“I’ve had that in mind. So far nothing has been taken in, unless—” Tom paused for thought. “Unless it was in small packages of great value hidden in their clothing. There was a jewel robbery just last night. This morning the truck made one of those mysterious journeys. But the idea of carrying a pound or two of diamonds on a truck! No, it won’t do.” Tom laughed a dry laugh.
“By the way,” he exclaimed, “I’m due to go over to look into that jewel robbery now. Want to go along?”
“I sure do!” exclaimed Jimmie. He was on his feet at once.
A short time later Tom and Jimmie entered the small back room of the diamond merchant’s shop.
“You won’t find many clues here,” said the uniformed policeman in charge of the case. “Slickest job I ever saw.”
“Hm,” said Tom. “You’d hardly think there’d been a robbery, except,” he looked down at the floor, “quite a lot of burned matches. They always are important. I have known a match to send a man to prison for ten years.
“You’d think,” he turned to Jimmie, “that crooks would use flashlights. Sometimes they do. More often they don’t. Light’s too penetrating. The gleam of a match or candle doesn’t carry far. This fellow——
“Say!” He picked up a match and examined it closely. “This at least is unusual. These matches are of the type used in the very far north, Alaska, Siberia.
“See!” He held the stub of a burned-out match to view. “He got two instead of one that time. The two stubs still hold together at the end.
“Those northern matches,” he went on after examining two others, “are made in blocks. They are small and come a hundred to the block. They are sulphur matches. A machine splits a small block of corkpine from end to end into a hundred tiny pieces. The block is not cut quite through. The tips of all the hundred ends are dipped in a sulphur compound and become matches. They are handy to carry. This man has been in the north. I’ll bet on that. He used the matches and came to like them so he still carries them. I’ll have the records searched for a safe-cracker who has been in the north.”