THE INCENDIARY

“The Warrington estate owns another large apartment house, besides the one where Warrington has his quarters, on the next street,” remarked Garrick, half an hour later, after we had met the boy from his office.  “I have arranged that we can get in there and use one of the empty suites.”

Garrick had secured two rather good-sized boxes from the boy, and was carrying them rather carefully, as if they contained some very delicate mechanism.

Warrington, we found, occupied a suite in a large apartment on Seventy-second Street, and, as we entered, Garrick stopped and whispered a few words to the hall-boy.

The boy seemed to be more than usually intelligent and had evidently been told over the telephone by Warrington that we were coming.  At least we had no trouble, so far.

Warrington’s suite was very tastefully furnished for bachelor quarters.  In the apartment, Garrick unwrapped one of the packages, and laid it open on the table, while he busied himself opening the safe, using the combination that Warrington had given him.

I waited nervously, for we could not be sure that no one had got ahead of us, already.  There was no need for anxiety, however.

“Here’s the letter, just as Warrington left it,” reported Garrick in a few minutes, with some satisfaction, as he banged the safe door shut and restored things so that it would not look as though the little strong box had been touched.

Meanwhile, I had been looking curiously at the box on the table.  It did not seem to be like anything we had ever used before.  One end was open, and the lid lifted up on a pair of hinges.  I lifted it and looked in.  About half way down the box from the open end was a partition which looked almost as if some one had taken the end of the box and had just shoved it in, until it reached the middle.

The open half was empty, but in the other half I saw a sort of plate of some substance covering the outside of the shoved-in end.  There was also a dry cell and several arrangements for adjustments which I did not understand.  Back of the whole thing was a piece of mechanism, a clockwork interrupter, as I learned later.  Wires led out from the closed end of the box.

Garrick shoved the precious letter into his pocket and then placed the box in a corner, where it was hidden by a pile of books, with the open end facing the room in the direction of the antiquated safe.  The wires from the box were quickly disposed of and dropped out of the window to the yard, several stories below, where we could pick them up later as we had done with the detectaphone.

“What’s that?” I asked curiously, when at last he had finished and I felt at liberty to question him.

“Well, you see,” he explained, “there is no way of knowing yet just how the apartment will be entered.  They apparently have some way, though, which they wouldn’t discuss over the telephone.  But it is certain that as long as they know that there is anyone up here, they will put off the attempt.  They said that.”