“What is it?” Duff asked.
Higgins smiled tightly and looked at Harry.
Harry raised his eyes to Duff and shrugged. “It’s my life savings, that’s what it is!
Since way back when Roosevelt threw us off the gold standard and I had to turn in the gold I kept. I bought platinum. Finally made one piece of it. Harder to swipe. Made that box, in the end, and melted down old pieces of solder to wall it in lead. Too heavy now for any housebreaker to snitch. Then I got bad legs and had to have a lot of medical care. An operation. After that, a year in machinist’s school — with board, room and tuition to pay! So I began cutting out wedges of the stuff and selling it. That’s what’s left! It’s perfectly legal to own it and I’ll be damned if I see what right the G-men have to make me haul it out and explain it. My secret — the only one I ever had — and no harm in it.”
Duff looked at Higgins. Higgins said, “Ellings isn’t kidding. He has a right to stash platinum away, and I did snoop. No search warrant — just noticed he kept his closet locked and asked for a look. We’re hunting some of the best counterfeit plates ever made — and that box was heavy… I hope you’ll accept our apology, Ellings.”
“How much good would it do me, if I refused?” the boarder asked tartly.
And that was that. Higgins and his companion left quickly with no further word.
Duff was on his way home from the campus the next afternoon when Higgins overtook him in a sedan and picked him up. He started driving in a direction tangential to the Yates place.
He said, “All right! Was it the same dingus?”
Duff had asked himself a thousand times. “I don’t believe it was. It was brighter, shinier, I think. And the machining on the first one was more precise, as I remember it. Of course, I was hurrying then. There were saw marks in this casting. Was it platinum?”