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Mystery of the Iron Box

<h2 id='chap02' class='c011'>CHAPTER II</h2> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c013'> <div>A FIRE</div> </div></div> There was a double line of the footprints—one set coming toward the door, one set going away from it. Ken stared at them for a long moment. Suddenly he realized that he was clearly visible, through the glass, to anyone who might be outside the house. Quickly he dropped the curtain into place and with a swift gesture he fastened the safety chain above the lock on the door. Then he ran to the back door and fastened the safety chain there. The events of the past few moments were perfectly clear in his mind. He sat on the edge of the kitchen table and ran over them again, trying to explain them to himself as he went along. He had stepped out of his bedroom and had almost immediately felt the draft of cold air. Probably the front door was just then being opened. The faint click he had heard an instant later had probably been the door being cased shut again—because after the click he had no longer felt the draft. The intruder—and there must have been one, Ken concluded—had actually been inside the house. Because there had been two other clicks, and another draft of cold air, which must have occurred as the intruder opened the closed door again in order to escape into the darkness. Ken was out of the kitchen in a flash, and on his knees before the front door. His fingers explored the surface of the polished floor. A few feet inside the threshold there were two patches of dampness. Ken moved backward carefully, surveying every inch of the smooth surface. He found no further wet spots. It seemed clear that the intruder had taken one step into the hall and then retreated again, apparently frightened off by Ken’s own footsteps in the upper hall. Ken made one more round of the house, and again assured himself that nothing had been taken or disturbed. His impulse to wake Sandy, and tell him about the whole business, died slowly away. There seemed no point in arousing Sandy, or anybody else, in the middle of the night. Ken warmed a glass of milk for himself in the kitchen and drank it thoughtfully. Then he went back upstairs, with a book under his arm. But he didn’t turn on his small reading light. He lay on his back, staring up into the darkness and puzzling over the mysterious intruder, until he finally fell into a troubled sleep. When he woke up, the clock said only seven-thirty, but he got out of bed immediately. The snow had stopped. The world outside was blanketed with white. It was dazzling to Ken’s eyes, even at that early hour of a winter morning. Sandy opened one sleepy eye as Ken stripped off his pajamas and began to dress. “Where do you think you’re going at this time of night?” “Downstairs,” Ken said. “And it’s morning. You’d better get up too. I’ve got something to tell you.” Sandy closed his eye again. “Can’t you tell me here?” “We’d wake everybody else up.” Ken tied his last shoelace. “Come on. It’s important.” The seriousness in his voice brought Sandy to a sitting position. “O.K. Get some coffee going. I’ll be down before it’s ready.” Ten minutes later, while the coffee percolator bubbled away unnoticed, Ken completed his story. “Well,” he said after a moment, “what do you think? Were we almost burglarized—or weren’t we?” Sandy set his empty orange-juice glass on the table. He was grinning widely. “I think,” he said, “you were asleep last night half a minute after I was. The whole thing was a dream. You should give up cheese sandwiches.” Ken pointed to the rear door. “I didn’t dream the chain into place there. Or on the front door, either.” Sandy shrugged. “Maybe you walked in your sleep.” But he got to his feet. “All right. Let’s go see these alleged footsteps on the front porch.” They walked through the hall together. Sandy unfastened the chain, unlocked the door, and threw it wide open. The white sweep of snow over the porch was unmarked. “I could have told you they wouldn’t show any more,” Ken pointed out. “It was still snowing then. Naturally they got covered up.” Sandy was still smiling as he bent down to examine the outer face of the lock. When he straightened again he looked sober. “Take a look,” he said quietly. “Those little scratches on the face plate were never made by keys. I’d say somebody’s been using a picklock in the dark.” “I’d say it’s a good thing I did eat cheese sandwiches,” Ken said a moment later, as they closed the door. “If I hadn’t come downstairs the house might have been cleaned out. Do you think we ought to notify the police?” he asked, when they were back in the kitchen and Sandy was pouring out two cups of coffee. “Let’s let Pop decide,” Sandy suggested. “And let’s not worry Mom about it as long as nothing was taken and no harm seems to have been done.” “Right,” Ken agreed. “We can talk to Pop at the office.” They ate some toast, drank their coffee, and then went outside to clear the walks and the driveway. By the time they had finished shoveling the snow it was almost nine o’clock and they were ready for some of the bacon and eggs Mom was preparing for Pop and Bert and Richard Holt and herself. The phone rang while they were all at the table. Bert went to answer it. “Global News wants Richard Holt,” he called from the hall. Holt shoved his chair back with an impatient gesture. “I called the office from the apartment yesterday, just to let them know I was back,” he said. “I see now that was a mistake. If they’ve thought up an assignment that will cut me out of a turkey dinner—” He disappeared into