The Weird Adventures of The Blond Adder

The Chicago World’s Fair had a new and amazing attraction — a red-hot meteor. Buried in this molten mausoleum was a man’s skull, and a square-cut diamond. The papers played it up as an unlucky planet dweller hurled earthward to doom. But Lee Nace, ace detective, doubted that star dwellers wore square-cut diamonds — and he went out to take a look for himself. It was then that he came face to face with — the flaming mask.

Chapter I The Hell Heat

The alleged meteor fell slightly after midnight. The morning papers carried a story about it. The item was interesting. But it was not half as arresting as the astounding and horrible discovery which was made a bit later.

Agency Detective Lee Nace read the papers that morning. There was also a short double paragraph about himself. It was on the front page, and said Nace, renowned sleuth whom Scotland Yard had once kept in England for a time as consultant, had stopped off in town to see the Century of Progress. The meteor item was on an inside page.

Nace clipped the bit about himself, filed it in a brief case. That kind of publicity was good for his business.

The alleged meteor was taken to the Century of Progress grounds for exhibition. That afternoon, a scientist put it under a powerful X-ray. What he saw caused the scientist’s eyes to pop. He called wildly to his associates.

A portion of a human skull was embedded in the upper part of the supposed meteor. Inside the skull were what appeared to be brains, thoroughly cooked.

In the lower portion of the meteor was a diamond. The gem was cut with large facets, a setting from a ring, perhaps.

The skull was that of a man.

Nace went out to look. No one invited him. Nobody paid him. He was simply interested in unusual murders. This looked like one.

Of course, the newspaper scribes wondered — in front page print — if the meteor was not a fallen star, and the skull that of an unlucky dweller from another planet. Nace doubted that star dwellers wore square-cut diamonds.

The alleged meteor was a tub-sized blob of metal. Its surface was bulbous, pocked, and vaguely remindful of distorted pictures of the moon. The scientists were uncertain just what kind of metal it was.

The meteor had been found in swanky Lincoln Park. It had given off a great, white-hot light which had emblazoned the apartment houses facing the park. It was still red-hot when they found it.

Some persons claimed they had seen it flash across the sky. These individuals became doubtful when pressed for details. Maybe it had not blazed through the heavens, they admitted.

The scientists, at the suggestion of the police, decided to drill in and get the diamond.

Nace stood and watched.

“So this is the way we’re going to spend our time at the Century of Progress!” complained Julia.

Julia was Nace’s red-headed assistant. She was stunning in gray sports frock and tiny hat. She carried a large pancake compact, the new type. She might have been a society deb.

“This may be something for us,” Nace told her.

“Who’s going to pay us?” Julia was highly commercial. “Since when did we start working for nothing?”

“Was anything said about you hanging around?” Nace demanded. “Drag your skirt out of here and look at the fair.”

Julia hung around. She kept away from Nace, and pretended elaborately not to know him.

They core-drilled the diamond out about dark. The gem was taken into a private room to be put under microscopes. Three policemen accompanied the two experts who were to do the examining.

Nace tried to get in. The sergeant in charge of the cops apparently did not like private detectives. He refused to let Nace be present.

Nace went to a phone booth nearby and called the head of the Chicago police. That worthy requested that police sergeant be put on the wire, and he would damn well see that Nace was present at proceedings.

Nace started to get the sergeant.

Then things happened.

Over where the remnant of the meteor lay, there was a terrific, white-hot glare. Nace tried to stare at the spot. It was as if he had been in a darkened room, and had suddenly sought to peer into the eye of a powerful searchlight. He was blinded.

Men and women screeched in fright and agony. There was a panic-stricken rush from the spot.

Nace felt a wave of heat against his face. It was if a welding torch had been held a few inches from his features. He spun and ran with the others. But he veered to the right as he did so. The room where they were inspecting the diamond was over there.

The angle of a wall cut him off from the terrific glare. But even the reflected blaze of the hellish light ached his eyes. He made small caverns over his eyes with his hands, peering through the thin flesh where his long, bony fingers rested together. So incredibly brilliant was the luminance that it went through his palms as though tablet paper. Sunlight never equaled it.

He reached the door of the room which held the diamond.

The door burst open. Behind it was another white-hot glare. It was as if the lid of Hades had been shoved ajar.

The three cops plunged out. The two scientists trailed them. They slammed the door.

Nace put a palm against the door, with the idea of shoving it open again. But it was so hot that he wrenched his hand away. The plywood began to smoke. Paint curled off.

Who-o-sh! The door burst into flame.

Nace retreated.

The other glare was subsiding rapidly. Nace approached it, eyes shaded.

The meteor was glowing with an awful heat. It lay in a pit it had melted in the floor. It had rested on a metal table. Molten metal from the table and liquidized sand from the concrete poured down the side of the pit.

It was impossible to approach within twenty feet of the spot. Modernistic fittings all about were smouldering or blazing. Smoke was filling the great exhibition buildings.

Backing away, Nace shook his head rapidly. On his forehead, a small patch of scarlet flushed out and rapidly assumed a definite form. The mark had been unnoticeable heretofore.

The crimson blotch had the shape of a coiled serpent — an adder. A Chinaman had once hit Nace on the forehead with the hilt of a dagger which bore the carving of a coiled snake. He was destined to carry the scar. It was garishly noticeable under the shock of blond hair. It came only when he was angry or puzzled.

He was puzzled now. He had never before seen such infernal heat as this.

There was another thing which worried him. Red-headed Julia was nowhere in sight.

Emergency fire apparatus arrived and extinguished the blazing parts of the exhibition building. Great clouds of steam poured from the supposed meteor. It cooled enough that it could be examined.

It was put under the X-ray again. The human skull was no longer discernible. It had melted into nothingness by the amazing heat.

The diamond was found to be missing from the room where it had been taken for examination.

Nace collared one of the scientists who had been making the inspection.

“I don’t know what happened!” the man groaned, and wiped his forehead. “We were just starting to inspect the stone, and there was a blinding light in the ceiling. We looked up. All hell seemed to be coming through the plaster. The light was so bright we couldn’t tell what it was. We ran!”

Nace prowled a little. He found one of the strange meteor-like lumps of metal in a self-melted pit in the floor. Its heat, he concluded, had been terrific enough to dissolve the diamond!

Most of the ceiling was gone. The room above, he found, had been one used only for storage.

Nace said nothing. But he thought a lot. The skull in the meteor and the diamond had been evidence. By striking twice, the hellish heat, whatever it was, had wiped out both skull and diamond.

With a hammer, Nace knocked off a hunk of the strange, clinker-like metal. He borrowed a microscope from an optical concern exhibit, some chemicals from another display, and retired to a theatre where television shows were given periodically. It was not show hour and the theatre was empty.

Nace was something of a scientist himself. He set to work making an analysis, applying various acids and watching the resulting reactions.

The adder scar became even more pronounced on his forehead as he proceeded. The first half dozen tests had gotten him nowhere. The job was going to take some time.

He pocketed the bit of clinker, went out and circled for some minutes through the crowds. There was much excitement. Gaunt and blond, only a little under seven feet in height, Nace skirted the throng, threaded its center.

Red-headed Julia, his assistant, was still nowhere in evidence.

Nace returned to the television theatre. He moved his microscope and chemicals to the projection booth behind the screen. There was more privacy in the booth. He turned out the other lights.

Before resuming his task, he crumpled twenty or thirty advertising pamphlets he found on a table and strewed them along the aisles of the darkened theatre.

He was back in the booth, applying a chemical mixture to the meteor fragment when he heard one of the paper balls crackle. Someone had stepped on it.

Nace had planted the paper in hopes it would give him just such a warning.

His eyes roved, came to rest on a spool of fine insulated wire. He seized the wire and tied the end to the neck of a small chemical bottle. This he placed in the glass bowl in which he was mixing ingredients.

