'I only ask because I have a sort of a notion about that clock. It's a pendulum clock, and you know how fast a clock ticks when you take the pendulum away, and the escapement can run free. It does an hour in about three minutes. Now, if I could get the pendulum out without alarming the clock ... it would be nine to-morrow morning in no time. See?'
'I see that,' said the patrol. 'I see that. But what I don't see—'
'Never mind what you don't see,' Mr. Jack Galpin murmured. 'Bring me my bag out of there. I may tell you,' he went on to Simon, 'that I thought of this scheme months ago, just as a pleasant sort of a fancy, but quite practical. It's a queer world, isn't it?'
'Here's your bag,' said the patrol.
'Now you two can just go into the waiting-room, and wait till I call you. Understand? And tell all these wild beasts round here to hold their tongues and sit tight. I haven't got to be disturbed in a job like this.... And it's a hundred pounds if I do it, mister, no more and no less, eh?'
Within exactly twenty-five minutes Mr. Galpin entered the waiting-room.
'See that?' he said, holding up a pendulum. 'That's it. You can come and look now. But I don't invite the public to see my own private melting process. Not me!'
He had burnt two holes through the half-inch plate of Bessemer steel in which the clock was enclosed, and by means of two pairs of tweezers (which must certainly have been imitated from the armoury of a dentist) he had detached the pendulum without stopping the clock. The hands of the clock could be plainly seen to move, and its ticking was furiously rapid.
Mr. Galpin made a calculation on his dazzling cuff.
'In three-quarters of an hour the clock will have run out,' he informed his audience, 'and you will be able to open any locks that you've got keys for. I shall call to-morrow morning, young man, for the swag. And don't you forget that there's only one Jack Galpin in the world. My address is 205, the Waterloo Road.'