Two men clawed the edge of the door and swung it ponderously open. Twenty-two guards poured into the room and all but trampled one another in their flying rush for the vault.
They didn't have time to notice the two canisters hissing quietly to themselves in a room already filled with laughing gas. Their attention was fixed on that closed steel door to the vault room across the way; midway to it, the guards began to sag. Grinning feebly, they sank to the floor.
Two of them, realizing too late what was going on, tried to get to the canisters to turn them off but failed. Chuckling stupidly, they embraced the cool smooth canisters in flaccid grips, sliding slowly down to the floor.
Three others, at the rear of the group, turned around and made it back to the hallway before collapsing like their mates with idiotic smiles and glazed eyes.
The canisters hissed on, above the supine smiling guards.
Francis took out the watch, glanced at it, and looked upward at the Mint. The fog was thinning more and more with every passing second.
The handcart was full.
Too full.
"Oh, no," Gabe said.
Five thousand pounds of gold was a lot of gold. It was in fact too much gold to push.
The four of them leaned as hard as they could, but the handcart wouldn't even rock. It might have been a stone wall.
"Damn!" Gabe said. "Damn, damn, damn, damn!"
Vangie cried, "I knew it wouldn't work! I knew it couldn't be done!"
Ittzy said, "I guess we'll have to take a lot of the gold out."
"Over my dead…" And then Gabe whipped around and grabbed Ittzy's arm. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Gimme that book!"
Ittzy gave him the book and Gabe thumbed feverishly through it. "I know I saw it in here someplace, someplace… Something about shaped charges…"
Nervously, Francis paced back and forth, eyeing the fire alarm box and the Mint up at the top of the hill.
Captain Flagway had remembered a bottle tucked away in his desk, and made it stand for both breakfast and lunch. There was enough left for dinner, plus snacks. Now, he peeked out the porthole and watched Roscoe's crew stacking bales of hay along one side of the ship, at the foot of the mainmast on deck. He reeled back to his chair and took another swallow from the bottle.
Sixteen additional guards piled into the anteroom, collapsing before they reached the second door.
"I've got it!" Gabe cried.
"We'll all be getting it," Roscoe said. Discouragement was becoming general.
"Ittzy," Gabe said, "get the rest of the dynamite. All of it. Bring it over here."
So while Gabe held the book open under Ittzy's nose, one finger tracing the words, Ittzy read with one eye and packed all the dynamite into a charge that he fixed to the face of the mangled vault door right behind the immobile handcart.
Ittzy finished and stepped back, "Now what?"
Gabe scowled toward the iron door. "Listen, what if there's guards lying across the tracks out there?"
Roscoe said, "So we run over them."
"No!" Vangie cried.
"Vangie's right," Gabe said. "We don't want them after us for murder."
Vangie said, "I'll go," and before anyone could react she was over by the steel door.
Gabe rushed to catch her. "Wait a minute… wait a minute!"
"What for?" She pushed the steel door open an inch. Gabe peered over the top of her head and saw that three of the guards were indeed sleeping across the tracks, broad smiles on their faces.
Vangie pulled the door open just wide enough to slip through. Gabe crowded through behind her, and the two of them, holding their breaths, dashed into the anteroom, dragged the sleepers to one side, dashed back, slammed the door, and breathed.
Roscoe said sourly, "You ready now?"
Gabe smiled at him. "Sure… sure," he said lazily.
"Then let's go."
Gabe smiled. Then he frowned and shook his head to clear it. "I must've got a whiff of that stuff." He glanced at Vangie. "You okay?"
She gave him a sleepy grin. "Hi, lover."
"No, Vangie. Definitely not." He grabbed her arm. "Come on, snap out of it."
"You bet." She kept on grinning and swayed happily toward him.
He put his lips close to her ear. "Think about how we're gonna get caught."
The smile faltered.
"Think about how we'll never get away with it, not in a million years; you warned us and we wouldn't listen to you."
She was frowning again, irritable again. "That's right!"
"That's better." Gabe turned back to Ittzy. "You all set?"
"I suppose so."
"Then let her rip." Gabe crossed to the steel door with two long strides. "Everybody take a few deep inhales and then hold your breath."
There was a lot of huffing and puffing in the room for the next few seconds. Long sighs and heaves of breath. Finally Gabe nodded his head and flung the steel door wide open. A cloud of gas rolled into the vault room…
Ittzy lit the dynamite and they all headed for the corners, holding their breath. Almost instantly the new charge went off.
The blast filled the room with deafening noise and vibration. And emptied it of the handcart, which shot like a cannonball out of the inner room and across the anteroom and right on down the corridor…
And Gabe, Vangie, Roscoe and Ittzy were running like mad, chasing it through the laughing gas and down the long corridor…
They bolted out of the gas cloud and the pent-up breath exploded from their chests. They ran full-tilt, panting and straining, but the cart was way out ahead and it really wasn't any contest.
The cart won.
It shot right off the lip of the loading platform and crashed into the back of the waiting wagon. The blow shook the wagon loose in its tracks and started it rolling toward the main gate with the handcart's dumpbucket tilting over and cascading lumps of gold onto the driver's seat and into the footwell. Two or three ingots fell off and lay in the courtyard, glistening in the mist…
Gabe, Vangie, Roscoe, and Ittzy were still running to catch the damned thing, jumping down off the loading platform and bolting forward at a dead run, toes straining, chests heaving, arms wind milling…
The main gates stood wide open. The two guards there were momentarily paralyzed with disbelief. But now doors in the building began to crash open, and guards came pouring into the courtyard. Roscoe brandished his huge revolvers and fired three quick shots into the air. It made the guards hesitate, just that extra second long enough.
Francis, the watch in his hand for the fifth nervous time, looked up in relief and delight at the sound of the shots. Turning, slipping the watch back into his pocket, he took two quick strides to the waiting fire-alarm box, yanked the handle, and took off at a fast clip for the pier.
Up at the Mint the wagon was closing toward the gate. The ground was level here, so the wagon was gradually losing speed, trundling inexorably but not rapidly toward freedom.
Gabe, Ittzy, Roscoe and Vangie were in its wake, strung out in a ragged line, gasping, running, staggering, slowly overtaking the monster they themselves had created. Guards were rushing at them from everywhere, while other guards scrambled frantically to get the main gates closed in time.