He tweaked the wire. This caused the bottle to rattle in the bowl, giving off a tinkling sound, as if chemicals being mixed.

He eased out of the booth. From time to time, he tugged the wire, which he unspooled as he backed away. Glassy jingles came from the booth each time he yanked. From the noise, the prowler would think he was still at work.

Someone had spotted his lone-wolf investigations. He was not displeased. Such a possibility had been in his mind when he went about them so openly.

Nace circled warily in the darkness, found an aisle and eased down it, still unspooling his wire. He felt out the location of his crumpled paper balls and carefully avoided them.

From time to time, he gave the wire a gentle jerk. The bottle in the bowl tinkle-tinkled.

He listened carefully. No sound — except the bottle in the bowl.

He crept toward the door, ears aching from the strain of listening. At the entrance, the nearness of the light switch intrigued him. He considered, put a hand on the switch, hesitated, tinkled his bottle in the bowl. Nothing happened.

He turned on the lights.

No one was in the television theatre.

Absently, Nace fished a pipe out of a pocket. It was stubby, with a big bowl. He clamped it in his teeth. He liked to bite on something when the going got bewildering or tough.

He snapped at the pipe stem — surprise made his teeth set hard, so hard the tough bakelite broke like gravel.

Something grisly, blinding was happening to the ceiling over the projection booth. It was dissolving, a white-hot, sudden flash, as if it were so much ignited flashlight powder.

He saw a great ball of incandescence swoop downward upon the booth. Heat that seared like flame washed against his face. His eyes pinched shut involuntarily. He heaved around, shouldered through the door.

The hell heat had struck at his life, coming from above, from one of the rooms overhead.

A thought struck him. He spun back, flat on the floor, eyes closed. He crawled a few feet. His hands, groping, gathered in balls of the crumpled paper. He carried them back outside.

The outer exhibit rooms, brilliantly lighted by electronic bulbs, seemed in a twilight after that terrific glare in the television theatre. He brought the paper wads close to his eyes, peered at them.

None were flattened, as they would have been had someone had stepped on them.

A fresh uproar seized the vast exhibit as the new blaze was discovered. Fire apparatus, still on hand from the other two fires, charged the spot.

Nace worked left, mounted stairs. Smoke rolled like living, smudged masses of cotton. He waded through it. The exhibit rooms upstairs were deserted, sucked clean of their throngs by the previous excitement below.

The room above the television theatre booth was occupied by an exhibit of surgical instruments. A vast hole in the center, over the booth, glowed with intense heat.

Nace tapped a coat pocket. The fragment he had chipped from the clinker of strange metal reposed there. He went downstairs again, ducking aside as a fire hose flung spray in his direction. He had an idea what they would find in the projection booth — another of those strange clinkers.

He circled through exhibition rooms, his pace rapid, uneasy. His unusual height enabled him to peer over heads.

He saw no trace of red-headed Julia.

He found a phone, put in a call to his hotel.

“Anyone left word there for Lee Nace?” he asked the girl on the phone board.

“A young lady telephoned a few minutes ago,” he was told. “A young lady who gave her name as Julia.”

“She leave a message?”

“Yes. She said she would be in the room which holds the diamond exhibit at the Century of Progress grounds.”

Nace hung up. He produced a guide book, scraped a finger nail down the list of exhibitors, and found the location of the structure which held the diamond display. It was down the midway a short distance.

Chapter II The Scared Man

The room was big, done in modernistic metals and woods. The paint scheme was brilliant.

In the center stood a metallic looking block. It was several feet square, perhaps waist high. Atop it was a glass case — the diamond exhibit case.

There was a diamond in the case worth three hundred thousand dollars. There were others almost as valuable. The case was fitted with tear gas. The glass was bulletproof. The gem display would drop automatically into a safe the instant the bulletproof glass was assaulted. Or so a printed sign said.

People milled about, staring at the brilliants, pressing faces against the cases to read the identifying cards. The Century of Progress show was so vast that the three appearances of the mysterious and frightful white-hot flame had not drawn spectators from the diamond exhibit.

Nace lounged in, slouching so that his height would not draw attention.

Julia was across the room, showing interest in a sample of the blue ground from which diamonds were taken. She was very pretty. She was getting, from nearby men, more attention than the diamond exhibit.

Nace produced his stubby pipe. The stem was ruined where he had bitten it. He dug an extra stem from a flat case which held several. Ruining stems was a habit of his; he carried spares always.

He stoked the bowl with tobacco, applied a match. Smoke crawled from his lips. Long puffs; short ones! A close observer might have perceived they were spelling words in the Morse dot-and-dash code.

“What’s up?” he asked with the smoke puffs.

The red-head lost interest in the sample of blue ground. She flipped open her flat pancake compact and went to work on her complexion. There was a bright light over the blue ground exhibit. The compact mirror caught this and tossed a reflected dab of luminance against the ceiling. It winked dots and dashes as the powder puff covered and uncovered the mirror.

“Over in the northeast corner — the man who looks scared,” she transmitted.

Nace removed his pipe, pretended to inspect the bowl. His gaze went on to the scared man.

The fellow was somewhat taller than Nace, which made him not many inches under seven feet. He had a small face, an enormous gray moustache. His dwarf features seemed bunched back of the big moustache. The rest of him was a collection of bones in a well-tailored sack.

His eyes held fear. They roved. His hands strayed nervously. His gaze went frequently to the diamond case, but seemed interested not in the contents, but in the crowd around about.

“O.K.,” Nace puffed, measuring smoke carefully through his lips. “What about him?”

“I saw him acting queer when the big blaze first hit in the other building,” Julia heliographed with her compact mirror. “I tailed him here. He’s got something on his mind.”

“You’ve been watching him all the time?”

“Sure.”

“He didn’t have a try at scragging me in the television theater?”

“He hasn’t been near any television theater!” Julia looked worried. “Has somebody been after you?”

“They’ve been messing around. Keep your eyes open.”

Nace walked over to the man who was scared. He cupped a palm under the fellow’s right elbow. The gesture looked friendly. Actually, it placed Nace in a position to block any effort the man might make at drawing a gun.

“Some trouble, brother?” Nace asked.

The man looked around, down. His eye stuck out a little. He began to tremble. He said nothing.

Nace tugged gently. In a dazed way, the man let himself be guided out of the press around the diamond case. Nace stopped him near a stand that sold an orange drink.

A girl in an orange-colored dress operated the stand. She was big-boned, but not hard to look at. She wore orange-hued earrings.

She came up, asked, “Two?”

Nace nodded, dropped two dimes on the marble and she set out two glasses.

The bony man was studying Nace nervously. He did not touch the orange drink.

The girl in the stand withdrew to the far end. She was fully fifteen feet distant. There was noise in the exhibition room — the conglomerate jumble of voices, loudspeakers, music somewhere.

Only if Nace raised his voice, could the girl overhear.

Nace produced his agency badge, displayed it.

The man trembled more violently, muttered, “The police!”

“What’re you worried about?” Nace questioned.

“I’m not worried!” the man retorted, and shivered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Better spill it!”

The man swallowed rapidly, said nothing.

Nace, deciding the fellow was about to walk off, reached out and took him firmly by the elbow.

“I’m not a cop,” he explained. “I’m a private detective.”

The man braced himself, scowled. “Leggo me, or I’ll hand you something for your jaw!”

“My business is helping people out of trouble,” Nace told him. “You look like a customer.”

“My looks deceived you, then!” snapped the man.

Jerking, he got loose. He spun and walked rapidly away, eyes staring straight ahead.

Nace glowered after him. On Nace’s forehead, the serpentine scar came out like something faded in by a concealed color camera.

Across the room, red-headed Julia made an impish mouth over her compact.

Nace, drawing deeply on his pipe, let out smoke in dots and dashes.

“Follow that monkey,” he directed.

Julia closed her compact, started away, then turned back abruptly and seemed to find something of renewed interest in the blue ground display.

The scared man had wheeled and was returning.

