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Mystery of the Iron Box

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<h2 id='chap20' class='c011'>CHAPTER XX</h2> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c013'> <div>FRONT-PAGE NEWS</div> </div></div> Six hours later, in Richard Holt’s apartment, Ken and Sandy looked up at the sound of a key in the lock. “It’s Dad!” Ken said. “Now we’ll get the rest of the story.” Sandy eyed the tall paper bag that Ken’s father carried in each arm. “Now we’ll get some food,” he said. Richard Holt smiled as he set the bags on a low table. “Help yourselves. There’s a hot roasted chicken in there, from the rotisserie, and half the contents of Max’s delicatessen. It occurred to me you might have an appetite by now.” “We’ve been drinking hot coffee ever since we got here,” Ken told him, opening up one bag, “and we finally got warmed up. But coffee isn’t very filling.” Sandy had already found the chicken, had dashed to the kitchen for a knife, and was hacking it up in sizable chunks. The correspondent pulled a newspaper out of his overcoat pocket as he took the coat off. “Thought you might want this too.” “Hey, look!” Ken said, around a mouthful. “Photos by Allen—two of them! And on the front page.” With an unconvincing air of boredom Sandy bent over to see the pictures. One was a highly foreshortened view of Barrack, Grace, and Cal seated around the paper-littered table in the back room of the Tobacco Mart. The other was a dramatic shot—also made from above—of the stone-laden barge, her port gunwale already under water, slipping sideways beneath the waves. “Not bad,” Sandy muttered. “That camera sure is great. Sorry there wasn’t better light for the table shot, though.” Ken grunted. “And I suppose you wish the helicopter had taken a nose dive into the sea, so you could have caught a better angle on the barge.” He shook his head. “Nobody but you would even have thought of a camera two seconds after being rescued from a briny grave.” “Listen to who’s talking!” Sandy said indignantly. “We weren’t in that windmill a minute before Ken was telling you to radio to New York to have the T-men close in on the Tobacco Mart.” He broke off, grinning. “Now there’s a nice by-line. ‘By Richard and Ken Holt.’” “Oh. I hadn’t even noticed it.” Ken glanced rapidly at the story and then looked up at his father. “You shouldn’t have let them put my name on it, Dad. You wrote it, and put in all that stuff about the foreign angle. I didn’t contribute anything but a couple of guesses.” “And the trail that led the Treasury men to a mighty slick counterfeiting ring,” his father pointed out. “Besides, your guesses were all pretty accurate. You were right about everything. The plates were sold to Grace and his gang by a European outfit for whom things were getting a little too hot—the same outfit I was talking about that day in the Advance office. They were palmed off on me, in the iron box, so they’d be brought through customs by a trustworthy character.” Richard Holt grinned. “And then,” he went on, “a carefully prepared duplicate was substituted for the box I’d brought. Grace has admitted he finally managed the exchange—after two false tries, here and in Brentwood—at Sam Morris’s store. Despite the fact,” he added, “that his little arson trick was almost a fiasco.” Ken’s father watched the boys eating for a moment. “You were also right,” he went on, “about the Tobacco Mart being the distribution center, under Grace’s direction. Barrack supplied paper and ink, through his printing connections. And Cal was the printer, working on the barge, just as you suspected. In fact, it was a well-planned operation—until you two happened along.” Ken took one more glance at the by-line over the front-page story headlined: TREASURY AGENTS NAB COUNTERFEITERS. It gave him a good feeling to see his own name and the name of his famous father written together that way. Then he looked up. “Well, there are still some things I’m guessing about,” he said. “That Treasury man asked questions faster than anybody I ever met—but he wasn’t very interested in answering any. I still don’t know how the trail of bills actually put them on the track. It seemed such a long chance when we tried it.” “It was a long chance,” his father agreed. “But it worked. Two New York banks had people waiting on their doorsteps when they opened up this morning—people who had found half a ten-dollar bill and who wanted to know if they were entitled to exchange it for a good one. Half an hour later two more had turned up. “The bills were immediately recognized as phonies—good as they were,” he went on, “and Treasury agents were notified. They got in touch with me immediately, in Washington, when they found my name scribbled on the bills. Of course it was the one you left in the truck that actually gave us the tip on where to look for you.” “You left one in the truck?” Sandy sounded surprised. “I didn’t know that.” “I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Ken said. “I figured that Cal borrowed the truck from some innocent man—someone not in the gang. So I thought that if I left one bill in the truck the owner might possibly find it. It seemed the best chance we had to bring attention to Cal and the barge in the shortest possible time.” His father nodded. “The truck owner was the third man to turn up with half a bill. He’d found it when he started to load fish this morning. And when the Treasury people asked him where he’d found it and how it got there, he said it must have been left by the man who borrowed the truck last night. The T-men located the spot where Cal’s barge was supposed to be tied up and learned that it had been towed out at four this morning, heading for Baltimore.” Sandy sighed comfortably and put down a bare chicken leg from which all the meat had been eaten. “That’s when we figured we were really lost—when the barge moved out.” “You shouldn’t underestimate the Treasury Department—or the Coast Guard,” Richard Holt said. “It was the Coast Guard that supplied the helicopter in record time, got us on our way, and radioed the tug to find your position.” He reached over and absent-mindedly picked up a chicken wing and began to nibble at it. “Speaking of underestimating,” he went on, “it looks as though we underestimated you two. You told me in the helicopter that Lausch said Mom’s box was both old and not very valuable. What prompted you to continue your prowling?” Neither of them answered him immediately. Ken was suddenly very busy helping himself to potato salad from a paper container. “He was worried about you,” Sandy said finally. “Because of Barrack knowing your address here, when all we’d told his landlady was the unlisted phone number. And since your door had been found open—as if somebody might have broken in—” “I see,” Richard Holt said slowly. “I worry about you sometimes, when I’m half the world away. It never occurred to me that you’re far more likely to get yourself into trouble when I’m at home.” “Oh, Dad!” Ken protested. “We don’t make a habit of this—honest! No matter what Bert says, we don’t go around looking for trouble. But I just had a hunch....” He let his voice trail away when he saw the twinkle in Richard Holt’s eye. “Of course not,” his father said. “You don’t make a habit of it. Things just happen to you.” He leaned back in his chair. “Tell me, Sandy and Ken, do you suppose there’s any way you could prevent things from happening?” “You’ll see,” Sandy assured him. “We’re planning to work out some kind of system for that—immediately. Aren’t we, Ken?” “Absolutely,” Ken agreed. “Good,” Richard Holt said. “Very good indeed.” But he would have sounded less relieved if he had known of events that were taking place even as he spoke—events that would soon enmesh the boys in the hazardous adventure destined to become known as The Clue of the Phantom Car. <div class='pbb'></div> <hr class='pb c000' /> <div id='fig04' class='figcenter id005'> <ANTIMG src='images/endpaper.jpg' alt='' class='ig005' /> <div class='ic005'> Endpaper illustration </div> </div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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