On Secret Service

"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."

III

THE YPIRANGA CASE

"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."