the hall. When he came back he was smiling. “Nothing serious,” he reported quickly, answering the question in Ken’s eyes. “I’m still on vacation. Global just wanted to let me know I didn’t close the apartment door carefully when I dashed in and out yesterday.” “Global told you that?” Pop looked blank. The correspondent grinned over a fresh cup of coffee. “I know it sounds confusing. Seems the apartment-house janitor found my door ajar when he was cleaning the hall this morning. He didn’t know I was back in the country, so he called Global News to ask what to do about it. Granger sent a man down to look the place over—very kind of him, of course, as he was careful to remind me. But nothing was disturbed—clothes, portable radio, typewriter, all safe and sound. No signs of illegal entry, so apparently the fault was mine.” He grinned again. “Granger wouldn’t even have called me about it, except that it gave him a chance to explain that Global always has the best interests of their employees at heart.” The others grinned back at him, all but Ken and Sandy who looked soberly at each other over the table. The same thought was in both their minds. An attempted burglary in Brentwood and a mysteriously unlocked door in Holt’s New York apartment, both on the same night, seemed a remarkable coincidence. Sandy opened his mouth to speak. But Ken, shaking his head slightly, got to his feet. “Are we all vacationing today?” he asked. “Or are we going down to the office?” “I hope you’re not all planning to vacation under my feet,” Mom said frankly. “I’ve got a lot to do today.” “We can take a hint,” Pop replied with dignity. “Come on, Holt. There’s not much work on tap for today, but we can yarn at the office as comfortably as we can here. You two,” he added to Sandy and Ken, “have to take you-know-what to you-know-where.” “I hope you’re referring to that disreputable-looking shoe box on the sideboard,” Mom said. “I’d like to have somebody take it somewhere out of my way.” “Know what’s in it, Mom?” Bert asked. “No. And I haven’t the slightest curiosity,” Mom told her older son. “Not much, you haven’t!” Bert said. “I’ll bet you spent half an hour this morning trying to see through the cardboard.” “I have other things to do with my time, especially on a busy day like this,” Mom assured him. “For example, there are the dishes to be done. But of course if you’re all going to be here, you might—” Pop was on his feet. “We’re on our way, ma’am. On our way. Come on, Holt, you drive down with Bert and me.” Ken and Sandy took the shoe box with them when they left a few minutes later, but they didn’t go directly to Sam Morris’s shop. They went to the office first. “We think you ought to know about something that happened last night, Pop,” Sandy said abruptly, when he and Ken joined the others in the Brentwood Advance office. “Ken came downstairs in the middle of the night and—” “No!” Bert leaped to his feet with an expression of mock horror. “You mean he found Mom peeping in the box?” Sandy didn’t even laugh. “Tell them, Ken.” Ken made his report as brief as possible. “You can see the scratches on the lock yourselves,” he concluded, “when we go back to the house.” He turned to his father. “And if somebody also broke into your apartment last night, Dad, it certainly looks—” Bert’s laugh interrupted him. “It’s not enough for you two to imagine one burglar. Oh, no—you can do better than that.” “Nobody tried to burglarize my apartment, Ken,” Holt said. “I just didn’t lock it properly myself.” “How do you know?” Ken asked. “Can you be sure, Dad?” “Doesn’t it seem strange,” Sandy put in, “that the minute you land in the country somebody breaks into the house where you’re staying, and at the same time your own apartment is mysteriously—” Bert was still laughing. “You’re just not used to the way these two carry on,” he told Ken’s father. “Every time they see a doughnut they begin to worry about who stole the middle out of it. Anything for a mystery—that’s their philosophy.” “Now wait a minute,” Pop said mildly. “It does sound as if there might be a sneak thief around Brentwood. We don’t have them often, but I suppose Christmas is a likely time, with everybody’s house full of presents. I’ll call Andy Kane and tell him to alert the force. That satisfy you?” He looked at Ken and Sandy. “But I will not,” he added, “call the New York police chief with a similar suggestion. So you two just take your dark suspicions out of here, and get over to Sam Morris’s while he’s still got time to fix that catch.” Ken and Sandy looked at each other. Ken smiled first. “All right,” he said. “I guess that does make sense. Come on, Sandy. But save your best stories until we get back, Dad.” As soon as they arrived at the jeweler’s shop they were glad they had waited no longer. The place was crowded with customers, all wearing the harried expression of those who have delayed their Christmas shopping until the last possible moment. Sam Morris and his two clerks looked equally harried as they tried to wait on several people at a time. Ken and Sandy chose the least crowded area along the glass-topped display counter that bisected the store lengthwise, running back toward Morris’s partitioned-off workroom at the rear. After they had waited for a few minutes, Sam, hurrying past with a heavy mahogany mantel clock, noticed their presence. