Part 78

"And what's going to happen to your millions of dollars?"

Trotter sat down in the chair again. "It's going to be stolen, every cent of it."

The man at the desk smiled. It was a very faint and mirthless smile. "You said that before, I think. But who's taking it?"

"One of the most accomplished crooks in all America."

"And from where?" was the next indulgent interrogation.

"From one of the richest banks in this city."

Trotter's calm and deliberate tones were beginning to nettle the other man a little.

"Then it hasn't actually been done?"

"No!"

"Yet you know it IS to be done?"

"Yes!"

Pyott was smiling by this time, quite broadly. "Would you kindly tell me just how you know all this? Just what first opened up the road to your somewhat startling knowledge?"

"Some turkey bones!"

"Ah, I see! Some turkey bones!" He nodded approvingly, indulgently. "And what were you doing with these particular turkey bones?"

"Putting them in a garbage can."

"Ah! You were putting some turkey bones in a garbage can. And as you were about to do this?"

"I caught sight of another man also trying to get rid of a parcel."

"Turkey bones, of course."

A butterball's bosom was no more impervious to slough water than the rapt-eyed youth to the older man's irony.

"When I opened his parcel I found it held mortar and stone and some steel cuttings."

"And this led you to infer?"

"This led me to follow him. He had a basement, I found, directly in the rear of a bank building."

"What bank building?"

"That's my story."

"And I trust the locality agreed with him."

"Extremely well," was Trotter's mild-toned reply. "In fact, it was essential for him to be side by side with that particular bank building, where he could quietly tunnel his way through its back wall and burrow under its floors and eat a passage right through to its vaults."

The man at the desk sighed and looked at the obsessed youth with a smile too impersonal to be called pitying. "Vaults! That's a matter for the police. This is a newspaper office."

"But can't you see the story in it? Can't you see what it means when you're the only people who're in on it?"