He stopped in front of Nace, looked about uneasily. No one was close. The girl with the orange dress and orange earrings was still at the other end of the stand. She seemed half asleep.

The frightened man’s voice was a wispy whisper.

“Can I talk to you and be sure it won’t get to the police?” he demanded.

Nace sucked deeply on his pipe. The bowl gurgled, hissed, popped faintly. “That depends.”

The other wet his lips. “Depends on what?”

“On whether I think the cops ought to have you or not.”

The man looked at the adder scar on Nace’s forehead. “But how can I tell—”

“You can’t!”

The other squirmed, swiped nervously at his big gray moustache. Facial expression said he was making up his mind.

“I’ve got to take the chance!” he gulped at last. “I’ve got to do something! I thought of going to the police! I really did! But after that — after what happened to that thing they thought was a meteor, I didn’t dare. They might not have — well, er-r—”

“Quite understood, eh?”

“That’s it.”

“What mightn’t they understand?”

“It’s horrible! So very horrible!” The man was becoming excited. He came closer; his face was almost against Nace’s. “Tell me, did they get a close enough look at that diamond to identify it? I mean — enough of a look that the jeweler who sold it would recognize the gem?”

“No.”

The man was perspiring. “That’s too bad! Too awfully bad! I was in hopes the police would get a clue to the man’s identity!”

Nace nodded as if he understood everything. “What’s this all about?”

The fellow peered narrowly at Nace. “Maybe I had better go to the police with this, after all! It’s big! So very big! And ghastly!”

“You’d better let me be the judge about the police!”

The man glanced to right and left, behind him. “They may be around here! I think I saw two of them a minute ago!”

“Two of who?”

The bristling gray moustache came so close that it almost touched Nace’s face.

“Would you believe me if I told you there was a gigantic plot underfoot?” the fellow demanded. “A plot to steal millions! A plot which even includes the theft of the diamonds in this very room! But it won’t stop there! They have that devilish stuff — the hell heat! It will melt the strongest bank vault as a blow torch melts butter. It will consume the bodies of men, and leave not a trace!”

“It left a trace last night,” Nace pointed out. “There was a human skull and a setting from a ring embedded in that supposed meteor.”

The man squirmed. “They didn’t use enough of it! They were inexperienced. But they know how much to use now. They are liable to be here any time, after these diamonds—”

The girl in the orange-drink stand had been watching — although she was certainly out of earshot. Now she came forward, with a cat speed and silently.

A pepper shaker stood beside a basket of oilpaper-wrapped sandwiches. She scooped this up, twisted it open, dumped the contents in the palm of her left hand.

Leaning far out, she gave Nace a swipe across the eyes with the hand which held the pepper.

Nace clapped both hands over his eyes. The girl had been behind him; had taken him by surprise.

He bent double and lunged violently away from the spot. He heard the orange-stand girl rap excited words.

“C’mon, tall boy!” she called, evidently to the man to whom Nace had been talking. “You and me are going places!”

“I don’t understand!” gulped the tall man’s voice. “Who are—”

“Clam up! C’mon!”

That was all Nace heard. There was no pepper in his eyeballs; he had closed his lids in time. But flakes crammed the tiny wrinkles in his lids and clung to the skin. He dared not open his eyes, or they would begin smarting.

A drinking fountain stood down a passage and around a corner. He had spotted it on his way here. It was a tribute to his sense of direction when he bumped blindly into it.

The fountain, like many others about the Century of Progress grounds, was one which started flowing automatically when one bent over it. The mechanism held a photo-electric cell which caused the water to go on when blanketed by the head-shadow of a drinker.

Nace bent over it. Water gushed against his face, a chill stream. He brushed his face from side to side, washing off the pepper.

Back in the diamond exhibit room, he could hear no undue excitement. Perhaps the pepper throwing incident had passed unnoticed.

Nace washed violently. The delay irked him. But it was necessary. If he did not get all the pepper off, it would be minutes before he could see.

He debated. The girl in the orange stand — obviously she wasn’t what she seemed. But how had she known he was about to get the tall man to tell what he knew?

The pepper all removed, Nace straightened, spun and barged back into the tall man with the moustache.

Nace roved his eyes.

Julia, his red-haired aide, was also gone.

The eerie flush of a serpent glowing redly on his forehead, Nace elbowed for the exit nearest the orange-drink stand. The case of diamonds was a scintillating blaze. A fat man, staring at them, jeered, “I wonder if anybody is sucker enough to think these are the McCoy?”

Nace went on. The gems were real enough. The fat man was fooled by the case. It was as near thief proof as science could make it, but it looked innocent as a cigar case in a corner drugstore.

Reaching an exit, Nace stopped. From where he stood, it was possible to see some several thousand people. Loudspeakers mouthed on poles along the midway, the announcer describing a boat race in the lagoon. No one seemed interested. To the south, an artificial dinosaur in an oil company exhibit was wagging its head and tail and emitting bizarre roars.

The tall man, the girl from the orange stand, red-headed Julia — none were in sight.

Nace, hearing faint movement behind him, stepped sidewise and pivoted. Two men who had been about to grasp his elbows from behind clutched empty air and looked foolish.

“What’s the idea?” Nace demanded sharply.

Both men were stocky, thick. Their combined weight would total near four hundred pounds. The day was hot; not twenty men in sight wore coats. These two wore theirs.

Each dropped a hand to his right hip, under his coat tail.

“Behave yourself, and you won’t get hurt!” one growled.

Nace jutted a long, scowling face at them. “You guys try to pull a circus on me and I’ll make somebody think he got hurt! What’s the idea?”

“We’re the law!” grunted one.

“Police detectives!” echoed the other.

“So what?”

“We want to know what happened in there. What’s up?”

“Search me!”

“Cough up! We saw you pullin’ some kind of an act inside. You gotta explain that, or we’ll throw your pants into the can on suspicion.”

Moving slowly so as not to excite the pair into using their guns, Nace drew his agency badge and displayed it.

“Private shamus, huh?” one muttered. “What’s your name?”

“Lee Nace.”

The two swapped sharp glances. They had heard of Nace. That was not surprising. He was one of the most widely known private operatives in the country. Scotland Yard had even brought him to England for a time in a consulting capacity. Magazines of national circulation carried his articles on criminology.

“Well, Nace, what happened inside?”

“I was talking to a guy and a dame in an orange stand smeared pepper into my eyes. Then her and the guy went off together, I guess.”

“Who was the guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why was you talkin’ to ’im?”

“He looked scared.”

The two again traded looks. They made displeased faces.

One grunted, “That sounds thin! You’d better come and tell it to the sarge!”

Nace gritted, “Now listen—”

“There ain’t no use arguin’ with us! We got orders to snap up any suspicious characters around the diamond exhibit. And you fit!”

“I haven’t the slightest idea—”

“Nix!” One grasped Nace’s arm on either side. “Let’s ankle!”

Through his teeth, Nace said, “A cop — always my pal!” He let himself be led away.

They took the center of the midway. On either side, modernistic exhibit buildings reared. An autogyro pulling a long aerial advertising sign had joined the two dirigibles overhead. Barkers cried their wares, not in the old-time carnival style, but through vacuum tube amplifiers and loudspeakers. Two men, dressed exactly alike in white-trousered military uniforms and carrying small hand sprayers went past arm in arm — advertisement for a fly spray.

Nace started to veer right. The pair tugged him back.

“The Exposition police headquarters is over here,” Nace objected.

“Sure it is! But we’re takin’ you to the city station!”

They worked through the crowds. Possibly half the men carried souvenir canes. Four out of every five walked gingerly, on tired feet. Parties of four and six were frequent — family groups.

Benches in the shade were crowded; those in the sun were deserted. The announcer at the loudspeaker had finished the boat race and was telling the throngs what a great thing the Century of Progress was. An old man and an old lady sat on a bench in the shade, both with their shoes off.

