“But when will you use it?” Jimmie’s father objected. “Of course, you might meet the president on the street and shoot him. But if you did you’d get nabbed. If you happened to meet a hold-up man and flashed a bulb in his face he’d shoot you and investigate afterwards.”
“You never can tell,” was Jimmie’s reply. “There’s no harm in being prepared.”
Shortly after that a fresh sensation made the headlines of all the papers. A strange new type of hold-up man was abroad on the city streets. A man crossing the Roosevelt Road viaduct heard a hoarse voice say: “As you are.” He saw an arm lifted in the shadows, felt a soft push at his chest, reeled dizzily, and some ten minutes later came to himself to find his wallet and watch gone.
“How was it done?” This was the headline for the next day’s paper. That, as time passed, became the question of the hour.
This man who soon became known as the Silent Terror struck again; this time in a tunnel leading to a suburban station. A woman hurrying to a train heard those same words, “As you are,” saw a hand, felt something touch her, and that was all. She was found a moment later lying unconscious. Her purse was gone. She returned to consciousness ten minutes later and was, apparently, none the worse for the adventure.
“Get that man!” was the cry of the police. “How does he do it?” the papers demanded. And they offered prizes, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand dollars, for the answer.
“Electricity,” said some; “gas” said others; “a new form of mysterious life and death.” But how? How?
A man on the Municipal Pier and a woman on the Washington Street bridge were the next victims. The man had a weak heart. He barely escaped death.
Tom Howe, one of the keenest young detectives in the city service, was assigned to the case. He was a friend of John Nightingale and had become greatly interested in Jimmie Drury. The three of them put their heads together but no solution appeared.
“And now,” Jimmie thought, sitting there in the newspaper office at night waiting for Scottie, the veteran photographer, “it’s happened to me. If only I got that fellow’s picture.”