room. A faro-layout was purchasing Senator Danfield a new touring-car every hour at the expense of the players. Another group was gathered about the hazard board, deriving evident excitement, though I am sure none could have given an intelligent account of the chances they were taking. Two roulette-tables were now going full blast, the larger crowd still about DeLong’s. Snatches of conversation came to us now and then, and I caught one sentence, “De Long’s in for over a hundred thousand now on the week’s play, I understand; poor boy—that about cleans him up.”
“The tragedy of it, Craig,” I whispered, but he did not hear.
With his hat tilted at a rakish angle and his opera-coat over his arm he sauntered over for a last look.
“Any luck yet?” he asked carelessly.
“The devil—no,” returned the boy.
“Do you know what my advice to you is, the advice of a man who has seen high play everywhere from Monte Carlo to Shanghai?”
“What?”
“Play until your luck changes if it takes until tomorrow.”
A supercilious smile crossed Senator Danfield’s fat face.
“I intend to,” and the haggard young face turned again to the table and forgot us.
“For Heaven’s sake, Kennedy,” I gasped as we went down the stairway, “what do you mean by giving him such advice—you?”
“Not so loud, Walter. He’d have done it anyhow, I suppose, but I want him to keep at it. This night means life or death to Percival DeLong and his mother, too. Come on, let’s get out of this.”
We passed the formidable steel door and gained the street, jostled by the late-comers who had left the after-theatre restaurants for a few moments of play at the famous club that so long had defied the police.
Almost gaily Kennedy swung along toward Broadway. At the corner he hesitated, glanced up and down, caught sight of the furniture-van in the middle of the next block. The driver was tugging at the harness of the horses, apparently fixing it. We walked along and stopped beside it.
“Drive around in front of the Vesper Club slowly,” said Kennedy as the driver at last looked up.
The van lumbered ahead, and we followed it casually. Around the corner it turned. We turned also. My heart was going like a sledgehammer as the critical moment approached. My head was in a whirl. What would that gay throng back of those darkened windows down the street think if they knew what was being prepared for them?
On, like the Trojan horse, the van lumbered. A man went into the Vesper Club, and I saw the negro at the door eye the oncoming van suspiciously. The door banged shut.
The next thing I knew, Kennedy had ripped off his disguise, had flung himself up behind the van, and had swung the doors open. A dozen men with ages and sledge-hammers swarmed out and up the steps of the club.
“Call the reserves, O’Connor,” cried Kennedy. “Watch the roof and the back yard.”
The driver of the van hastened to send in the call.
The sharp raps of the hammers and the axes sounded on the thick brass-bound oak of the outside door in quick succession. There was a scurry of feet inside, and we could hear a grating noise and a terrific jar as the inner, steel door shut.
“A raid! A raid on the Vesper Club!” shouted a belated passer-by. The crowd swarmed around from Broadway, as if it were noon instead of midnight.
Banging and ripping and tearing, the outer door was slowly forced. As it crashed in, the quick gongs of several police patrols sounded. The reserves had been called out at the proper moment, too late for them to “tip off” the club that there was going to be a raid, as frequently occurs.
Disregarding the melee behind me, I leaped through the wreckage with the other raiders. The steel door barred all further progress with its cold blue impassibility. How were we to surmount this last and most formidable barrier?
I turned in time to see Kennedy and O’Connor hurrying up the steps with a huge tank studded with bolts like a boiler, while two other men carried a second tank.
“There,” ordered Craig, “set the oxygen there,” as he placed his own tank on the opposite side:
Out of the tanks stout tubes led, with stopcocks and gages at the top. From a case under his arm Kennedy produced a curious arrangement like a huge hook, with a curved neck and a sharp beak. Really it consisted of two metal tubes which ran into a sort of cylinder, or mixing chamber, above the nozzle, while parallel to them ran a third separate tube with a second nozzle of its own. Quickly he joined the ends of the tubes from the tanks to the metal hook, the oxygen-tank being joined to two of the tubes of the hook, and the second tank being joined to the other. With a match he touched the nozzle gingerly. Instantly a hissing, spitting noise followed, and an intense blinding needle of flame.
“Now for the oxy-acetylene blowpipe,” cried Kennedy as he advanced toward the steel door. “We’ll make short work of this.”
Almost as he said it, the steel beneath the blowpipe became incandescent.
Just to test it, he cut off the head of a three-quarter-inch steel rivet—taking about a quarter of a minute to do it. It was evident, though, that that would not weaken the door appreciably, even if the rivets were all driven through. Still they gave a starting-point for the flame of the high-pressure acetylene torch.
It was a brilliant sight. The terrific heat from the first nozzle caused the metal to glow under the torch as if in an open-hearth furnace. From the second nozzle issued a stream of oxygen under which the hot metal of the door was completely consumed. The force of the blast as the compressed oxygen and acetylene were expelled carried a fine spray of the disintegrated metal visibly before it. And yet it was not a big hole that it made—scarcely an eighth of an inch wide, but clear and sharp as if a buzz-saw were eating its way through a three-inch plank of white pine.
With tense muscles Kennedy held this terrific engine of destruction and moved it as easily as if it had been a mere pencil of light. He was easily the calmest of us all as we crowded about him at a respectful distance.
“Acetylene, as you may know,” he hastily explained, never pausing for a moment in his work, “is composed of carbon and hydrogen. As it burns at the end of the nozzle it is broken into carbon and hydrogen—the carbon gives the high temperature, and the hydrogen forms a cone that protects the end of the blowpipe from being itself burnt up.”
“But isn’t it dangerous?” I asked, amazed at the skill with which he handled the blowpipe.
“Not particularly—when you know how to do it. In that tank is a porous asbestos packing saturated with acetone, under pressure. Thus I can carry acetylene safely, for it is dissolved, and the possibility of explosion is minimised. This mixing chamber by which I am holding the torch, where the oxygen and acetylene mix, is also designed in such a way as to prevent a flash-back. The best thing about this style of blowpipe is the ease with which it can be transported and the curious uses—like the present—to which it can be put.”
He paused a moment to test the door. All was silence on the other side. The door itself was as firm as ever.
“Huh!” exclaimed one of the detectives behind me, “these new-fangled things ain’t all they’re cracked up to be. Now if I was runnin’ this show, I’d dynamite that door to kingdom come.”
“And wreck the house and kill a few people,” I returned, hotly resenting the criticism of Kennedy. Kennedy affected not to hear.
“When I shut off the oxygen in this second jet,” he resumed as if nothing had been said, “you see the torch merely heats the steel. I can get a heat of approximately sixty-three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the flame will exert a pressure of fifty pounds to the square inch.”
“Wonderful!” exclaimed O’Connor, who had not heard the remark of his subordinate and was watching with undisguised admiration.