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, boys,” he murmured. He put the clock down in front of a woman several feet away, told her to take her time examining it, and came back to where Ken and Sandy stood. “This is the box, Sam,” Sandy explained, lifting it out of its carton. “The catch broke when it fell. See?” Sam studied the injury, murmuring, “Nice workmanship. Nice. Yes—ought to be able to fix that all right.” A hand holding a wrist watch thrust itself between the two boys, and a voice behind them said politely, “Excuse me. Could you put a new crystal in this watch while I wait?” Down the counter the woman studying the mahogany clock called out, “Mr. Morris, I think I like the one you showed me first. May I see that again?” “I’ll be right back,” Sam muttered, and hurried away. “I certainly picked a fine day to break the crystal of my watch,” the man behind the boys said, and they turned to smile sympathetically into his pleasant middle-aged face. “If it weren’t such a good timepiece, I’d let it go for a while, but I hate to have it get dirty.” When Sam hurried back, looking more harried than ever, he shook his head at the customer behind the boys. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m mighty busy today, and it takes quite awhile to cement a crystal into place.” He took the small iron box from Sandy’s hands. The owner of the watch spoke up quickly. “Don’t bother with cement,” he said. “If you could just snap a crystal into place, I could get it cemented after Christmas, in New York. I’m just passing through Brentwood and—” Sam shrugged. “All right. I could do that. Come back in about half an hour.” He took the watch. “You too,” he added to the boys. “I’ll try to have this ready by then. Won’t take me long—if I just have a chance to get at it.” He moved rapidly toward the partition at the rear. “He’s certainly an accommodating gentleman,” the owner of the watch said, as all three of them began to edge their way through the crowd together. “He certainly is,” Ken agreed. “If I owned a store I wouldn’t open the doors on Christmas Eve.” “See you in half an hour,” the man said with a friendly wave as they separated on the sidewalk to go in opposite directions. Back at the office they found Richard Holt in the middle of one of the lively tales he always brought back from his trips. “And they found that the phones in the police chief’s own office were being tapped,” he was saying. “So—” He broke off as the boys entered. “What luck?” he asked. “It’ll be O.K.,” Ken told him. “Sam said we could pick it up in half an hour.” “Good,” his father said. “Good,” Pop echoed, almost absent-mindedly. “Go on, Dick. Did they ever find out who was doing the wire tapping?” Richard Holt grinned. “It was the old woman who cleaned the office. They certainly never would have suspected her—she looked too old and harmless. But she got jittery finally, and disappeared. And they were curious enough to investigate. Now, I understand, you can’t get a job cleaning the municipal offices there unless you’re recommended by the prime minister himself.” “Wow!” Bert said. “What a yarn! Did they track down the rest of the gang then too?” “What’s this all about?” Ken wanted to know. “Start from the beginning.” “It’s not a very lively story, except for the old lady,” Mr. Holt assured the boys. “Just an ordinary tale of slick counterfeiters, though they did have an expert engraver capable of turning out beautifully engraved ten-dollar bills. United States bills, that is, which are always popular in Europe, and therefore easy to pass. Of course the banks could spot them, and they did eventually—a few at a time. But as long as the gang had its wire-tapping service in operation, it could keep informed as to police suspicions—and shift its plates and its printing apparatus to a new location if the police began to make inquiries in the neighborhood where they were.” “Did they track down the gang?” Bert persisted. “Unfortunately not,” Richard Holt admitted. “And you can imagine how the police chief felt, under the circumstances. He’s pretty sure they’ve cleared out of his territory, but of course that’s not enough to satisfy him. And of course the U.S. Treasury isn’t very happy about it either. Last I heard, it was sending some T-men over to lend a hand, because the counterfeits were American bills.” Bert nodded. “Those T-men work fast. We received a circular here about six months ago, about some bad twenties that were turning up in this vicinity. But before we could print the story, the counterfeiters were nabbed. Of course,” he added, “most counterfeit bills here are made by the photoengraving process, and that’s pretty crude compared to a good engraving.” Pop grinned. “People complain these days about the low standards of craftsmanship, but in some ways it’s a help. There aren’t many engravers in this country who can turn out a good set of plates, and what few there are, are working for the Bureau of Engraving in Washington or for some legitimate private business.” “Of course there was one case, years ago,” Holt said. “I was just a cub reporter at the time, but I happened to be involved. I remember....” He was off on another yarn. Almost an hour went by before Sandy happened to glance at the clock. “Hey!” He jumped up. “Sam Morris said half an hour.” The wail of a siren and the sudden clanging of the fire-engine’s bell seemed to put an exclamation mark at the end of his sentence. “Vacation or no vacation, a fire is news,” Pop said. He reached for the phone, dialed rapidly, and spoke a few brisk questions into the mouthpiece. Then he slammed the receiver down. “Get going, Ken,” he said. “You too, Sandy. This might be good for a picture. The fire’s at Sam Morris’s jewelry shop!” <div class='pbb'></div> <hr class='pb c000' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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