Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/67



HE nightly poker game was on at the Grizzly Club. Henry Harrington, a wildly excited young man, and feeling as if he could never sleep, had been glad to recall it. He met Clayton upon the stairs and, three and one-half hours tardy, the two edged into the game. Harrington was lucky as usual and by twothirty in the morning was some thirteen dollars ahead and gloating over Clayton, who was nearly as much behind, when into one of the absorbed silences of the play there echoed a distant reverberation. It boomed from somewhere outside, not very loudly, but very unmistakably—the detonation of high explosives.

"What was that?" asked Gallup, the grocery man, quick and nervous.

"Sounded like an explosion!" said Guy Getz, the butcher.

"Like blowing a safe to me!" imagined Charlie Clayton.

Gallup and Getz, who both had safes, sprang up; but Harrington was ahead of them at the window and, throwing it wide, stood peering down the empty silence of North Street to where that wide and solid-looking three-story brick structure which housed the administrative office of Boland General squatted in the darkness.

"It sounded down there to me," he remarked.

"Cash in, fellows!" demanded Gallup, who had been