They came to the turnstiles at an exit, hipped their way through, Nace in the center. They dodged traffic across a street. There was a parking lot ahead, long, rowed with thousands of cars.

“We’ve got an iron in here,” offered one of the men.

Nace said nothing. His long face was placid, but the serpentine scar was like a design done with ocher.

A parking lot attendant took a check one of them presented, then guided them down an alley of cars. He came to a large coupe, snatched a duplicate tag off the radiator, then wheeled and walked away. He did not look back.

“Get in!”

Nace, opening the coupe door, kept his eyes downcast. He could see the shadows of his two companions on the ground.

One of them was lifting a hand above Nace’s head. The fist gripped a gun.

Nace, from the shadow, calculated how the blow would fall. He shifted his gaunt frame slightly — took the smashing swing of the gun barrel directly atop his head.

He sprawled down on the running board, slid from there to the ground, and lay motionless.

Chapter III The Heat

“That’s kissin’ ’im, Shack!” chuckled one of the two men.

Shack laughed fiercely. “Feel of his wrist, Tubby, and see if he needs another one!”

Stooping, Tubby laid the tips of stubby fingers against Nace’s wrist. “Hell! He’s still tickin’!”

Shack elbowed closer. “I’ll hand him one alongside the temple! That’ll do the job!”

“Hey, wait! Hadn’t we better ask ’im some questions?”

“What for?”

“Hell! To find out how much he knows!”

“Nix!”

“But maybe the cops are wise! We can tromp this bozo until he tells us whether they are or not! Then we’ll know whether it’s safe to go ahead with the big idea!”

“Waste of time!” Shack jeered. “This Nace don’t know nothin’! He just saw Canadan actin’ jittery an’ started to talk to ’im! Move over! I’ll fix Nace!”

“But that dame who snatched Canadan after she throwed pepper in Nace’s eyes! For cryin’ out loud! Who was she? Where’d she take Canadan? What was her idea?”

“Will you move over an’ let me swing this Roscoe?”

“But that orange-stand dame—”

“She ain’t our worry! We had orders to get rid of Nace. T’hell with the dame! She’ll be taken care of!”

“Oh, all right!” Tubby sidestepped to give Shack room to swing his weapon. Suddenly his arms flew up. They windmilled. Tilting over, he slammed into Shack. Off balance, they both sprawled down in the narrow space between the parked cars.

Nace came to his feet. He still held Tubby’s ankles, which he had grasped. He lifted on the ankles, elbows braced close to his side. When he had Tubby dangling off the ground, he angled a leg around expertly and knocked a heel against the fellow’s temple. Tubby became slack.

Grunting with the effort, Nace heaved Tubby atop Shack. He fell upon the pile the pair made, spearing expert blows with a bony fist.

Shack fired his gun. The bullet squealed off under cars and caused a tire to blow out somewhere with a bang almost as loud as the shot itself.

Nace grasped the gun hand, succeeded in gouging the barrel into the ground. It went off again. The earth closed the barrel end, and the powder gases, backed up, split the cylinder open, rendering the weapon useless.

Tubby began to squirm, reviving. His weight still held Shack down. Nace, braced atop the pair, burrowed teeth into his coat sleeve and yanked out his shirt cuff. A wrench of his teeth tore the cuff entirely off.

The links in the cuff were rather large, elongated. His fingers found a catch in one, opened it. A small lid flew up. Two tiny darts dropped out.

Scooping the darts up, Nace jabbed one into Shack, the other into Tubby.

The struggle went out of both men. They seemed to go soundly asleep. They would remain thus for perhaps two hours, thanks to the drug contained in the tips of the diminutive darts.

Nace heaved both men in the rear compartment of the coupe and locked them in.

Getting behind the wheel, he used Shack’s keys on the ignition and drove out of the parking lot. He saw the attendant peeking out of a sedan in which he had taken concealment at sound of the fight.

Nace turned down a side street, hit Michigan Avenue and wheeled right.

Reaching up, he removed his entire thatch of blond hair. It was attached to a rubber-padded steel skull cap. He wiped perspiration from his close-cropped natural hair, which was of a hue which exactly matched that of the wig.

He replaced the steel-lined wig. When Shack had struck him down, the thing had saved him, not only from unconsciousness, but from almost certain death.

Nace parked the coupe in front of a little hotel in the loop district. He did not examine the pair in the rear. To do so might attract attention. The streets were crowded. Cracks in the floor boards would admit air enough for the pair, anyway.

Entering the hotel, Nace got his key and went to his room on the ninth floor. Up until he entered the room, he moved as if in a great hurry; but once inside, all his bustle departed. He sat down by the telephone, stoked his pipe, waited.

Minutes dragged. Nace killed time by looking for the name of Canadan in the telephone directory. Canadan, of course, had been the name of the tall man with the enormous gray moustache. There was no Canadan listed.

The phone rang.

Nace swept up the instrument. “Shoot, baby!”

“My, oh my!” Julia said sarcastically. “By chance, you weren’t camped there by phone pining away for my dulcet voice—”

“Cut it out!”

“Go ahead! Bite me!”

“I’ll tear your arms and legs off if you don’t start telling things! This is big! That Canadan was on the point of—”

“That the tall one who hides behind the gray cookie duster?”

“Sure. He was just opening up when that orange-stand girl pulled her act.”

Julia’s voice became businesslike. “I trailed that girl from the orange-drink stand. She took this Canadan along. He didn’t seem to want to come. I think she put a gun in his back.”

“What’d you learn?”

“Not much, except that they like to ride the taxicabs. They went up and down Lincoln Park. They stopped once and got out. They went over to where a little crowd stood, then came back and got in their hack.”

“What was the crowd?”

“A bunch rubbering at the spot where that meteor fell last night. The thing melted a big hole in the ground where it hit.”

“That wasn’t any meteor.”

“Well, I’ve guessed as much. But do you know of a better name to call it?”

“I’m not sure what the dang thing is,” Nace admitted.

“They’re in the Idyll House, now,” Julia continued. “It’s a little hotel in the loop.” She gave an address.

“That’s only half a dozen blocks from here,” Nace told her. “What’re they doing?”

“Sitting here in the lobby talking. They’ve been talking every time they left the Century of Progress grounds.”

“Then she isn’t holding a gun on him now?”

“Nope. They seem to have come to an agreement. At least, they’re mighty sociable.”

“Have they seen you?”

“Just here in the hotel. I had to show myself. There was no other phone near. The girl has looked me over two or three times, but I don’t think she smells anything.”

“Can she see your lips?”

“Sure.”

Nace groaned deeply. “Turn around so she can’t see your face! She’s a lip reader. She must be! At that orange-drink stand, she wasn’t close enough to hear what I was saying to Canadan, but she knew I had him on the point of talking. A lip-reader is the only way to explain it.”

“For the love of mud!” Julia said sharply.

“What now?”

“You were right, Lee! She’s wise! She’s up on her feet and coming over here!”

“See what you can get out of her!” Nace rapped.

“Can you tell me something, so I can make a play that I know more than I do?”

“You know as much about it as I do — except that two plugs named Shack and Tubby tried to sashay me. And the diamond exhibit out at the Century grounds must be a part of it.”

“A lot of help you are!” Julia’s voice changed — evidently she was addressing the girl from the orange-drink stand. “I say now, honey — are you an old friend or something? The way you’re staring—”

There was a short, sharp racket. Scuffling! The phone went dead.

Nace jammed his pipe stem between his teeth, strained his ears. The receiver at the other end must have been hung up. There was no sound. The pipe stem made crunching sounds as his teeth worried it.

He ran out of the room, paced circles in the elevator cage as it lowered him, and dived into his car. He headed toward the Idyll House.

THE Idyll House proved to be a wedge of brick between department stores which were closed at this hour.

Nace saw two running policeman before he saw the hostelry. The officers were headed for the hotel. Angling his car in to the curb, Nace sauntered in behind them.

