In the meantime the operator in the glass cage was seeing and hearing such things as he had never so much as dreamed of.
His first intimation that something was wrong was when Johnny’s microphone sent him a curious sound of warning. This was caused by someone grasping it in both hands. Compared to the sound that followed at once, this was as nothing. Had two freight engines entered the room from opposite directions and suddenly crashed they could not have produced a more deafening hubbub than that which came from the loud-speaker as the microphone, hurled by mysterious hands, crashed against the studio wall.
As the operator’s startled senses directed his attention to Johnny’s cubby-hole, and his eyes took in at a glance the full horror of the situation, he stood paralyzed with fear.
His chair overturned, Johnny Thompson lay crumpled on the floor. A shadowy figure reached up and crushed his light as a child might a bird’s egg. The same figure seized the police gong and hurled it through a window. Broken glass flew in every direction. A telephone followed the gong. Then, as mysteriously as he had come, the sinister figure stepped once more into the dark, leaving wreck, ruin and perhaps death in his wake.
“Gone!” No, not quite. One more act of violence. Came a flash, a roar, and a bullet struck with a thud against the padded partition.
The operator promptly dropped flat upon the floor. Nor did he, being a prudent youth, rise until heavy feet came stamping up the stairs and three uniformed policemen, led by a youth in shirt sleeves, burst into the room.
The young man in shirt sleeves was Drew Lane.
From the moment Johnny took his first squad call, Drew had been listening in at his room. He had come to have a very great interest in Johnny. “Anyone of his courage, spirit and ambition, coupled with a desire to be of real service to others, will go far,” he had told himself. “I’ll just listen in tonight. He may make a slip or two. If he does I can set him right.”
Johnny made no slips. In fact Drew was obliged to give him credit for a steady hand and a clear head. Drew had been thinking of throwing off the radio and turning in, when the crash of the wrecked microphone reached him through his loud-speaker in the shack.
With a mind well trained for sudden disaster, he knew on the instant that something unusual and terrible was happening in the studio. What it was he could not guess.