CHAPTER III
JOHNNY FLUSHES A SKULKER
Trembling with suppressed excitement, his brow deeply furrowed, Johnny lifted the lid to the lunch-box, then stared in surprise and disgust. The box contained, not the precious steel bars of unusual and as yet unknown composition, but a small twist drill, worth, perhaps, a dime. For a moment he stared at the thing, then picked it up and thrust it into his pocket.
“Sneak thief! Petty larceny of the pettiest kind. But, anyway, I’ll report it to the chief. He may want to do something about it.”
The rest of that night, waiting in the shadow of a gigantic sheet-steel press, in full view of the vault where rested the remaining bars of steel, Johnny saw no movement, heard no sound that told him there were other human beings in the building save himself and the regular night watchman, who made his monotonous hourly rounds, pausing only to punch a clock here and there. But motionless and silent as they might be, Johnny knew there were at least two persons in that building who were there without leave or license.
To attempt to run down a single individual in the vast plant, with its labyrinth of aisles, with thousands of machines, drill presses, millers, forges, moulders, cranes, conveyors, with its seemingly tangled mass of overhead equipment and its endless underground tunnels, would be equal to the task of capturing a fish with a hand-net on the bottom of the Atlantic. To discover the person would be almost impossible, and even if he were discovered, his capture would be difficult indeed. Only the best of good fortune could crown such an effort with success.
Johnny knew there were two men. One was he who had attempted to tamper with the vault’s lock, and the other was the originator of the mysterious white fire. That the fire was produced by electric currents set to operate upon certain given contacts, Johnny could not believe. In the case of the knob to the vault’s door, this might be true, but in that of the aluminum casting such a theory was impossible, for Johnny knew there could have been no prearranged electrical contacts.
The casting had been on the floor. Johnny had lifted it to his vise and had clamped it there. No one had been near it, save he himself, from that time until the mysterious heat had enabled him to do the work of repair by welding. How could the heat have come there? That, he could not tell. Who had created it? He could not even guess. What had been the purpose in either case? Was he friend or enemy? What would be his next strange demonstration of power? All these remained unanswered. Of one thing alone Johnny was positive: The person had been in the building and was there still.
The thought made him distinctly uncomfortable. “Why,” he thought suddenly, “if he is our enemy, he has but to burn out the lock to the vault and the door will swing open of its own weight!”
Then he thought of himself. He had an uncomfortable conviction that this heat might be applied anywhere—on his own body, like as not. At times he saw himself racing about the factory tortured by an intolerable heat which turned his garments to ashes and charred his very flesh. At such times as these he rose and shook himself free from disturbing fancies.
He tried in vain to remember any great discovery which would make such intense detached heat possible. He could think of none.