Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 104, No. 4, August 22, 1936

An alert chap eagerly answered his snapped questions. They hadn’t seen any armored truck pass within the past ten minutes.

“We’ve been watching, too!” the chap told him. “We caught the alarm on our radio, and we’ve been checking the cars going past, just in case they came this way.”

Hewitt grunted thanks, swung out of the station and headed the coupé back toward the city. Disappointed, he mumbled profanely. The mob had twisted, somewhere, and very probably had gone to cover by now.

He drove at a brisk forty, keeping to the center of the pavement and eagerly scanning both sides as well as he could, for skid marks, especially at intersections.

The pavement swung about a looping turn and the headlights played for a fleeting moment on a stretch of high board fence, built back from the boulevard a hundred yards. Hewitt made out a word or two in a sprawling sign painted on the fence and remembered the place as an amateur baseball park that hadn’t been used this summer.

Then, just when he was passing the place, his eye caught a series of weird, lightning-like flashes of greenish-hued light, lancing high above the fence.

The coupé had rolled a good three hundred yards before the significance of those flashes dawned on Hewitt. Then he jammed on brakes and swung the coupé in a feverish, screaming turn about.

That artificial lightning effect had been made by an oxy-acetylene welding or cutting outfit in operation. It wasn’t likely that any honest work of that nature would be going on in the ballpark at ten o’clock tonight.

Completing the turn, Hewitt switched off headlights and sneaked back to the ballpark, turning off the pavement onto the broad gravelled driveway leading to the fence. He made a silent stop a dozen yards from a dark break in the fence that marked an entranceway.

He knew the answer to something that had been bothering him. He knew how the mob had planned to get into that armored tank.

His gun was in his right hand, his pocket flashlight in his left, when he reached the dark gap. Tensely he passed through, rather dose to one side.

He had only gotten a glimpse of the bulky outlines of the armored truck, picked out by carefully held flashlights in the hands of four men crowded close to it, when there was a sudden movement from the deep shadows beside the fence and the hiss of exertion forced breath.

Something smashed down on the back of his head, crushing his Panama hat and sending Hewitt stumbling to his knees. The roar of his own gun, blasting harmlessly at the ground, dinned in his ears, then black nothingness descended upon him.

It seemed that the report of the gun still was roaring in his ears when consciousness drifted back to Walter Hewitt. His fingers clawed cinders for a moment and then he managed to get up on bended knees, swaying dizzily. His head ached fearfully, but quickly-exploring fingers could feel nothing worse than an egg-sized lump at the back of his head, that wasn’t moist.

Savagely he swore his disgust and anger, scrambling to his feet, thrusting out a hand to the fence to steady himself. He strained his eyes in the now pitchy darkness and could make out nothing familiar except the shadowy bulk of the armored truck, outlined against a lighter western sky. The only sounds were the hollow roarings of car motors on the boulevard.

II

Fumbling fingers found a box of matches. By the feeble light of the three struck in succession, Hewitt confirmed his suspicion that both gun and flashlight were gone. Apparently he had been dragged a few yards from the gap in the fence and dumped there.

He did find his hat, shapelessly crushed where a tire had passed over it.

A faint, wavering beam from a flashlight came threading through the gloom, through the fence gap.

“Hey! Anybody in there?” a quavering voice challenged.

Hewitt stumbled dizzily to the gap and showed himself in the torch beam that centered on him.

“It’s all right!” he croaked huskily. “Come over here, with your torch!”

Feet scrabbled in the gravel; a small man in shirtsleeves approached cautiously, and rays of his flashlight glinted on a big revolver that wavered a little uncertainly in his other hand.

“What’s coming off over here?” The chap tried to make his tones gruff and confident. “I heard a shot, and I saw two cars light out of the ballpark.”

Hewitt fished out his badge, identified himself quickly, with a brief explanation of his presence there. The man was relieved.

“My name’s Miller,” he explained in return. “I live across the boulevard. I heard about that stickup over my radio. Gosh! Is that the armored truck there?”

His torch had picked out the truck. Hewitt snatched it from his hand.

“That’s the truck!” he snapped. “Let’s have a look around.”