Kenneth Robeson - The Avenger 14 by Three Gold Crowns

Author:Three Gold Crowns
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-20T15:16:29+00:00

Chapter XI

Brother and Sister

Nellie’s tiny flashlight rayed out. She flipped an electric switch and a single unshaded globe bathed the vault in yellow light. They could hear no sound from outside, but Nellie knew the shadowy figure was well on his way to escape, with all the incriminating envelopes in his possession.

The vault was crowded. There were filing cases in which the more valuable of the firm’s correspondence was kept; there were boxes of paper and carbon paper; there were quart bottles of ink?all the paraphernalia needed to run a big office.

Terribly crowded. There was hardly room for the two girls, even though Harriet wasn’t taking up much room at the moment. She was flattened back against the filing cases with her eyes as big as saucers and her face white with fear.

She tried to talk big.

“All we have to d-do is wait till morning and someone will open the vault. They open it at eight thirty, as soon as the office is filled.”

But Nellie shook her head.

“No use kidding ourselves,” she said. “They’ll open it in the morning, all right. But they won’t find us. They’ll just find a couple of bodies! We’ll suffocate in here in an hour or less.”

For Nellie knew something about the cubic feet of air necessary to sustain life in a human for a given length of time. And there were precious few cubic feet in here.

“We’ve got to get out right away,” she said.

“How?”

“You would ask that,” said Nellie. “I don’t know how. I only know we have to.” She stared tensely around the vault. “Say, they use a lot of sulphuric acid in making paper, don’t they?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Harriet. “Why?”

“Sulphuric eats through metal. If we could pour some around the combination knob of”

“There’s no acid in here,” said Harriet. “They keep only office stuff in here. The acid would be down in the plant.”

Nellie relaxed. It had been a good thought, but it didn’t mean anything. Then she brightened up again.

“The watchman. Do you happen to know when he makes his rounds?”

“Yes,” said Harriet. “Every hour on the half-hour. He takes about thirty minutes to do it and just stays on the first floor the other thirty minutes. He is due on the top floor at about ten forty.”

Nellie looked at her watch, and then her hand jerked to a metal desk lamp that someone had put in here because it wasn’t being used for the moment. It was ten forty-four.

“He may be out already!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t I think of it at once! He may?”

She was unscrewing the single light bulb.

“He turns on the lights at each floor as he makes his rounds, doesn’t he?” she snapped.

“Why, yes,” said Harriet. She was making a great effort to keep from hysteria, because already it was hard to breathe. “He turns on the lights while he goes over the floor, then turns them out when he?”

Darkness in the vault. Nellie had unscrewed the light bulb. A flash of blue. She had shorted the socket with the metal desk lamp.

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