United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He slipped out to little restaurants and cheap boarding-places for his meals. So he went on to some fairer bargain. There was a bank-vault just across the alley from his secret back room in the real estate office, and many a night did young Herbert lie awake in his cave hearing his imaginary bank-robbers mining their way into the vault and escaping with much rich treasure.
If a man, for instance, accidentally gets shut into a bank-vault, or other air-tight box or chamber, it will be only a few minutes before he begins to feel suffocated; and in a few hours he will be dead, unless some one opens the door.
"I did not dive through your solid steel, Pharaoh! I used my eyes, after I had used my ears. Here!" His fists had been doubled. He unclasped his hands and held them forward. In each palm was one of the metal disks. "Your bank-vault door was trigged with these wedged in the crack of the outer flange. I saw, I pulled hard on the big handle and here I am!"
At its touch the mass of steel swung inward noiselessly as the door of a bank-vault. With the swinging of the door there reached us the hot, stuffy smell of unwashed bodies under steam-heat the unmistakable odor that one sometimes meets in a court-room. Marny and I stepped inside.
Mike's apartment was reasonably soundproof, but it wasn't built to take the kind of explosion that would shake the door that Mike the Angel had just closed. It was a two-inch-thick slab of armor steel on heavy, precision-bearing hinges. So was every other door in the suite. It wasn't quite a bank-vault door, but it would do. Any explosion that could shake it was a real doozy.
Peeked into Town Hall and saw the general round-up. Light in the bank. Bill was boosted up by Tom and got a peek over the curtain. One fellow inside adding figures much taken up. Bank-vault door wide open. Front door unlocked. Crawled in. Kept crawling. Crawled into bank room. Grille door wide open. Bill up and hit fellow with rubber nob-knocker it snuffs, but is not dangerous.
A gleam of light was disappearing into the open sea. He put his hand into his pocket and took out the scraps of torn paper. "These notes," he said, "like the ones which you hold in your bank-vault, were never issued by the Bank of England." I stammered some incoherent sentence; and the great chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard turned toward me.
Word Of The Day