“And mind you!” He wheeled about. “You’re out of this.”
“Aw! Say! Now——”
“Absolutely out of it until after the mop-up.” Tom’s voice was steady and firm. “Reporters come in after the fight. You’ll get your story and the pictures right enough. But a fight like this is nothing for a boy.”
“Oh, all right,” Jimmie agreed reluctantly.
“Sometimes I think,” Tom droned, squinting through his telescope, “that it’s no sort of a thing for any decent fellow to be in this detective business.
“And yet,” he paused for a space of seconds, “if some of us didn’t go in for it where’d everyone else be? Always in fear of their lives. It’s war! That’s what it is.” His voice rose. “War against crime. Not so many years ago there was a terrible war in Europe. Millions of fine fellows were killed. And yet, when you ask the boys who lived through it what they were fighting for they’ll tell you they don’t know.
“But we know!” He struck the table with his fist. “In this war against crime we know we’re fighting for the safety of simple, honest, kindly people, a whole city full of them. And in the end we’ll win. We——
“There!” he exclaimed springing to his feet. “There goes their truck! Come on! This is our zero hour!”
A half hour later, from his hiding-place behind a trash box in the dark alley beside the fur storage warehouse, Jimmie was witnessing a strange sight. The basement of the storage place had been built out under the alley. The outlaws, having tunneled to this basement, had made one hole up into the large storage room and another up through the alley. Now, like a pack of rats carrying away grain, they were passing up bundle after bundle of silver-fox furs worth a king’s ransom. And no one was there to stop them; at least, no one appeared to be. It was eerie, fantastic, impossible, like a scene played on the movie screen. And yet it was intensely real.
By their shadowy profiles Jimmie recognized them. He could almost call the roll, Tungsten Tom, Black Dolan, Stumps Sharpe. And back of all, in the shadows, where he could scarcely be seen at all, not moving, but very real for all that, was another. Jimmie found his stiff lips refusing to form the name even in a whisper. Still he thought it, “The Bubble Man,” and shuddered.