"The fellow was probably keeping watch on this office. He saw what happened, and decided not to run his neck into a noose. You'll never have any word from Tripps."
"Isn't it just barely possible," hinted one of the clerks, "that the man wanted the stuff for some legitimate purpose?"
"A man who knows how to use nitroglycerine," retorted Hemingway, gruffly, "also knows that it's against the law to ship nitroglycerine unlabeled. He also knows that it's against the law for an express company to transport the stuff on a car that is part of a passenger train. So this fellow who calls himself Tripps is a crook. We haven't caught him, but we've stopped him from using his 'soup' the way he had intended to use it."
"Wonder what he did want to do with it?" mused Dick Prescott.
"There are any one of twenty ways in which the fellow might have used the stuff criminally," replied the plain clothes man. "Of course, for one thing, it could be used to blow open a safe with. But safecracking, nowadays, is done by ordinary robbers, and they're able to carry in a pocket or a satchel the small quantity of 'soup' that it takes to blow the lock of a safe door, or the door off the safe."
After thinking a few minutes, Hemingway went to the telephone, calling up the chief of police at the latter's home. The plain clothes man stated the case, and suggested that the story be told to "The Blade" editor for publication in the morning issue. Then, if anyone in town had any definite suspicion why so much nitroglycerine should be needed in that little city, he could communicate his suspicions or his facts to the police.
"The chief agrees to my plan," nodded Hemingway, leaving the 'phone.
"Me for 'The Blade' office."
"See here," begged Dick, earnestly, "if there's to be a good newspaper story in this, please let me turn it over to Len Spencer. He's one of our best newspaper men. He'll write a corking good story about this business—-and, besides, I'm under some personal obligations to him."
"So I've heard," replied the plain clothes man, with a twinkle in his eyes. Hemingway heard a good deal in his saunterings about Gridley. He had picked up the yarn about Dick & Co., Len Spencer and the "dead ones."
"So that 'The Blade' gets it, I don't care who writes the story," replied the policeman, good-humoredly.