The two cops were getting the story from the desk clerk. Voices were loud. Nace heard what was said without appearing to show interest in proceedings.

“A man and a woman grabbed another woman out of a telephone booth and made off with her,” announced the clerk.

“Which way’d they go?”

“South. They got in a taxicab.”

One cop dashed out to spread an alarm.

“Who were they?” the other officer asked the clerk.

“I didn’t know any of them. The woman they grabbed was red-headed — a peach of a looker. The other woman wore an orange-colored dress and one orange-colored earring. She wasn’t so hard to look at, either. I don’t know the man’s name, but I’ve seen him before.”

“Seen him when?”

“Oh, he came in a time or two with one of our guests, a Mister Osterfelt.”

“Osterfelt here now?” demanded the officer.

“No. He didn’t come in last night. Hasn’t been in all day.”

“Why didn’t you notify the police he was missing?”

The clerk shrugged. “We don’t usually rush into things like that. He might have put up with a friend for the night.”

Unnoticed, Nace glided over to the desk. Instead of the old-fashioned registration book, this hostelry used a card index system. He opened the card drawer surreptitiously and thumbed through it.

Mel. G. Osterfelt, from Berlin, Germany, had registered for 1103.

Without attracting attention, Nace went to the bank of pigeon holes which held keys. Then he rode the elevator up.

The door of 1103 was locked. The key he had taken from the pigeon hole downstairs fitted. He let himself in.

The room was plain, like most of the other hotel rooms Nace had seen. A big traveling bag, plastered with steamship stickers, stood near the bed. Osterfelt must have traveled a lot. There were stickers from most of the big steamship lines.

Nace opened the bag. It was empty. There was clothing in the closet, neat business suits. Osterfelt had evidently unpacked for a stay.

Measuring the suits against his own gaunt height, Nace concluded Osterfelt had been a stocky man, very fat. He had been a dresser; there was silk underwear in the dresser drawers.

The dresser had two half-drawers at the top. One of these held a brief case. It was stuffed. Nace dumped the contents.

Papers showed Mel. G. Osterfelt to be a research chemist for a Berlin firm specializing in the manufacture of welding equipment.

There was a black bag, leather-padded, perhaps two inches square. Nace opened it. It was a ring box, empty.

The padded satin of the lid carried the indentation made by the setting of a ring which must have been placed there often. Nace calculated. The impression was about the size and shape of the diamond which had been found in the alleged meteor.

Nace replaced the box. It had about convinced him that the man who died — murdered, probably — in the hellish blaze which many had thought was a meteor, was Osterfelt. At least, the victim had been wearing Osterfelt’s ring.

Pushing his search, Nace found one more item of interest. It was a receipt for the shipment of a package from New York by serial express.

Nace left the room, locking the door. The policeman and the clerk were just entering an elevator, enroute up to Osterfelt’s room, no doubt, when he reached the lobby.

He entered a booth which was one of a bank. From one of these, Julia must have been dragged.

Nace thumbed through a directory, found the number of the local office at which aerial express arrived. He described the package designated in the receipt and asked if it was being held.

“It was called for yesterday,” he was told.

“How many men came after it?” he queried.

“Three,” was the reply. “I remember the occasion because one of them, a short, fat fellow, was some kind of a foreigner. He couldn’t speak much English.”

That would be Osterfelt, Nace reflected.

“What about the other two?”

“I don’t remember much about them.”

Nace described the two men unconscious in his car — Shack and Tubby. “That sound like them?”

“Sure. That’s the pair. I remember now.”

“Any idea what was in the package?”

“Hell no!”

Nace hung up. Shack and Tubby had gone with Osterfelt to get his package. Then Osterfelt had been murdered. Or so it seemed.

A squad car filled with police moaned up in front. Officers blocked the door.

Nace started to leave.

“Sorry, buddy,” he was told. “Something just happened here. A kidnapping, or something. We’ve got to find out what it’s about before anybody leaves.”

Nace nodded meekly, entered an elevator, got off at the second floor, let himself through a window onto the bottom landing of a fire escape and managed it from there to an alley.

He walked around in front, kept parked cars between himself and the police, and entered the coupe. He got away without being discovered.

He drove to his hotel. For the moment, there was nothing else to do.

It would be — he consulted his watch — thirty minutes before Shack and Tubby awakened. Not until then could they be questioned.

As for Julia, no telling where she had been taken. If she got a chance, she would give Nace a call at his hotel. It was the only spot where she could be sure of finding him.

He parked the machine and rode up to his room. He did not wait idly this time. Out of a closet, he dug a zipper-closed canvas bag. This container held tools of his trade. It was his sack of magic.

His clothing was a bit rumpled. He changed to a neat dark blue linen suit. A white Panama came out of a suitcase. He examined it carefully, put it back on.

He extracted a small flask of rubbing alcohol from his bag. Then he went downstairs.

“The room next to mine don’t happen to be vacant?” he queried.

The clerk consulted his record. “The connecting room on the right is unoccupied.”

“I’ll take it,” Nace told him. “A couple of friends of mine have been foolish enough to take on a little bigger load than they can stand. They’re both — well, pretty tight. I don’t like to take them home in that condition. I’ll just put them up there and let them sleep it off.”

The clerk smiled knowingly.

Chapter IV Tricks

Nace signed for the room, paid the tariff, then went out to his car. He waited until no one was near, then unlocked the rear compartment and dragged out both prisoners.

On each man, he sprinkled a quantity of the rubbing alcohol. The stuff evaporated, but left the strong scent of liquor.

An arm about the waist of each, he lugged them inside.

“Passed plumb out,” he told the clerk.

“I’ll help you,” the clerk offered.

Together, they got the pair up to the room Nace had rented. Nace gave the clerk a dollar for his trouble, and watched the fellow depart.

Nace now used sheets and towels to bind each man. He did not apply the lashings any too tightly. He dumped them on the bed.

He unlocked the connecting door.

He was standing there when the pair on the bed began to squirm with returning consciousness. They rolled their eyes at him, glared. One opened his mouth.

“Go ahead — squawk!” Nace invited. “Cops will be up here thicker’n flies!”

The man changed his mind about yelling.

“Whatcha want?” he snarled.

“Your company is all for the present,” Nace said dryly.

“Huh?” They seemed surprised.

“Sure,” Nace chuckled fiercely. “You see, I’ve sort of got a line on you two punks. We’ll wait around a bit and see what happens.”

He said nothing more, but watched them. They squirmed, testing their bonds. Then they exchanged looks and remained quiet. Each had discovered he could slip the lashings in a very few minutes.

After a bit, Nace went into his own room. He closed the door. Instantly, he could hear the pair struggling with their tyings.

Nace lifted the receiver quietly off his phone, got the operator and asked for the adjoining room.

An instant later, the phone in the next room began shrilling.

He left the receiver off the prong of his own instrument and walked through the connecting door.

Shack and Tubby instantly became quiescent. Their bindings were markedly looser.

Nace picked up the ringing telephone. “Yeah? Oh, it’s you, kid?”

He listened intently for a moment.

“That’s swell,” he declared, pretending the call was genuine. “Canadan spilled the works, did he? Now, let me get this straight! Canadan knew Shack and Tubby had lifted the secret of that infernal heat from Osterfelt. Shack and Tubby killed Osterfelt. They promised to kill Canadan if he told anybody they intended to pull a series of big robberies, the first of which was the theft of the diamond exhibit at the Century of Progress? That it….”

Shack and Tubby were swapping pop-eyed looks.

“You say Canadan has offered to produce proof that Shack and Tubby killed Osterfelt after they got the ingredients for making the infernal heat from the aerial express office?” Nace continued. “That’s swell!.. He can prove they destroyed the diamond and Osterfelt’s skull, too? And that they tried to get me in that television theatre?… He will! That’s even better!”

Nace went through the motions of listening intently. “O.K. They’ll be here when you come up with the cops.”

