FRONT-PAGE NEWS
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_.
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Transcriber’s note:
Page 104 - changed double quote to single quote
to him the other day, 'Look, Mr. Grace, why don’t you
page 114 - changed "breath" to "breathe"
But as soon as Ken could breath evenly again he
Page 189 - changed "bit" to "bitt" in
Ken clung to Sandy and the redhead clung to the bitt