But he should have been prepared for it. Taylor had foreseen a possibility of this sort of thing happening. He, himself, had thought a car had been trailing him. Yet, in his surprise and fright, he had almost ruined everything.

He shrugged his thin shoulders and, taking off his hat, abstracted a few folded sheets of paper from the sweatband. It was the work of five minutes to deposit them in a vault, and see the immensely strong steel door swing shut. He felt relieved.

“I wonder what they’ll do,” he muttered to himself on the way home, “when they try to follow the instructions on the paper they did get.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “If they do, there’s going to be one heck of an explosion.”

Sills arrived home to find three policemen pacing leisurely up and down the sidewalk in front of the house.

“Police guard,” explained Taylor shortly, “so that we have no more trouble like last night.”