“I’m going to have some things sent up. Tonight I start work over the safe. We shall enter the vault by Sunday, when no one is in Pope’s office.”
“How are you going to cut that vanadium steel? Father told me once it was the hardest kind of metal.”
Fay glanced at the skylight which had been changed to a new position. “I told you,” he smiled, “that I had an idea. It’s so far out of my line that the police wont suspect me. I’ve been accused of using thermite, the oxy-acetylene blow-pipe, the electric-arc, with a water-rheostat, and other devices. This time I’ll go everybody one better. The material will be up by special messenger.”
Fay left the studio. His thoughts were not on the method he intended using to open “The Black Cougar’s” strong box. They drifted between two mysteries—the matter-of-factness of Saidee Isaacs, who was certainly unemotional, and the spool of wire which Pope had locked in the vault.
The shop Fay visited that afternoon, and where he waited while a glazier finished the last of his order, was far enough from the center of the city to admit of no danger from the police.
“You see,” Fay told the proprietor, “I am making some experiments at an ostrich farm near Pasadena. Be careful when you pack the mirrors. I’ll have to carry them on a trolley-car.”
He took a huge, well-wrapped package after paying the man the price demanded, and rounded the block. He found a messenger standing in front of a telegraph-office.
“For Miss Saidee Sorjoni, photographer,” he told the boy. “She’s located in the Bradock Building. Here’s a four-bit piece. Don’t break anything.”
Fay watched the boy until he had disappeared. He went through narrow streets to a second glazier’s. This man had constructed two halves of a hollow lens. This lens was about three feet in diameter. It was far from being accurate.