuse to get him to shed his coat—though I did want to see whether the door came all the way down to the floor—and I noted that his suspenders were very broad and his trousers abnormally wide around the waist. He didn't want to take any chances with that extra fourteen pounds of gold, you know. It would never do to drop it in the street.
"The rest is merely corroborative. I found that bluish lights had been observed in the basement of Cochrane's house, and one of my men located the tailor who had enlarged his trousers. That's really all there was to it."
With that Drummond started to the door, only to be stopped by Director Preston's inquiry as to where he was going.
"On my vacation, which you interrupted this morning," replied the Secret Service man.
"It's a good thing I did," Preston called after him. "If Cochrane had really gotten away with that gold we might never have caught him."
"Which," as Bill Quinn said, when he finished his narrative, "is the reason I claim that the telegraph boy who persisted in paging Drummond is the one who was really responsible for the saving of some hundred and thirty thousand dollars that belonged to Uncle Sam."
"But, surely," I said, "that case was an exception. In rapidity of action, I mean. Don't governmental investigations usually take a long time?"
"Frequently," admitted Quinn, "they drag on and on for months—sometimes years. But it's seldom that Uncle Sam fails to land his man—even though the trail leads into the realms of royalty, as in the Ypiranga case. That happened before the World War opened, but it gave the State Department a mighty good line on what to expect from Germany."
"Mexico," said Bill Quinn, who now holds a soft berth in the Treasury Department by virtue of an injury received in the line of duty—during a raid on counterfeiters a few years ago, to be precise—"is back on the first page of the papers again after being crowded off for some four years because of the World War. Funny coincidence, that, when you remember that it was this same Mexico that gave us our first indication of the way we might expect Germany to behave."
"Huh?" I said, a bit startled. "What do you mean? The first spark of the war was kindled in Serbia, not Mexico. Outside of the rumblings of the Algeciras case and one or two other minor affairs, there wasn't the slightest indication of the conflict to come."
"No?" and Quinn's eyebrows went up in interrogation. "How about the Ypiranga case?"
"The which?"
"The Ypiranga case—the one where Jack Stewart stumbled across a clue in a Mexico City café which led all the way to Berlin and back to Washington and threatened to precipitate a row before the Kaiser was quite ready for it?"
"No," I admitted, "that's a page of underground history that I haven't read—and I must confess that I don't know Stewart, either."
"Probably not," said the former Secret Service man. "He wasn't connected with any of the branches of the government that get into print very often. As a matter of fact, the very existence of the organization to which he belonged isn't given any too much publicity. Everyone knows of the Secret Service and the men who make the investigations for the Department of Justice and the Post-office Department—but the Department of State, for obvious reasons, conducts its inquiries in a rather more diplomatic manner. Its agents have to pose as commercial investigators, or something else equally as prosaic. Their salaries are, as a general thing, paid out of the President's private allowance or out of the fund given to the department 'for use as it may see fit.' Less than half a dozen people know the actual status of the organization or the names of its members at any one time, and its exploits are recorded only in the archives of the State Department."
"But who," I persisted, as Quinn stopped, "was Jack Stewart and what was the nature of the affair upon which he stumbled in Mexico City?"
Stewart [replied Quinn] was just a quiet, ordinary sort of chap, the kind that you'd expect to find behind a desk in the State Department, sorting out consular reports and handling routine stuff. Nothing exceptional about him at all—which was probably one reason for his being selected for work as a secret agent of the Department. It doesn't do, you know, to pick men who are conspicuous, either in their dress or manner. Too easy to spot and remember them. The chap who's swallowed up in the crowd is the one who can get by with a whole lot of quiet work without being suspected.
When they sent Jack down to Mexico they didn't have the slightest idea he'd uncover anything as big as he did. The country south of the Rio Grande, if you recall, had been none too quiet for some time prior to 1914. Taft had had his troubles with it ever since the end of the Diaz regime, and when Wilson came in the "Mexican question" was a legacy that caused the men in the State Department to spend a good many sleepless nights.
All sorts of rumors, most of them wild and bloody, floated up through official and unofficial channels. The one fact that seemed to be certain was that Mexico was none too friendly to the United States, and that some other nation was behind this feeling, keeping it constantly stirred up and overlooking no opportunity to add fuel to the flame. Three or four other members of the State Department's secret organization had been wandering around picking up leads for some months past and, upon the return of one of these to Washington, Stewart was sent to replace him.
His instructions were simple and delightfully indefinite. He was to proceed to Mexico City, posing as the investigator for a financial house in New York which was on the lookout for a soft concession from the Mexican government. This would give him an opportunity to seek the acquaintance of Mexican officials and lend an air of plausibility to practically any line that he found it necessary to follow. But, once at the capital with his alibis well established, he was to overlook nothing which might throw light upon the question that had been bothering Washington for some time past—just which one of the foreign powers was fanning the Mexican unrest and to what lengths it was prepared to go?
Of course, the State Department suspected—just as we now know—that Berlin was behind the movement, but at that time there was no indication of the reason. In the light of later events, however, the plan is plain. Germany, feeling certain that the greatest war Europe had ever known was a matter of the immediate future, was laying her plans to keep other nations out of the conflict. She figured that Mexico was the best foil for the United States and that our pitifully small army would have its hands full with troubles at home. If not, she intended to let Japan enter into the equation—as shown by the Zimmerman note some two years later.
When Stewart got to Mexico City, it did not take him long to discover that there was an undercurrent of animosity to the United States which made itself felt in numberless ways. Some of the Mexican papers, apparently on a stronger financial basis than ever before, were outspoken in their criticism of American dollars and American dealings. The people as a whole, long dominated by Diaz, were being stirred to resentment of the "Gringoes," who "sought to purchase the soul of a nation as well as its mineral wealth." The improvements which American capital had made were entirely overlooked, and the spotlight of subsidized publicity was thrown upon the encroachments of the hated Yankees.
All this Stewart reported to Washington, and in reply was politely informed that, while interesting, it was hardly news. The State Department had known all this for months. The question was: Where was the money coming from and what was the immediate object of the game?