sections of theMint. 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 be-
come 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[24] 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 of-
fice 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.
10
"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 superinten-
dent 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?"[25]
"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 bet-ter 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[26] 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
11
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[27] enlarged his trousers. That's really all there was to it."
