“That’s a very likely theory,” the Camera Chap agreed. “Quite an ingenious idea on their part, wasn’t it? But do you really think that old Gale fixed up that bomb himself?”
“Certainly. Don’t you? The whole thing is perfectly clear to me. They wanted to discredit Carroll in the eyes of the public, to make it impossible for him to win at the coming election, so they planned this bomb outrage. I think ‘planted’ is the word you newspaper men use, is it not?”
“But is it logical to suppose that old Gale would go to the length of deliberately blowing himself up?” the Camera Chap exclaimed.
“It is not,” the lawyer answered, with a smile. “And I don’t suppose anything of the kind. I feel perfectly sure that Gale had no intention of having that bomb explode in his hands.”
“Then how do you suppose it happened?”
“It was an accident, of course. My theory is that the Gales didn’t intend to have the bomb explode at all. They planned merely to have it ‘discovered’ in the Chronicle Building, timed to go off at a certain hour. They were going to send for Chief Hodgins, and have him remove the package to police headquarters. If the plan had gone through all right, Hodgins would have taken the package to headquarters, soaked it in a pail of water, and then examined its contents. He would have announced that it was a genuine, sure-enough infernal machine of the most deadly type. Within a few hours everybody in Oldham would have heard of the dastardly attempt to blow up the Chronicle Building.”
“And that Fred Carroll was responsible for it,” the Camera Chap added, with a grim smile.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” the lawyer answered. “I don’t think that they would have sprung that sensation right away. If they had a proper sense of the dramatic, they would have allowed the identity of the sender of the infernal machine to remain a mystery for several days. Then, when the people of Oldham were keyed up to a proper pitch of excitement, Hodgins would suddenly have announced that the infernal machine had been sent by Carroll, and would have produced his evidence to prove his startling charge.”
“You certainly possess a vivid imagination, Mr. Hands,” the Camera Chap declared. “I have no doubt, though, that that is just about what they intended to do, if the bomb hadn’t gone off accidentally while old Gale was handling it in his private office, and made the thing much more serious than they contemplated.”
“I am confident that my theory is correct,” said the lawyer; “but the trouble is, we are going to have a hard job proving it. In order to do so, we shall have to show that Gale made the infernal machine himself. I am afraid that is going to be a poser.”