The Shadow - 278 - Crime Caravan by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Street & Smith
Published: 1944-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

Elcor looked like a one street town, but the impeachment wasn’t quite justified. There were other streets that paralleled the main one, though they were merely dirt-surfaced and seldom used. However, the cars took one of these and pulled up behind an old brick building with windows that had iron bars fitted into the granite sills.

The place looked like a jail—and had been once—but recently it had been converted into a bank. That, rather curiously, was a token of Elcor’s prosperity as represented by a towering industrial plant that stood on the other side of the tumbling river that supplied the needed power. Elcor had sprung up so rapidly in wealth and population that building construction couldn’t keep up with it. Transforming the abandoned jail into a bank had been a happy thought toward harboring the money that was being saved for buying houses, when available.

Newspapers loved to print such bits of whimsy. The idea of a town putting its cash in a jail, as the last place where crooks would go to get it, came under a heading some editors termed human interest.

Maybe they thought that crooks weren’t human or couldn’t read, but they were wrong.

It was being proven right now.

From the cars behind the former jail came a squad of experts who demonstrated with the aid of muffled crowbars, that getting into jail was a very simple process. When they pried the bars, the granite sills followed and took the bricks along. Equipped with other utensils, the crooks went inside to see what the vault was like.

The vault occupied a cell that had once been used for solitary confinement. Its front wall was tough enough to restrain a lone prisoner, particularly if bare-handed, but it didn’t fulfill a vault’s qualifications, even though a strong-door had been fitted into it. Rather than play with the big steel door, these technicians decided to blow the wall away from it.

They filled the stone crevices with a mushy substance formed from a dynamite base. Referring to the stuff as “soup” they retired to the far corners to watch how it would work.

It worked.

The whole building seemed to suck in its breath, in order to deliver the mighty “Pow!” that blew the vault.

With the blast came what could best be termed a muffled glow, vivid yet suppressed, a glare that briefly showed the entire scene in full, even to the faces of the men who crouched in the distant corners.

Though scarcely more than instantaneous, that curious flash seemed to linger, as did the thunder of the power-packing blast. Both were things that had been accumulated, to be delivered in a single moment that didn’t seem large enough to hold them. Perhaps the effect was only mental, but it could have been physical as well, judging from the other things that happened.

The crooks had overestimated the necessary charge, or possibly the real blame lay with the persons who had originally built the jail. In either ease, the effects of modern explosives were out of proportion to the strength of ancient masonry.

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