Despite the tension, I could scarcely suppress a smile at the appearance of one of the directors, James Burke, a young man with a pale, sallow face and an habitually apologetic manner. He half arose to his feet, as if almost startled out of his wits, then sat down again hurriedly and wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead. I noticed that his hand shook like an aspen leaf, and he snickered hysterically. Clearly, his was the clearest case of funk I had ever witnessed.
The factory whistle blew!
A dull, muffled explosion! Then chaos!
Chapter II
I awoke with a start. For a second I lay quiet, my mind attempting to grope back over what had happened, unable to comprehend. Outside I could hear shouts, the clanging of bells, the sound of footsteps on the stairs leading to the office. My head ached dully, but I was otherwise uninjured. The big table, overturned, lay across my legs. Pushing it off, I raised myself to a sitting position. For an instant my brain whirled and everything grew black before me. Then the dizziness and feeling of nausea passed away and I was able to comprehend what was happening around me.
Plaster from the ceiling and walls covered everything; the air was filled with its thin, white dust. The pungent odor of explosives assailed my nostrils.
Chairs were overturned. Books and papers lay scattered about the floor.
Beside me lay Grimes, breathing heavily. Innis and Slocum were huddled together across the room, the latter bleeding from a small cut on the forehead. In one corner Burke, the man I had marked as a coward, was sitting up sobbing crooningly to himself, — the victim of hysteria, evidently. The other members of the board sprawled here and there in various attitudes. Backus raised himself to one elbow and gazed about stupidly.
The door was burst open with a crash and the room filled with rescuers—factory workmen, their black smudgy faces expressing their wonderment. I pulled myself clear of the table and started mechanically, to look after Grimes and those who seemed most in need of attention.
With the bellow of a maddened bull, Backus drew himself to his feet and, elbowing his way through the throng about the door, throwing men to right and left as he charged, rushed up the damaged stairway leading to the tower above.
A physician emerged from somewhere. But, by the time of his arrival, his services were in little demand. For practically all of those who had been in the room at the time of the explosion were on their feet assuring each other of their safety. Aside from plastering up the cut in old man Slocum’s head, there was little for him to do. Even the officer at the foot of the stairway leading to the tower had escaped uninjured, although the tower itself was a wreck.
A girl—even to my dirt filled eyes, a vision of loveliness in a cool, white chiffon—struggled through the crowd of men in the outside hallway and threw her arms around the aged president.
“Are you hurt? Are you injured, Uncle Grimes?” she demanded, sobbingly.
The little man patted the girl’s shoulder.
“Not by a darned sight,” he chuckled. “It was worth the bump I got to prove to Slocum that I’m not such a darned old fool as he claims I am. Now dry your eyes and meet Mr. Larson—Captain Larson, my niece Joan—Miss Marne, I should say.”
He turned to the assembled directors with a beatific smile on his wrinkled face.
“Gentlemen,” he said gravely, although there was a twinkle in his eyes, “I hereby declare this meeting adjourned until ten o’clock tomorrow morning, at which time we will continue our discussion of our friend, ‘The Man in the Black Mask.’ Larson, you will be my guest while in town, of course?”
With a few terse orders to the superintendent as to the repairs in and about the office, he followed his niece and myself to the waiting automobile below, chuckling like a youngster at Slocum’s discomfiture.
Chapter III
I sat at the luncheon table and gazed across the wide expanse of cloth at the girl. She was an enigma—a female puzzle—a woman, as could easily be seen, unhampered by society’s conventions, unaffected, yet every bit a woman. She was a beauty—yes, a beauty judged by any kind of rule. Yet there was something odd, strange, peculiar, about her—an elusive something that I could not comprehend. She reminded me of a person laboring under a sorrow which she was struggling to keep hidden from the world. She ate little to speak of, seeming preoccupied, and resisting my best efforts to carry on even a casual conversation.
Grimes, on the other hand, was extraordinarily cheerful, caring more, to all appearances, for his victory over Slocum than for the property loss the company had suffered.
Mrs. Casey, the invalid, plainly a neurotic—excitable and prone to hysteria—said little, excusing herself before the end of the meal was reached, pleading a bad case of nerves as a result of the trouble at the factory.
Luncheon over, Grimes, with all the chipperness of a youngster of twenty, declared that he intended motoring back to the factory to look things over. Naturally, I was to accompany him.
Miss Marne aroused herself from her lethargy and insisted on going with us. She excused herself and, before we had completed our cigars, she danced into the room again attired in a natty motoring costume, her abstraction gone and gay as a butterfly, taking the wheel herself. I took the front seat with her while Grimes lolled in the rear.
Workmen had already completed the job of cleaning away the debris in the office. A truck load of gravel and a pile of bricks gave evidence that, despite the threats of the mysterious blackmailer to destroy the entire plant, it was Grimes’s intention to rush repairs as rapidly as possible.
As we climbed out of the machine, Backus, who had been standing in the background, his round, red face wearing a puzzled expression, stepped forward and greeted us.
“Find anything new, Chief?” Grimes demanded.
The big man looked about him cautiously, then motioning us to one side, produced from his pocket a small, thin, slightly bent piece of metal.
He handed it to the little president without a word. Grimes looked at it with a puzzled expression, then passed it on to me.
“I’m danged if I know what it is,” he admitted. “How about you, Larson?”
I gave the bit of metal a cursory examination then handed it to Joan.
“I think that the Chief has struck oil the first shot,” I replied. “In other words, that same piece of metal is a bit of the shell that kicked down your tower. Where did you find it, Chief?”
“In the upper room just over the office,” replied the officer. “It wasn’t there this morning, for I made a personal inspection and locked the door myself before stationing Mitchell at the foot of the stairs.”
“Shell?” jerked Grimes. “Nonsense!”
“Nevertheless,” I reiterated, “your tower was blown up with some kind of a shell. You can’t get away from the evidence.”
Backus wagged his head sagely as he replaced the metal in his pocket. I had already won him for a friend, I could readily see.
“All right, we’ll admit it’s a shell, then, for the sake of argument,” Grimes responded. “That doesn’t put us any closer to the solution of the puzzle.”
“On the contrary,” I interrupted, “it does. It stands to reason, as any one who is acquainted with explosives will tell you, that the shell was of small calibre and filled with but very little high explosive, else the damage would have been greater. It was fired from somewhere, and by somebody, and from some sort of gun. Result: We have but to find where the shell came from and we have your ‘Man in the Black Mask’ by the heels.”
“As well look for a needle in a haystack. My opinion is that some sort of explosive was planted in the tower in spite of the chief’s precautions, and detonated by electricity—possibly by wireless. I’ve heard of such things. Don’t you think that more probable than the idea you and Backus have of some wonderful gun and still more wonderful marksman?”