Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 7, 1928 — page 42: what you’re looking at

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

182 usual this morning, sir. The young man thought he could finish his work before you came in. You see [ tried to telephone and there was trouble on the line, so I sent for a repair man, and he located the trouble here. “You will kindly withdraw until Mr. Ward has his breakfast,” Haskins continued, turning to the repair man, who got up grudgingly from the floor, shoved his kit of tools up against the wall and went out. Haskins bustled about setting the room in order and _ continuing his apology, while Ward read his paper. “Well, of all the nerve!” Haskins exclaimed suddenly, and picked up the telephone man’s bag of tools, “ leav- ing this ’ere in plain sight while you eat, sir. I must apologize again.” Haskins, still muttering, carried the bag out to the kitchen. “Where’s that bloke from the tel- ephone company?” he demanded. “ He said he’d go out on the grounds and smoke while Mr. Ward had break- fast,” the cook told him. “Well, he needn’t have left his dirty bag around here for us to stumble over,” Haskins grumbled, and, open- ing the rear door, he set it out in the service yard, after noting that the tel- ephone employee was nowhere in sight. Haskins had barely returned to “the breakfast room when there came a sudden ripping explosion from just outside the house. Windows were shattered all around. The door of the servants’ entrance was blown from its hinges, and the kitchen walls as well as those of several adjoining rooms were stripped of plaster. Ward and Haskins rushed out to- gether through the servants’ entrance. Out in the service yard, where Has- kins had left the telephone repair man’s bag of tools, there was a ragged hole in the ground like the crater of a small volcano. The shrubbery for several rods around it was torn and broken. “Good Lord!” Edison Ward ex- ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. claimed. “ Haskins, if you hadn’t been grouchy this morning and put that fellow’s ‘bag outside, we'd all be dead, and there wouldn’t be anything but rubbish left of the old house. I re- member now where I’d seen that repair man before. I thought his face was familiar when I came in to breakfast. Do you remember, Haskins, that after- noon before the evening in which I was supposedly bumped off by a bomb in my room, there was something wrong with the telephone wires then ?”’ “I do remember, sir,” Haskins*ex- claimed. “And I remember _ this young man, too, now you speak of it. He was the man that was sent up that afternoon to repair it, and he said the trouble was in your suite of rooms, and when you came home you took him‘in long enough to. irx it,” © Right,” Ward approved. “ And now I “begin to see a solution of the mystery that has been troubling me as well as the police and you ever since that bombing. We've all wondered how a man could get into my private rooms through dead bolted doors, pull a wisecrack over the radio, and then throw, a bomb and get out again still through dead bolted doors, and not get hurt himself, or leave any trace of himself behind excepting the ex- plosion. “Well, this young telephone man is the answer, of course. He brought some kind of infernal machine in his bag of tools, and managed to tuck it away in that little room almost under my very nose. Now let me see if I can find anything scattered around the yard that will tell me how the trick was pulled.” Ward spent half an hour picking up small fragments about the grounds, and at the end of that time had col- lected not only the pieces of the cast- iron shell as before, but enough bits of glass, coils of wire, and other attendant apparatus, to reconstruct a small port- able radio set, if it had been possible to put it all together again. COPMNICLOOOKS (C@