Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/68

 banking. "I'm going to see what happened." But Harrington was the first to push his stack of chips across the green board and therefore the first to dash down the stairs. He arrived at the administration building after a run of two blocks, with the rest of the poker game trailing after, to find the torch-light of a lone policeman flashing amid the wreckage of a vault in the ground floor office of O. T. Morgan, land commissioner of Boland General, where homed the Edgewater Townsite Company, the Wahpeetah Townsite Company and all the wide range of the tax and title interests of Old Two Blades.

"I was right on their heels," croaked Policeman Ryan excitedly; "but they blew the wrong vault anyway. Only papers in this one."

But Harrington thought the litter of document-containers, huge record-books and rolls of maps scattered over the floor might be that created by eager hands, pulling them out, searching them over and making hasty selections before an imperative departure.

"Maybe they were after papers!" he divined.

"Hornblower!" ejaculated Guy Getz, without a moment's hesitation.

"You bet your life! You'd ought to have let us croaked him, Henry!" declared Phil Gallup.

"It might be Hornblower, of course," conceded Henry, glumly, and stood meditative, surveying and re-surveying the confusion, while excitement grew with each new arrival. Two or three night watchmen came in, another policeman and then Scott, the Chief of Police. Somebody telephoned O. T. Morgan and Cosby, head of Boland General's private detective force. Nobody touched anything. It lay as it fell for the small