“The Black Star’ll get out some way!”
“Take it easy, Muggs,” the chief advised. “We’ve got the entire block surrounded. Every door and window is being watched. Why, I’ve even got men watching the sewer connections. Not a rat could get out of this block without being seen and caught.”
“Yeh? We had him surrounded in a house once out on the river, and didn’t he get to the roof and streak it away in an aëroplane?”
“Well, you may be sure he hasn’t any plane on the roof of this building, Muggs. He couldn’t have driven it here and landed—he’d have been smashed to bits, and, besides, some one would have heard or seen him. An aëroplane makes a noise. And he didn’t have any on the roof at supper time, because one of the watchmen we found bound and gagged lives up there, and he just told me he’d seen nothing suspicious. We’ve got him in a trap, I tell you.”
The wall crashed in, and the men fell back, half expecting to face a fight with the Black Star and his men. But their torches showed them a dark shaft running up between the walls and a cable in one corner of it, and that was all.
They cleared away the debris. Up in the lodge hall the other policemen smashed through the wall, too, and sent a shower of bricks and plaster down. Through the shaft they held conversation with those below.
“That box business is up here, chief, but she’s empty,” one of the men called.
“What’s that—empty?”
“Not a sign of anybody in it or anything. It was at the top of the shaft.”
The chief sputtered a moment in impotent rage, and then shouted his orders up the shaft.