I looked at the simple little instrument with a sort of reverence, for on it depended the momentous question of whether we should be released in time to pursue the two who were escaping in the automobile.

“You’ll have to hurry,” continued Garrick, speaking into his transmitter.  “Give the signal.  Get the car ready.  Anything, so long as it is action.  Use your own judgment.”

There he was, flashing a message out of our prison by an invisible ray that shot across the Cimmerian darkness to the point where we knew that our friends were waiting anxiously.  I could scarcely believe it.  But Garrick had the utmost faith in the ability of the radiophone to make good.

“They must have started by this time,” he cried, craning his neck out of the window and looking in every direction.

Forbes was still rambling along, but Garrick was not paying any attention to him.  Instead, he began rummaging the room for possible evidence, more for something to do than because he hoped to find anything, while we were waiting anxiously for something to happen.

An exclamation from Garrick, however, brought me to his side.  Tucked away in a bureau drawer under some soiled linen that plainly belonged to Forbes, he drew out what looked like a single blue-steel tube about three inches long.  At its base was a hard-rubber cap, which fitted snugly into the palm of the hand as he held it.  His first and middle fingers encircled the barrel, over a steel ring.  A pull downward and the thing gave a click.

“Good that it wasn’t loaded,” Garrick remarked.  “I knew what the thing was, all right, but I didn’t think the spring was as delicate as all that.  It is a new and terrible weapon of destruction of human life, one that can be carried by the thug or the burglar and no one be the wiser, unless he has occasion to use it.  It is a gun that can be concealed in the palm of the hand.  A pull downward on that spring discharges a thirty-two calibre, centre fire cartridge.  The most dangerous feature of it is that the gun can be carried in an upper vest pocket as a fountain pen, or in a trousers pocket as a penknife.”

I looked with added suspicion now, if not a sort of respect, on the young man who was tossing, half conscious, on the bed.  Was he, after all, not the simple, gullible Forbes, but a real secret master of crime?

Garrick, keen though he had been over the discovery, was in reality much more interested just now in the result of his radiophone message.  What would be the outcome?

I had been startled to see that almost instantly after his second call over the radiophone there seemed to rise on all sides of us lights and the low baying of dogs.

“What’s all that?” I asked Garrick.

“Dillon had a dozen or so police dogs shipped up here quietly,” answered Garrick, now straining his eyes and ears eagerly.  “He started them out each in charge of an officer as soon as they arrived.  I hope they had time to get around in that other direction and close in.  That was what he sent the chauffeur back to see about, to make sure that they were placed by the man who is the trainer of the pack.”