Hanging up, Nace went over and gagged Shack and Tubby. He did not touch their bindings.

“You monkeys are bad actors!” he said in a blustering tone. “I’m going down and see if I can raise a gun. I’ll need it, maybe, with two mugs like you on my hands.”

He went out, locked both doors, and hurried downstairs. He grinned at the clerk, said, “My two pals are coming along all hunky,” and went out.

He circled to an alley in the rear and watched the hotel fire escape. He wore his Panama, and carried his canvas zipper bag.

Not more than four minutes later, both Shack and Tubby came out of the hotel window. They piled down the fire escape in great haste.

Nace withdrew from view. From his bag, he took a delicate periscope. The stem of this was not much larger than a match, but so perfectly ground were the tiny mirrors and lenses that it functioned with the efficiency of a much larger instrument. It was possible to thrust the thing through a keyhole and survey an entire room.

Using this around the angle of a brick wall, Nace watched Shack and Tubby. When they ran toward him, he withdrew and hailed a taxi.

He was seated on the floorboards in the rear of the taxi when Shack and Tubby came out of the alley. For a moment, he thought they were going to attempt to hail the hack in which he crouched. They did not notice the tiny stick of the periscope.

Another cab came along and they piled in.

The trail led over to Michigan Avenue, then south past hotels which faced the lake, past expensive shops. The twin towers of the Sky Ride in the Century of Progress grounds hove into view ahead. The towers were like girders standing on end. Long rods of light striped their sides.

The two men did not stop at the Century of Progress, but went on southward, dismissing their conveyance at the Twenty Third Street entrance. They paid a fifty-cent admission apiece and passed through a turnstile.

Nace, carrying his zipper bag, trailed them. He kept under cover as much as he could.

A prominent radio broadcast band was blaring music from the loudspeakers mounted on poles along the midway. The crowds were thicker. The cool of the night had drawn them out. Overhead, one of the little dirigibles was pulling a long streamer of illuminated letters.

Shack and Tubby walked swiftly.

Nace got in a ricksha pulled by a college boy. He made the boy trot, kept his quarry in sight.

The two crossed the semi-circular bridge over the lagoon, passed the Spectaculum, passed a moored whaling ship, a Norwegian ship. They swung out on the steamer landing.

Nace dismissed his college boy.

Shack and Tubby entered a lake steamer moored to the landing. It was a small craft as such vessels go, obviously old, in need of a paint job. No smoke came from the funnels. The steamer apparently was not being used.

A sign, hung on a chain across the gangplank, said, “No admittance.”

On the other side of the landing, another steamer, clean, neat, was taking on passengers for a night ride on the lake.

Nace, walking back a few yards, paid twenty-five cents admission and went aboard the whaling ship. From the far rail, he could see a speed boat tied to the lakeward side of the old steamer.

He quitted the whaler and approached the old boat. Posting himself near the stern, in the shelter of a piling, he watched the boat which was taking on passengers. It was loaded. They were hauling in the gangplank. A moment later, the whistle blared out, a signal prepatory to departing.

Under cover of the great roar, Nace ran lightly, leaped. He landed on the steamer rail. A twist, and he was aboard the old boat.

He crouched there for a time. There was no light, no sound. He sidled over and saw the speed boat still tied to the lakeward rail.

Working forward, he found, in the engine room, the explanation of why the old steamer was inoperable. Something had gone wrong with the engine. A boiler was partially dismantled.

He went on, ears alert, entering narrow passages which were shabbily carpeted. Stateroom doors crowded either side. One of these, well down the corridor, showed a bar of light at the bottom.

He stopped before this, stooped, put an ear to the keyhole.

“So this guy Nace was pulling a fast one!” growled Shack’s voice. “You sure?”

“I had not told him a thing,” Canadan’s voice quavered.

“He talked like somebody had put a bug in his ear!” Tubby put in. “He knew about Osterfelt — how Osterfelt brought the secret of the big heat and the ingredients for making it to this country. He also knowed we lifted it from Osterfelt, then scragged ’im!”

Shack swore violently. “He knew we had planned to take a whack at the diamond exhibit here! How’d he figure that out?”

“Plain as your nose!” Tubby jeered. “He found Canadan hangin’ around the diamond exhibit. That told him. He’s a dick. He can deduce things!”

“I’ll deduce things too, if I get my hands on that shamus!” Shack gritted savagely. “Say, d’you reckon he could’ve let us loose so he could follow us? Them sheets and things he tied us with were mighty loose. He might’ve trailed us—”

A feminine voice behind Nace said grimly, “And I presume that’s exactly what he did!”

Nace erected, spun. Simultaneously, a flashlight sprayed him with white.

The girl from the orange-drink stand stood just out of reach. A tiny automatic poked a black snout out of her fist.

She waved the gun. “You know the motions! Go through ’em!”

Nace carefully lowered his zipper bag and lifted his hands.

She came forward, patted his armpits, his hips, his coat pockets. “Well, for the love of Mabel! Don’t you carry a gun?”

Nace, keeping his arms up, said, “No!”

Inside the stateroom, silence had suddenly fallen.

Canadan’s shaky voice called, “What’s happened?”

“I’ve got our friend Nace,” retorted the orange-stand girl. “He was using his ears out here.”

“Bring him in,” suggested Canadan, after the briefest of pauses.

“In a minute!”

Nace scowled at the girl. She still wore her one orange colored earring. “So you’re one of the gang?”

She laughed shortly. “The great Lee Nace! I always did figure they had you overrated!”

“Yeah?”

“You said it! You’ve got this gloriously balled up. Your red-head wasn’t so hot, either.”

“Where is Julia?” Nace asked sharply.

“She’s all right.”

“Where is she?”

“Down in the hold, cuffed to a hull brace, and chewing on a mouthful of her own nifty frock.”

Nace rocked slowly on his heels, hands still high. “She’d better be okay!”

The orange-stand girl laughed again. “I wouldn’t hurt her!”

“Yes you wouldn’t!”

“Cross my heart, I wouldn’t. I told you that you had this all balled. I haven’t anything against you and the red-head, except that I thought it’d be swell to put it over on you. The great Lee Nace, who went to England to show Scotland Yard how it was done! Ha! Either you’re lousy, or we’re pretty good here in Chicago.”

“You talk like a cop!” Nace jeered.

“I used to be on the city detective force,” confided the orange-stand girl. “Just now, I’m an agency dick like yourself. I was one of several assigned to guard that diamond exhibit.”

Nace lowered his hands. “So you thought you’d put one over on me?”

“You said it! I got wise when you started to talk to Canadan. I can read lips. So I got Canadan away from you and persuaded him to talk. When your red-head came nosing around, I just collared her to keep her out of the way. Then we came here to the gang hangout and waited for Shack and Tubby to turn up.”

Nace looked at the stateroom door. “You’ve got Shack and Tubby?”

“Sure. They’re handcuffed in there. Canadan is watchin’  ’em! You see, Canadan was a friend of Osterfelt. Shack and Tubby approached Osterfelt with the plan for a series of robberies with the infernal heat. He refused to have anything to do with it, told Canadan about it, and they decided to go to the cops. Osterfelt was killed. Canadan was wandering around, scared to talk, when you collared him. I persuaded him it would be all right to spill the works.”

Nace glowered. “You might have told me you were a private cop in the first place!”

“Don’t be silly! There’s a standing reward of five thousand to anybody who thwarts an attempt to steal that diamond exhibit. Do you think I wanted to cut you in on that jack?”

Nace shrugged. “You win!” He adjusted his Panama, picked up his bag. “Go ahead and grab the glory!”

The girl shoved the door open, backed inside. She was barely across the threshold when a fist flashed into view. It held a revolver; the weapon cracked against her gun hand.

She dropped her automatic.

Shack leaped into view and grabbed her by the throat.

Tubby, jumping around the pair, pointed another gun at Nace.

