“There were sentries outside the building, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“Did they see any vehicle driving near the Treasury?”
“No, except the cab I spoke of, and the driver has accounted satisfactorily for his time that night. The absence of any conveyance is the strange part of it; and, moreover, the sentries, although pacing outside the walls of this building, heard nothing of the concussion beyond a low rumble, and those who thought of the matter at all imagined an explosion had occurred in some distant part of the city.”
“Then the outside doors in the large hall above were not blown open?”
“No; the officer reports that they were locked and bolted when he examined them, which was some minutes, of course, after the disaster had taken place; for he, the officer in charge, had been thrown down and stunned, seemingly by the concussion of air which took place.”
As Jennie walked down the corridor, she saw more and more of the evidences of the convulsion. The thick iron-bound door lay where it had fallen, and it had not been moved since it was lifted to get the two men from under it. Its ponderous hinges were twisted as if they had been made of glue, and its massive bolts were snapped across like bits of glass. All along the corridor on the floor was a thick coating of dust and débris, finely powdered, growing deeper and deeper until they came to the entrance of the room. There was no window either in corridor or chamber, and the way was lit by candles held by soldiers who accompanied them. The scoria crunched under foot as they walked, and in the chamber itself great heaps of dust, sand and plaster, all pulverized into minute particles, lay in the corners of the room, piled up on one side higher than a man’s head. There seemed to be tons of this débris, and, as Jennie looked up at the arched ceiling, resembling the roof of a vaulted dungeon, she saw that the stone itself had been ground to fine dust with the tremendous force of the blast.
“Where are the remnants of the treasure chest?” she asked.
The Director shook his head. “There are no remnants; not a vestige of it is to be found.”
“Of what was it made?”