"ArkCovenantPart4" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacClure Victor)

CHAPTER FOUR of The Ark of the Covenant
Two Clues


I DID not mean to leave Dan Lamont that afternoon until we had gone over all the
points of the robbery very thoroughly. I have the greatest respect for my
friend's mind.
One of the first things Dan did was to point out where I had made the very
sap-headed break in my theorizing. When I told him that the sleep-producing gas
was what had stopped the engines of the automobiles, he grinned at me in a sort
of sarcastic way.
"Are you chemist enough to tell me what there is in the air that enables the
automatic engine to combust its gasoline?" he asked.
"Don't be funny, Dan," said I, and innocently answered him, "Oxygen, of course."

"Clever fellow, he purred. "And now will you tell me what the human engine gets
out of the air to help its combustion?"
Right there I saw where I had pulled the bone. It was obvious that a gas strong
enough to deprive an automobile engine of its oxygen would have deprived humans
of their lives.
I dare say I deserved all the chaffing he gave me, but he rubbed it in all
afternoon.
By and by he was sprawling on the floor of his sitting-room, searching the
newspapers for further information that might throw light on the mystery. He had
managed to get his mop of flaxen hair so tangled up and over his eyes that he
looked like one of those silky-haired Scots dogs.
"A clue, a clue, a clue,--let's find a clue," he was chaffing me."Let's find a
clue on which to base a reasonable hypothesis, my dear Jimmy. I said, mark you,
a reasonable hypothesis. The gas that stopped the engines doped the bulls! It
may sound all right--but the reasoning is just what might be expected from a
mere mechanic.
"Oh, shut it, Dan!"
He shut one eye and recited at me:
"The famous airman, looking for a gas, pulls a large bone and proves himself
an--egregious mechanic!"
"You might have rhymed," said I, and threw a cushion at him.
"Oh, that that brain which did the ether penetrate
Should ossify and fattily degenerate!"
he finished and threw the cushion back at me.
"I've found another curious robbery of last night that seems to have escaped
you, you slug," said he. "Come and look at this, Jimmy."
I got down on the floor beside him. He had one of the stubby fingers of his
childish hand on a paragraph in a newspaper. This briefly stated that five
thousand litres of high-grade gasoline had vanished in some mysterious fashion,
during the night, from one of the big containers in New Jersey belonging to the
Standard Oil Company.
"That's a curious thing," said I.
"It is a curious thing," Dan agreed. "Somebody gets away from the financial
district with over three thousand kilos weight of gold--and on the same night
some one else gets away with five thousand litres of gasoline. What do you know