Meanwhile the crowd that had begun to collect was getting larger.

Dillon went through the form of calling on them for aid, but the call was met with laughter. A Tenderloin crowd has no use for raids, except as a spectacle. Between us we held them back, while Garrick worked. The crowd jeered.

It was the work of only a few seconds, however, before Garrick changed the jeers to a hearty round of exclamations of surprise. The door seemed to be lifted up, literally, until some of its bolts and hinges actually bulged and cracked. It was being crushed, like the flimsy outside door, before the unwonted attack.

Upwards, by fractions of an inch, by millimeters, the door was being forced. There was such straining and stress of materials that I really began to wonder whether the building itself would stand it.

"Scientific jimmying," gasped Garrick, as the door bulged more and more and seemed almost to threaten to topple in at any moment.

I looked at the stubby little cylinder with its short stump of a lever.

Garrick had taken it out now and had wedged it horizontally between the ice-box door and the outer stonework of the building itself. Then he jammed some pieces of wood in to wedge it tighter and again began to pump at the handle vigorously.

"What is it?" I asked, almost in awe at the t.i.tanic power of the apparently insignificant little thing.

"My scientific sledgehammer," he panted, still working the lever more vigorously than ever backward and forward. "In other words, a hydraulic ram. There is no swinging of axes or wielding of crow-bars necessary any more, Dillon, in breaking down a door like this. Such things are obsolete. This little jimmy, if you want to call it that, has a power of ten tons. I think that's about enough."

It seemed as if the door were buckling and being literally wrenched off its hinges by the irresistible ten-ton punch of the hydraulic ram.

Garrick sprang back, grasping me by the arm and pulling me too. But there was no need of caution. What was left of the door swung back on its loosened hinges, seemed to tremble a moment, and then, with a dull thud crashed down on the beautiful green marble of the reception hall, reverberating.

We peered beyond. Inside all was darkness. At the very first sign of trouble the lights had been switched out downstairs. It was deserted.

There was no answer to our shouts. It was as silent as a tomb.

The clang of bells woke the rapid echoes. The crowd parted. It was the patrol wagons, come just in time, full of reserves, at Dillon's order.

They swarmed up the steps, for there was nothing to do now, in the limelight of the public eye, except their duty. Besides Dillon was there, too.

"Here," he ordered huskily, "four of you fellows jump into each of the next door houses and run up to the roof. Four more men go through to the rear of this house. The rest stay here and await orders," he directed, detailing them off quickly, as he endeavoured to grasp the strange situation.

On both sides of the street heads were out of windows. On other houses the steps were full of spectators. Thousands of people must have swarmed in the street. It was pandemonium.

Yet inside the house into which we had just broken it was all darkness and silence.

The door had yielded to the scientific sledge-hammering where it would have shattered, otherwise, all the axes in the department. What was next?

Garrick jumped briskly over the wreckage into the building. Instead of the lights and gayety which we had seen on the previous night, all was black mystery. The robbers' cave yawned before us. I think we were all prepared for some sort of gunplay, for we knew the crooks to be desperate characters. As we followed Garrick closely we were surprised to encounter not even physical force.

Someone struck a light. Garrick, groping about in the shadows, found the switch, and one after another the lights in the various rooms winked up.

I have seldom seen such confusion as greeted us as, with Dillon waiving his "John Doe" warrant over his head, we hurried upstairs to the main hall on the second floor, where the greater part of the gambling was done. Furniture was overturned and broken, and there had been no time to remove the heavier gambling apparatus. Playing cards, however, chips, racing sheets from the afternoon, dice, everything portable and tangible and small enough to be carried had disappeared.

But the greatest surprise of all was in store. Though we had seen no one leave by any of the doors, nor by the doors of any of the houses on the block, nor by the roofs, or even by the back yard, according to the report of the police who had been sent in that direction, there was not a living soul in the house from roof to cellar. Search as we did, we could find not one of the scores of people whom I had seen enter in the course of the evening while I was watching on the corner.

Dillon, ever mindful of some of the absurd rules of evidence in such cases laid down by the courts, had had an official photographer summoned and he was proceeding from room to room, snapping pictures of apparatus that was left in place and preserving a film record of the condition of things generally.

Garrick was standing ruefully beside the roulette wheel at which so many fortunes had been dissipated.

"Get me an axe," he asked of one of Dillon's men who was pa.s.sing.

With a well-directed blow he smashed the wheel.

"Look," he exclaimed, "this is what they were up against."

