“Mrs. Scorbitt.”
“What is it?”
“Be on your guard! I have just heard that this very night—”
The sentence had not been finished when the door of Ballistic Cottage was burst open by a push from several shoulders, and up the staircase came an extraordinary tumult. There was a voice protesting; then other voices silencing it; then a bump as of a fallen body—bump, bump—it was the negro, Fire-Fire, rolling downstairs after an unavailing defence of his master’s home—bump, bump; the door of the workroom flew open; policemen rushed in; the excitable Maston seized a revolver; instantly he was disarmed; a policeman laid his hand on the papers on the desk; Maston slipped free and dashed at a note-book; the police were after him; before they could reach him he had torn out the last leaf, clapped it to his mouth, and gulped it down as if it had been a pill!
“Now!” said he in the tone of a Leonidas at Thermopylæ. “Now you can do your duty.”
An hour afterwards he was in the gaol at Baltimore.
And that was probably the best thing that could have happened to him, for the populace were in such a state of excitement that the police might have found themselves powerless to protect him.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CONTENTS OF THE NOTE-BOOK.
The book seized by the Baltimore police contained thirty pages, sprinkled with formulæ, multiplications, equations, and finally the general results of J. T. Maston’s calculation. It was a work of the higher mechanics, appreciable only by mathematicians. One of the equations was the—
V2 - (V0)2 = 2g(r0)2(1/r - 1/r0)