There was no time to be lost now. Down the steps again dashed Garrick, after our expected failure both to get in peaceably and to pass the ice-box door by force. This time Dillon emerged from the cab with him. Together they were carrying the heavy apparatus up the steps.
They set it down close to the door and I scrutinized it carefully. It looked, at first sight, like a short stubby piece of iron, about eighteen inches high. It must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. Along one side was a handle, and on the opposite side an adjustable hook with a sharp, wide prong.
Garrick bent down and managed to wedge the hook into the little space between the sill and the bottom of the ice-box door. Then he began pumping on the handle, up and down, up and down, as hard as he could.
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 titanic 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 passing.
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 buttons 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 button under the carpet and a set of batteries. The other series of little magnets in the black pockets is connected with another button and the batteries."............