“Walk in!” he snarled. “And be plenty careful!”

Nace walked in.

Canadan, tall and bony, his dwarf face more than ever seeming to seek concealment behind his big gray moustache, stood against the opposite bulkhead. Handcuffs were on his wrists.

Tubby, jerking open Nace’s zipper bag, brought to light several pairs of handcuffs. He slapped a set of these on Nace’s wrists, others on his ankles.

Shack ceased choking the orange-stand girl. They put Nace’s handcuffs on her, ankle and wrist.

Nace looked at her, snorted, “So you had ’em!”

The girl glared, then stared in bewilderment at Canadan.

The tall man wiped his forehead with his manacled hands. “It’s too bad! They sprang upon me when I was not looking!”

“You as much as decoyed me in here!” the girl snapped.

Canadan squirmed. “I couldn’t help it! They threatened to kill me if I didn’t pretend everything was all right!”

Shack eyed the orange-stand girl. “Where’s Nace’s red-head?”

“Go jump in the lake!” she spat at him.

“C’mon, sister! Where is she?”

“I don’t know!”

Shack spun on Canadan. He cocked the revolver he held. “Where is she? Spit it out quick!”

Canadan rolled his eyes, blew a groan through his big moustache, and moved his limbs as if he were being tortured.

He began, “I don’t—”

“Out with it!” Shack snarled. He shoved his gun muzzle against Canadan’s temple.

Canadan shrank from the weapon as if the blued steel were a burning iron.

“She’s down in the hold, handcuffed to a brace!” he wailed.

Shack looked at Nace, at the orange-stand girl, jeered, “You private dicks trying to stem each other out of a reward made it easy on us!” He went out.

Three or four minutes passed. Tubby, juggling his gun, admonished fiercely, “You could yell, and people outside wouldn’t pay no attention, on account of so much yelling around the fair grounds. But I wouldn’t try it!”

Shack came back. Ahead of him, he propelled red-headed Julia. She was disheveled. A two-inch strip off the hem of her sports frock was balled in her teeth, held there with twine. Handcuffs clinked on her wrists.

She eyed Nace, made buzzing noises through her nose. The sounds — long and short dashes and dots — transmitted a diguised message.

“So this is the way you rescue me?”

Nace snorted.

Chapter V Horror in the Sky Ride

Using more handcuffs from Nace’s zipper bag, Shack secured the prisoners to the metal posts of the stateroom bunks. Sheets from the bunks were converted into gags.

Shack spent approximately ten minutes in the tying process. He did a thorough job.

Only Nace and the two girls were fastened. Canadan was not touched.

“What’re you gonna do with me?” Canadan whimpered.

Shack leered at him. “We’re taking you along, brother. We’ve got a little job to do! And if the cops are wise to us, there may be some lead flying. In that case, it’ll be just too bad for you. It was your loose mouth that made us all this trouble!”

Canadan moaned. “I will be seen on the robbery scene! The police will think I am equally guilty with you fellows!”

“Ain’t that too bad!” Tubby jeered.

“Who said anything about a robbery?” Shack rapped.

“You’re going after the diamonds?” Nace interposed.

Shack came over, leaned down and rasped the rough cylinder of his revolver across Nace’s face. The steel tore flesh. Four or five scarlet strings sprawled down Nace’s cheeks and off his jaw.

“Don’t ask goofy questions!” Shack advised.

Nace, saying no more, held his head to one side so the crimson would not soil his dark linen suit. His white Panama lay to one side.

Tubby kicked the hat under a bunk, waved his gun at Canadan. “C’mon, tall stuff! We’re taking the cuffs off you. But if you start to run, say your prayers first!”

The bracelets were removed from Canadan’s wrists. He stumbled out of the stateroom.

Shack stopped in the door to glower at Nace. “It may interest you, shamus, to know we’re comin’ back!” He chuckled nastily. “This old boat would make a swell meteor, wouldn’t it?”

He pulled the door shut behind him, locked it.

Nace listened. He lost track of footsteps. There was a monotonous roar of sound — loudspeakers, bands, concession barkers, the bawling of paper-mache dinosaurs in prehistoric world exhibits. The mumble penetrated even to the innards of the ancient lake boat, blanketing the footsteps.

He heard the speed boat start. Shack, Tubby and Canadan had departed by water.

Nace braced a wristband of his handcuffs against the edge of the berth. He pressed, apparently endeavoring to force the wrist circlet tighter. There was a click.

The cuff dropped away from his wrist.

The orange-stand girl stared, wide-eyed.

“I’ve had my own handcuffs put on me before,” Nace told her. “I had a special brand made up. You have to turn the key into a certain position when you lock them, or they won’t hold.”

Working rapidly, Nace freed the girls. He ungagged them. Julia, manacled with cuffs which had belonged to the orange-stand girl, proved more of a problem.

Nace took a small metal spike of a probe from his zipper bag. Two minutes work was enough to pick the lock on Julia’s manacles.

Nace crawled under the bunk and got his white Panama hat. He jammed it on his head, scooped up his bag.

“You two had better beat it somewhere!” he told Julia and the orange-stand girl.

“I’m seeing it through!” said the girl in the orange dress. “I’ll take back what I said, Nace. I’m just a bum!”

Red-headed Julia gave her a mean look. “You said it, honey!”

They scrambled out of the old boat, ran down the gangplank, vaulting the chain on which hung the “No Admittance” sign.

“Where to?” Julia demanded.

“The building which holds the diamond exhibit!” Nace rapped.

They ran. That was quickest. The semi-circular bridge over the lagoon with its numerous concession stands was crowded. They took the right rail, where the throng was thinnest.

Nace pointed. “Look! Half way down the lagoon — directly under the cables of the sky ride!”

“Their speed boat!” Julia gasped. “They’re leading us!”

They left the bridge, passed the hump of an exhibit known as “The World a Million Years Ago.” A gigantic ape stood in front of the exhibit, wagging its head slowly, mechanically. The ape was wood, cloth, artificial hair and paint. The Hall of Religion bulked gigantic on their right.

“Not much farther!” Nace grunted, and took the center of the midway.

Purposefully, he increased his pace. The two girls were left behind.

Ahead, a sudden bedlam of yelling arose. Shots snapped. Somewhere, a siren shrilled. The sounds mounted, became a thunderous babble.

“Too late!” Nace gritted.

The uproar was coming from the exhibit building which held the diamond display.

Smoke poured from ventilating rifts in the ceiling of the vast structure. People were milling about the doors. Others, inside, were struggling to get out.

Nace took an entrance marked, “Employees.” Down a brilliantly lighted passage, he plunged. There was smoke, acrid with the tang of scorched paint and varnish.

Police and special Century of Progress officers had already thrown a cordon around the diamond exhibit. Nace struggled close enough to glimpse the display. Tear gas smarted his eyes.

The robbery had been successful. The much-advertised burglar-proof diamond case had yielded its contents. The metallic block of a safe below the case, into which the diamond display dropped when the case was molested, had an enormous hole eaten in its side.

Edges of the hole glowed red-hot.

To the left, the wall of the exhibit booth was in flames.

“They got our attention with that fire over there,” a cop was yelling. “Then they wiped out the side of the safe and grabbed the sparkler. We couldn’t do much in the smoke and excitement.”

The officer fell to coughing from the effects of the tear gas.

Nace backed out, rubbing his eyes. The special police on guard wore gas masks. The thieves must have worn them, too.

Julia was at Nace’s elbow. How she had kept track of him was a miracle.

“The boat in the lagoon—”

“I know!” Nace cut in. “Listen, you clear out! These birds are bad actors! Snatching them jewels like that took nerve! They won’t stop at anything! You may get hurt!”

As he spoke, he was running toward the lagoon.

“In your hat!” Julia told him.

Nace, as if reminded of something, felt of his white Panama. It was still on his head.

The girl from the orange-stand pounded up, moving fast, skirts gathered above her knees.

