“We have tried.”
“We must succeed.”
“Your coachman says to himself: ‘If Mr. Mellen has made five hundred millions of dollars in thirty years, what he can do, I can do. Do you see him doing it? I tell you the man has the gold. He isn’t trying to sell us any secret. All he asks is to be let alone. That is the alarming thing.
“It must be a mine. Where else could so much gold come from?” Mellen’s thoughts were on the source of the gold.
“My dear William, we can account for every ounce of gold produced in the world. There is no mine capable of producing such a quantity secretly.”
“He may have hoarded it; accumulated it for months.”
“If a mine produced a thousand ounces a month We’d know it; and Grinnell has deposited in our bank and others, as far as I have been able to trace, at the rate of a million ounces a month. He is too young to have hoarded it for years. He has no accomplices. That is certain. He visits nobody, but stays home. His father did not leave it to him. He has not unearthed any secret treasure, and, moreover, there never was or could be a hidden treasure of such magnitude. Why, his gold must weigh something like seventy-five tons! Nobody could have given it to him, for nobody had it to give except our bank or the Commercial, and we certainly didn’t. The Assay Office say Grinnel’s is not quite like any of the other bullion that goes to the Assay Office. Its only impurity is a little platinum, and it isn’t always present. We know, within a negligible quantity, where almost every ounce of gold in the world is, and who holds it. There is not a bank or a bullion dealer anywhere whose supply is not known, approximately, to us. It’s my business to know. There’s no mystery about that. The mystery is Grinnell’s gold supply. He cannot store vast quantities in his house. Our men have been in every room in it. Costello, disguised as a driver from the dealers from whom Grinnell buys his chemical supplies, says there is no place for vaults. The only alterations made in the house since Grinnell bought it, that he can see, were to transform the basement into a metallurgical laboratory. We can say almost certainly that the gold is melted in his electric furnace. But all that we know positively is this: NOTHING GOES IN, AND GOLD COMES OUT! Grinnell is making it, I tell you.” The president turned to his morning mail. Mellen stopped him.
“But that is impossible. You know it is.”
“It is a scientific impossibility; but it is also an actual fact. Maybe it isn’t gold at all. But the Assay Office and chemists who have analysed samples I secured from the Assay Office say it is. Where can he get it? Not from a mine outside of New York, for we could easily trace it, no matter how long ago it came. Not from a mine in Thirty-eighth Street, or we’d know it. Not from sea-water. I even had the street torn up in front of Grin-nell’s house under pretence of fixing the gas-main. He can’t get it from the air. The whole thing is impossible. That’s why I’m afraid.”
“If he makes it he must make it out of something,’’ said Mellen controversially.