“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 passing.

With a well-directed blow he smashed the wheel.

“Look,” he exclaimed, “this is what they were up against.”

His forefinger indicated an ingenious but now twisted and tangled series of minute wires and electro-magnets in the delicate mechanism now broken open before us.  Delicate brushes led the current into the wheel.