“You’re a better runner than you are detective!” Julia told her nastily.

“You dry up!” retorted the other. “Or I’ll pull me some red hair!”

Nace ran past the tower on the Sky Ride. Spidery, streaked with lights, it reared more than six hundred feet. From a point slightly less than half way up, the manifold cables on which the cars ran stretched their great span across the lagoon to the other tower. Elevators lifted to that point, and to the observation platform at the top.

Around the north wing of the Hall of Science, Nace soon located the launch. It bounced up and down on the small waves within the lagoon, moored by the bow to the railing along the lagoon edge.

Shack, Tubby — Canadan — none of the three were in sight.

Vaulting the railing, Nace landed lightly on the speed-boat deck. He wrenched up the engine cover, dived in a hand, grasped a fistful of ignition wires and tore them out.

He threw the wires into the lagoon. The boat would not start soon.

Julia and the girl in orange came up.

“They either haven’t reached the launch yet, or have taken another way out!” Nace told them.

“Let’s go up in the car landing of the sky ride!” Julia suggested. “We may be able to spot them from here.”

“O.K.” Nace ran to one of the nickel-in-a-slot telescopes, many of which were mounted along the lagoon edge to catch sightseer’s coins.

He grasped the glass, wrenched. The mounting resisted. He tried again. It snapped off.

They sprinted for the Sky Ride tower. Nace, holding his hat on with one hand, carried the telescope with the other. He had lost his zipper bag somewhere. It was clumsy to carry, anyway.

Julia demanded, “Nace — do you know what that infernal heat is?”

“I can’t tell you exactly what’s in it,” he threw over his shoulder. “I didn’t get to make a full analysis. But it’s some kind of highly perfected thermit.”

“What’s thermit?” demanded the orange-stand girl.

“A metallic powder which burns with terrible heat. It was used in incendiary bombs in the war. It’s used in welding. Osterfelt, the bird who perfected this stuff, worked for a manufacturer of welding equipment. He must have developed it in the course of his chemical research work. Probably brought it to the Century of Progress for exhibition.”

They reached the tower of the Sky Ride. An elevator was waiting. Nace chucked a dollar bill and two dimes in the window — admission for three. The lift raced them upward.

The cage halted at the car landing. The doors whispered back.

Nace stared, made a sudden gesture to get the doors shut again. He was too late.

Shack and Tubby stood on the car landing, menacing them with drawn revolvers. Behind them stood Canadan. He was handcuffed.

“Sweet, this!” Shack jeered.

He stepped into the cage and rapped the elevator operator viciously over the head with his gun. The uniformed operator dropped. Shack hauled him out bodily.

The operator of another cage — evidently the one which had brought the three men up — lay in a slack pile on the landing, scarlet trickling from a welt on his head.

Shack dumped both elevator attendants in a waiting car.

“Now you get in!” He gestured meaningly at Nace and the two young women.

Julia looked at Nace. Her eyes were wide, scared.

“Just string along with them!” Nace advised her.

She nodded. They entered the car. The big box of an affair had two levels for passengers. They were on the lower. Apparently, there was no one above.

Nace sat down on one of the seats which ran lengthwise of the car. The earth, not quite three hundred feet below, looked very distant.

Canadan got inside. Then came Tubby. He had his arms full of squarish cloth packets from which webbing straps dangled. Parachutes — three of them. He also carried tear gas masks, obviously those used in the raid of the gem exhibit. He tossed the latter carelessly aside.

Shack came in with a large bag. It made a gravel-like rattle when he dropped it on the floor. The diamonds!

It was Shack who got the car in motion.

“We found out how this thing operates earlier today!” he chuckled. “We figured we might have to use this thing for a getaway. Lookit — see that boat?”

Nace followed his pointing arm. On the opposite side of the lagoon, nearly under the point over which the Sky Ride cables passed, another speed boat was moored. It was, as near as Nace could tell by the glow of electric lights, a twin to the one from which he had just torn the ignition cables.

The car was moving. Machinery made a dull moan. The vehicle gave a somewhat unnerving lurch when suspension points on the tracks were passed.

Nace lifted his hands and grasped the brim of his Panama, as if to hold the hat on.

Shack gave him an ugly look. “In case you ain’t guessed it, we’re gonna step in the door when we get over that speed boat, pull the ripcord on our chutes and go down. There’s enough wind to open the chutes before we take off, so we won’t have to run the chance of the drop openin’ them!”

He fumbled in the bag which held the diamonds, brought out a metallic looking egg of an object somewhat larger than a football. “I’m gonna be the last guy out! And I’ll leave this egg for you! You know what it is?”

“Thermit bomb?” Nace guessed dryly.

“Right,” Shack grinned. “A new kind of thermit. There’s enough of the stuff in here to melt the middle out of a battleship. You’ll be cooked so quick you’ll never see the thing let loose!”

“You’re going to kill us?”

“What the hell’d you think?” Shack demanded.

Nace looked at tall, moustached Canadan. “In that case, there’s no need of Canadan playing prisoner any longer!”

Canadan started violently. “Huh?”

“You’re not fooling anybody,” Nace growled. “I’ve had it figured for some time that you were giving Shack and Tubby their orders.”

Canadan’s dwarf face seemed to swell behind his moustache. He blurted, “That is ridiculous—”

“Oh, cut it out!” Nace snapped. “You claimed Shack and Tubby overpowered you back there in the lake steamer, but there wasn’t a mark of a struggle on you. That alone was enough to give you away. You turned them loose. And their taking you along when they went to commit the diamond robbery. That’s a laugh! You went along to supervise the job. They’d never take a prisoner with ’em to look on!”

“You’re crazy!” Canadan sputtered indignantly.

“Your yarn about being scared was intended to interest me until you could get me off some place and dispose of me, but you made it stick with the girl here.”

The girl in the orange dress groaned. “What a bright one I was!”

Canadan gave his handcuffs a tug. They had not been locked. They came off. He threw them the length of the car.

“O.K.!” he snapped. “What’re you going to do about it?”

Nace took off his Panama.

“This!” he rapped, and gave the hat band a tug.

There was a loud ripping sound. Sparks flew as the hat band, turned by the force of the wrench, ground against a friction igniter.

Like a stricken match, the hat burst into flame. It blazed brilliantly, gave off a tremendous cloud of billious yellow smoke.

Nace flung the headgear at Canadan. The man ducked. Nace twisted sidewise.

He had clamped one hand tightly over his mouth and nostrils. His eyes were closed.

He found a window. With his free fist, he beat madly against it. The glass was the non-shattering type. It gave like cardboard under the furiously-driven blows. When he had a sufficient aperture, he thrust out his head.

Even then, Nace did not breathe in air until his lungs were throbbing. He drew in tentatively, made a face, began to cough violently. He hung in the window, limp, features distorted, until the car reached the other tower.

For a time, he was entirely unconscious.

The jar as the car arrived at the landing stage aroused him. He stumbled to the mechanism, got it stopped before the car had rounded the horseshoe turn-track and started back. He gained the door, stumbled out on the platform, then wheeled dizzily and stared.

Everyone in the car was unconscious.

It required ten minutes to get police on the spot, turn Shack, Tubby and Canadan over to them, together with the sack containing, at a conservative estimate, some millions in gems.

Nace got a receipt for the stones. Then he set about reviving Julia and the girl detective from the orange-drink stand. That took another five minutes.

The girl in orange took her head in both hands and rocked. “Do I feel awful! What’d you do, anyway?”

“My hat was painted inside with a chemical mixture which, when burned, produces a gas that’ll knock you instantly,” Nace explained. “The hat itself is whitened with a highly inflammable paint, a mixture of celluloid and some other stuff.” He coughed. “I got a dose of the gas myself.”

The orange-drink girl scowled. “You might have told me in advance what was coming off!”

Red-headed Julia laughed spitefully. “After the way you clowned around, you should squawk, honey!”