Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 7, 1928 — page 45: what you’re looking at

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

“YOU'VE KILLED PRIVACY!” Far from. seeming particularly alarmed or filled with despair, Edison Ward appeared strangely elated. He took Marian firmly by the arm. “ Just run up to my laboratory with me and I’ll show you what we will do,” he told her. “But they'll just trap us up there,” she told him. ‘“ Of course you can lock us in, but then they'll set fire to the house.”’ “Just do as I tell you,” Edison Ward said masterfully, suddenly stripped of his overpowering shyness in Marian Lord’s presence. A moment later they were shut in the suite upstairs, with a heavy steel door and window shutters dead bolted on the inside. Ward took her over to the table where the panorama mirror lay and gave her a magnifying glass, while he took the other. Wonderingly, she studied the mov- ing picture spread out before her. All around the grounds they could see the tiny figures of men stealing forward through the shrubbery. The special policeman who should have been guarding the gate had gone. Nowhere was there any one in sight except mem- bers of Redfern’s band. “T see where they cut the telephone wires!” Ward exclaimed, pointing at a spot near the south garden wall with a tip of his pencil. Over against the wall, at short inter- vals all around the grounds, men were stationed, evidently with the purpose of allowing no one to slip out, while others were advancing — stealthily toward the house. Ward reached into a cabinet and selected a small telephone set with a short wire attached and slipped it into his pocket. “We may need this,” he told the puzzled girl, with a cheerful grin. “ And before we go I'd better take out one or two things so that in case they search the place more carefully this time they won’t learn all my little se- crets, particularly this one that I may 185 want to use again if I ever have to do any more broadcasting.” He took her into the little inner room, where the microphone stood. The wall in this room was covered with steel plates riveted together, and backed by hollow tile. Under the spot where the micro- phone wire disappeared through the wall he picked out four supposedly solid rivets with his finger-tips, releas- ing one of the plates, and exposing a good sized niche behind it, made by the simple process of removing some of the tiles. From that niche he took out a gramophone and set it on the table be- fore the bewildered girl, detaching a little electric motor, and a wire that had been cut into the telephone wire. “That accounts for how I could be broadcasting in this room that night and yet not be killed by the bomb; in fact, it explains how at that moment I could be out spying around, and dis- covering Mr. Redfern’s headquarters. You see, I just dictated my address to a phonograph, hitched it to an electric motor; put another microphone with it, and stuck the whole thing into this niche in the wall, where I just had the second microphone cut in on the tel- ephone wire, to which the first one is attached. So you see, I wouldn’t be embarrassed at all by delivering my speech over the radio. In fact, here was a case where I[ could set my mouth going and go away and leave it, which I did.” “ But we’ve got to go away now!” exclaimed the agitated girl, “or it will be too late. I don’t see how you went oway then, with everything locked like this, nor how you're going: to go away now.” “Tm going away now with you this time, just the same wav that I went alone then,” he assured her, and led her out to the sitting room of the suite, to a point in the wall, where a big old- fashioned chimney, some eight feet wide, jutted a full three feet out into the room. COMIC OOO KS (E@)