Part 12 (1/2)

Meanwhile the crowd that had begun to collect was getting larger.

Dillon went through the form of calling on them for aid, but the call was met with laughter. A Tenderloin crowd has no use for raids, except as a spectacle. Between us we held them back, while Garrick worked. The crowd jeered.

It was the work of only a few seconds, however, before Garrick changed the jeers to a hearty round of exclamations of surprise. The door seemed to be lifted up, literally, until some of its bolts and hinges actually bulged and cracked. It was being crushed, like the flimsy outside door, before the unwonted attack.

Upwards, by fractions of an inch, by millimeters, the door was being forced. There was such straining and stress of materials that I really began to wonder whether the building itself would stand it.

”Scientific jimmying,” gasped Garrick, as the door bulged more and more and seemed almost to threaten to topple in at any moment.

I looked at the stubby little cylinder with its short stump of a lever.

Garrick had taken it out now and had wedged it horizontally between the ice-box door and the outer stonework of the building itself. Then he jammed some pieces of wood in to wedge it tighter and again began to pump at the handle vigorously.

”What is it?” I asked, almost in awe at the t.i.tanic power of the apparently insignificant little thing.

”My scientific sledgehammer,” he panted, still working the lever more vigorously than ever backward and forward. ”In other words, a hydraulic ram. There is no swinging of axes or wielding of crow-bars necessary any more, Dillon, in breaking down a door like this. Such things are obsolete. This little jimmy, if you want to call it that, has a power of ten tons. I think that's about enough.”

It seemed as if the door were buckling and being literally wrenched off its hinges by the irresistible ten-ton punch of the hydraulic ram.

Garrick sprang back, grasping me by the arm and pulling me too. But there was no need of caution. What was left of the door swung back on its loosened hinges, seemed to tremble a moment, and then, with a dull thud crashed down on the beautiful green marble of the reception hall, reverberating.

We peered beyond. Inside all was darkness. At the very first sign of trouble the lights had been switched out downstairs. It was deserted.

There was no answer to our shouts. It was as silent as a tomb.

The clang of bells woke the rapid echoes. The crowd parted. It was the patrol wagons, come just in time, full of reserves, at Dillon's order.

They swarmed up the steps, for there was nothing to do now, in the limelight of the public eye, except their duty. Besides Dillon was there, too.

”Here,” he ordered huskily, ”four of you fellows jump into each of the next door houses and run up to the roof. Four more men go through to the rear of this house. The rest stay here and await orders,” he directed, detailing them off quickly, as he endeavoured to grasp the strange situation.

On both sides of the street heads were out of windows. On other houses the steps were full of spectators. Thousands of people must have swarmed in the street. It was pandemonium.

Yet inside the house into which we had just broken it was all darkness and silence.

The door had yielded to the scientific sledge-hammering where it would have shattered, otherwise, all the axes in the department. What was next?

Garrick jumped briskly over the wreckage into the building. Instead of the lights and gayety which we had seen on the previous night, all was black mystery. The robbers' cave yawned before us. I think we were all prepared for some sort of gunplay, for we knew the crooks to be desperate characters. As we followed Garrick closely we were surprised to encounter not even physical force.

Someone struck a light. Garrick, groping about in the shadows, found the switch, and one after another the lights in the various rooms winked up.

I have seldom seen such confusion as greeted us as, with Dillon waiving his ”John Doe” warrant over his head, we hurried upstairs to the main hall on the second floor, where the greater part of the gambling was done. Furniture was overturned and broken, and there had been no time to remove the heavier gambling apparatus. Playing cards, however, chips, racing sheets from the afternoon, dice, everything portable and tangible and small enough to be carried had disappeared.

But the greatest surprise of all was in store. Though we had seen no one leave by any of the doors, nor by the doors of any of the houses on the block, nor by the roofs, or even by the back yard, according to the report of the police who had been sent in that direction, there was not a living soul in the house from roof to cellar. Search as we did, we could find not one of the scores of people whom I had seen enter in the course of the evening while I was watching on the corner.

Dillon, ever mindful of some of the absurd rules of evidence in such cases laid down by the courts, had had an official photographer summoned and he was proceeding from room to room, snapping pictures of apparatus that was left in place and preserving a film record of the condition of things generally.

Garrick was standing ruefully beside the roulette wheel at which so many fortunes had been dissipated.

”Get me an axe,” he asked of one of Dillon's men who was pa.s.sing.

With a well-directed blow he smashed the wheel.