His forefinger indicated an ingenious but now twisted and tangled series of minute wires and electro-magnets in the delicate mechanism now broken open before us. Delicate brushes led the current into the wheel.

With another blow of the axe, Garrick disclosed wires running down through the leg of the table to the floor and under the carpet to b.u.t.tons operated by the man who ran the game.

"What does it mean?" I asked blankly.

"It means," he returned, "that they had little enough chance to win at a straight game of roulette. But this wheel wasn't even straight with all the odds in favor of the bank, as they are naturally. This game was electrically controlled. Others are mechanically controlled by what are called the 'mule's ear,' and other devices. You CAN'T win. These wires and magnets can be made to attract the little ball into any pocket the operator desires. Each one of the pockets contains an electro-magnet.

One set of electro-magnets in the red pockets is connected with one b.u.t.ton under the carpet and a set of batteries. The other series of little magnets in the black pockets is connected with another b.u.t.ton and the batteries."

He had picked up the little ball. "This ball," he said as he examined it, "is not really of ivory, but of a composition that looks like ivory, coating a hollow, soft-iron ball inside. Soft iron is attracted by an electro-magnet. Whichever set of magnets is energized attracts the ball and by this simple method it is in the power of the operator to let the ball go to red or black as he may wish. Other similar arrangements control the odd or even, and other combinations, also from push b.u.t.tons. There isn't an honest gambling machine in the whole place. The whole thing is crooked from start to finish,--the men, the machines,----"

"Then a fellow never had a chance?" repeated Dillon.

"Not a chance," emphasized Garrick.

We gathered about and gazed at magnets and wires, the b.u.t.tons and switches. He did not need to say anything more to expose the character of the place.

Amazing as we found everything about us in the palace of crooks, nothing made so deep an impression on me as the fact that it was deserted. It seemed as if the gamblers had disappeared as though in a fairy tale. Search room after room as Dillon's men did they were unable to find a living thing.

One of the men had discovered, back of the gambling rooms on the second floor, a little office evidently used by those who ran the joint. It was scantily furnished, as though its purpose might have been merely a place where they could divide up the profits in private. A desk, a cabinet and a safe, besides a couple of chairs, were all that the room contained.

Someone, however, had done some quick work in the little office during those minutes while Garrick was opening the great ice-box door with his hydraulic ram, for on every side were scattered papers, the desk had been rifled, and even from the safe practically everything of any value had been removed. It was all part of the general scheme of things in the gambling joint. Practically nothing that was evidential that could be readily removed had been left. Whoever had planned the place must have been a genius as far as laying out precautions against a raid were concerned.

Garrick, Dillon and I ran hastily through some scattered correspondence and other doc.u.ments that spilled out from some letter files on the floor, but as far as I could make out there was nothing of any great importance that had been overlooked.

Dillon ordered the whole ma.s.s to be bundled up and taken off when the other paraphernalia was removed so that it could be gone through at our leisure, and the search continued.

From the "office" a staircase led down by a back way and we followed it, looking carefully to see where it led.

A low exclamation from Garrick arrested our attention. In a curve between landings he had kicked something and had bent down to pick it up. An electric pocket flashlight which one of the men had picked up disclosed under its rays a package of papers evidently dropped by someone who was carrying away in haste an armful of stuff.

"Markers with the house," exclaimed Garrick as he ran over the contents of the package hurriedly. "I. O. U.'s for various amounts and all initialed--for several hundred thousands. h.e.l.lo, here's a bunch with an 'F.' That must mean Forbes--thousands of dollars worth."

The markers were fastened together with a slip in order to separate them from the others, evidently.

Garrick was hastily totalling them up and they seemed to amount to a tidy sum.

"How can he ever pay?" I asked, amazed as the sum crept on upward in the direction of six figures.

"Don't you see that they're cancelled?" interjected Garrick, still adding.

I had not examined them closely, but as I now bent over to do so I saw that each bore the words, "Paid by W."

Warrington himself had settled the gambling debts of his friend!

In still greater amazement I continued to look and found that they all bore dates from several weeks before, down to within a few days. The tale they told was eloquent. Forbes, his own fortune gone, had gambled until rescued by his friend. Even that had not been sufficient to curb his mania. He had kept right on, hoping insanely to recoup. And the gamblers had been willing to take a chance with him, knowing that they already had so much of his money that they could not possibly lose.

A horrid thought flashed over me. What if he had really planned to pay his losses by marrying a girl with a fortune? Forbes was the sort who would have gambled on even that slender prospect.