Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 28, 1928 — page 84: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

514 Inside eaclr box was an automatic pistol trained to shoot a stream of bul- lets into the breast of anybody who entered the hallway. If the bullets from one of these pistols missed him, most likely those from the other weapon would not. The pistols were operated by a push button, and Mr. Gander stood ready to press that button if he didn’t like ‘the face of the person who came in the front door. When you had a hundred pounds of platinum and a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewels in your safe all the time, you had to be prepared for every eventu- ality. What the deuce, says the impatient reader, has all this stuff about platinum got to do with Lester Lucus and his hot-dog stand? Well, it happened that Gander & Gruen’s offices were upon the second floor of the old building on Broadway near Fulton, and directly be- low them was the tiny shop of Lester and his new-found corporation. The place for Gander & Gruen to be located, you would say, was in some new office building in quarters especial- ly prepared for them, but it happened that they had been on this spot for forty years, and they made up for the antique character of the building by the ade- quacy of their arrangements, and they paid about a quarter as much rent as they would have done in a new struc- ture. Their safe was modern and perfectly fireproof as well as burglarproof. They had laid a floor of quarter-inch armor plate, and the walls and ceilings were protected in the same way, and they kept a watchman armed to the teeth in the offices night and day. Two men worked at the benches in the front office, persons who had been with Gander & Gruen for a generation, yet these gentlemen changed all their clothes in the outer office, presented their naked bodies for inspection every noon and at night before donning their street clothes and wending their way ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. homeward, and had been submitting to this indignity so long they thought nothing of it. f: They were very highly paid work- ers in platinum, and they realized that dust which stuck to their overalls was immensely valuable. Goldsmiths used to be the aristocrats of the mechanical trades, but platinum smiths are the crowned kings. Otto Lendburg, whose thick-lensed specta- cles and long, brownish-white whiskers marked him in a crowd, was foreman of the shop. He made as high as two hundred dollars a week, but his habits were sim- ple, his tastes plain. Lately he had been getting his lunches downstairs at the stand where Lester Lucus sold Comet sausages and soft, fresh bread for twenty cents a sandwich. Mr. Lendburg was of German birth and could eat sausages for lunch every day in the week without injuring his health. If he could have washed them down with a stein of dark beer instead of Mocha and Java he would have been entirely happy. America was his home; under no consideration would he have been will- ing to return to Germany to live, but he did not approve of banning beer. He could have proved to you, if you were open to argument, that the small alcoholic content of beer was less in- jurious to the human system than the caffeine in the best coffee. Every day, before going downstairs to lunch, Mr. Lendburg changed all his clothes so that no particles of platinum could be carried out of the establish- ment of Gander & Gruen. How, then, did the tiny ball of the precious metal happen to be lying upon the counter of Lester and Chipmunk’s tiny café? The answer is very simple. It fell out of his luxuriant white beard. And on that particle of platinum a good deal of this story depends. In the meantime Lester had gone cruising for despondent frankfurter venders in good locations. He found (EO) VOOLKS ANIC (C@