Leaning on the sword Trenmore looked on with renewed hope in his optimistic soul. "I wonder," thought he, "does the boy know some real secret about this red thing here? Or is he bluffing? If he is, good luck and a power of invention to the tongue of him!"
Drayton was escorted around to the dais steps by two blue-clad policemen. When he stood before the throne, Cleverest gestured impatiently.
"I have no wish to question this man. Gentlemen, since you have taken the matter on yourselves, will you kindly conclude it?"
"We will." The imperturbable Mr. Courage turned to Drayton. "Young man, what is it that you know about the Threat of Penn which we, the Servants of Penn, do not already know?"
"It's history," retorted Drayton boldly. He spoke up loudly, so that Trenmore also might hear. "To be convincing I must go back a long way in the history of Philadelphia-back to the very beginning of her isolation from the rest of the United States. You know nothing of that?"
Leaning from his throne, Cleverest whispered in the ear of Mr. Courage. The latter nodded.
"Stick to the bell itself, please," he said sternly. "We are not interested in the history of Philadelphia."
"I'll try to but you won't understand. Well, then, in that distant age there was a certain group of men practically, though not openly in control of this city. They were called 'grafters,' 'the contractor gang,' and 'the gang.' Those were titles of high honors then-like Servants and Superlatives, you know."
Here, Trenmore, on the bell, almost dropped the sword for sheer delight.
"These grafters," continued Drayton, "got hold of a man who had made a certain discovery. He was professor of physics in a university here. You know-or rather probably you don't know-that all matter in its atomic structure vibrates, and that different sorts of energy waves can affect that vibration. I am no physicist myself, and I can't tell you this in scientific terms. As I understood it, however, he discovered a combination of metals which, when treated in a certain way, would give off sound waves of the exact length of the vibration not of atoms, but of the electrons. That is to say-"