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 telegra-phy--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 Mexi-
can? 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."[14]
"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!" [15]
II
THE MINT MYSTERY
6
"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[16] 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[17] 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 vision-ary.
"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.
7
"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.[18]
"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
