As we watched from the top of the hill, I wondered what Garrick\'s next move was to be. Surely he would not attempt to investigate the place yet. In fact, there seemed to be nothing that could be done now, as long as it was day-light, for any movement in this half-open country would have been viewed with suspicion by the occupants of the little house in the valley, whoever they might be.

We could not help viewing the place with a sort of awe. What secrets did the cottage hide, nestled down there in the valley among these green hills? Often I had heard that the gunmen of New York, when hard pressed, sought refuge in the country districts and mountains within a few miles of the city. There was something incongruous about it. Nature seemed so perfectly peaceful here that it was the very antithesis of those sections of the city in which he had found the gunman, whoever he was, indulging in practically every crime and vice of decadent civilization.

"So—the one they call the Boss has led up to the refuge of the Chief, the scientific gunman, at last," Garrick exclaimed, with marked satisfaction, as we turned and walked slowly back again to our car.

"Yes," I assented, "and now that we have found them—what are we to do with them?"

"It is still early in the day," Garrick remarked, looking at his watch. "They suspect no trouble up here. Here they evidently feel safe. No doubt they think we are still hunting for them fruitlessly in New York. I think we can afford to leave them here for a few hours. At any rate, I feel that I must return to the city. I must see Dillon, and then drop into my office, if we are to accomplish anything against them."

He had turned the car around and we made our way back to the main road, and then southward again, taking up in earnest the long return trip to the city and covering the distance in Warrington\'s racer in a much shorter time, now that we had not to follow another car and keep under cover. It was late in the afternoon, however, when we arrived and Garrick went directly to police headquarters where he held a hasty conference with Dillon.

Dillon was even more excited than we were when he learned how far we had gone in tracing out the scant clews that we had uncovered. As Garrick unfolded his plan, the commissioner immediately began to make arrangements to accompany us out into the country that night.

I did not hear all that was said, as Garrick and Dillon laid out their plans, but I could see that they were in perfect accord.

"Very well," I overheard Garrick, as we parted. "I shall go out in the car again. You will be up on the train?"

"Yes—on the seven-fifty," returned Dillon. "You needn\'t worry about my end of it. I\'ll be there with the goods—just the thing that you want. I have it."

"Fine," exclaimed Garrick, "I have to make a call at the office. I\'ll start as soon as I can, and try to beat you out."

They parted in good humour, for Dillon\'s passion for adventure was now thoroughly aroused and I doubt if we could have driven him off with a club, figuratively speaking.

At the office Garrick tarried only long enough to load the car with some paraphernalia which he had there, much of which, I knew, he had brought back with him after his study of police methods abroad. There were three coats of a peculiar texture, which he took from a wardrobe, a huge arrangement which looked like a reflector, a little thing that looked merely like the mouthpiece of a telephone transmitter, and a large heavy package which might have been anything from a field gun to a battering ram.

It was twilight when we arrived at the nearest railroad station to the little cottage in the valley, after another run up into the country in the car. Dillon who had come up by train to meet us, according to the arrangement with Garrick, was already waiting, and with him was one of the most trustworthy and experienced of the police department chauffeurs. Garrick looked about at the few loungers curiously, but there did not seem to be any of them who took any suspicious interest in new arrivals.

We four managed to crowd into a car built only for two, and Garrick started off. A few minutes later we arrived at the top of the hill from which we had already viewed the mysterious house earlier in the day. It was now quite dark. We had met no one since turning off into the crossroad, and could hear no sound except the continuous music of the night insects.

Just before crossing the brow of the last hill, we halted and Garrick turned out all the lights on the car. He was risking nothing that might lead to discovery yet. With the engine muffled down, we coasted slowly down the other side of the hill into the shadowy valley. There was no moon yet and we had to move cautiously, for there was only the faint light of the sky and stars to guide us.

What was the secret of that unpretentious little house below us? We peered out in the gathering blackness eagerly in the direction where we knew it must be, nestled among the trees. Whoever it sheltered was still there, and we could locate the place by a single gleam that came from an upper window. Whether there were lights below, we could not tell. If there were they must have been effectively concealed by blinds and shades.

"We\'ll stop here," announced Garrick at last when we had reached a point on the road a few hundred yards from the house.

He ran the car carefully off the road and into a little clearing in a clump of dark trees. We got out and pushed stealthily forward through the underbrush to the edge of the woods. There, on the slope, just a little way below us, stood the house of mystery.

Garrick and Dillon were busily conferring in an undertone, as I helped them bring the packages one after another from the car to the edge of the woods. Garrick had slipped the little telephone mouthpiece into his pocket, and was carrying the huge reflector carefully, so that it might not be injured in the darkness. I had the heavy coats of the peculiar texture over my arm, while Dillon and his man struggled along over the uncertain pathway, carrying between them the heavy, long, cylindrical package, which must have weighed some sixty pounds or so.

Garrick had selected as the site of our operations a corner of the grove where a very large tree raised itself as a landmark, silhouetted in black against a dark sky. We deposited the stuff there as he directed.

"Now, Jim," ordered Dillon, walking back to the car with his man, "I want you to take the car and go back along this road until you reach the top of the hill."

I could not hear the rest of the order, but it seemed that he was to meet someone who had preceded us on foot from the railway station and who must be about due to arrive. I did not know who or what it might be, but even the thought of someone else made me feel safer, for in so ticklish a piece of business as this, in dealing with at least a pair of desperate men such as we knew them to be in the ominously quiet little house, a second and even a third line of re-enforcements was not, I felt, amiss.

Garrick in the meantime had set to work putting into position the huge reflector. At first I thought it might be some method of throwing a powerful light on the house. But on closer examination I saw that it could not be a light. The reflector seemed to have been constructed so that in the focus was a peculiar coil of something, and to the ends of this coil, Garrick attached two wires which he fastened to an instrument, cylindrical, with a broadened end, like a telephone receiver.

Dillon, who had returned by this time, after sending his chauffeur back on his errand, appeared very much interested in what Garrick was doing.

"Now, Tom," said Garrick, "while I am fixing this thing, I wish you would help me by undoing that large package carefully."

While I was thus engaged, he continued talking with Dillon in a low voice, evidently explaining to him the use to which he wished the large reflector put.

I was working quickly to undo the large package, and as the wrappings finally came off, I could see that it was some bulky instrument that looked like a huge gun, or almost a mortar. It had a sort of barrel that might have been, say, forty inches in length, and where the breechlock should have been on an ordinary gun was a great hemispherical cavity. There was also a peculiar arrangement of springs and wheels in the butt.

"The coats?" he asked, as he took from the wrappings of the package several rather fragile looking tubes.

I had laid them down near us and handed them over to him. They were quite heavy, and had a rough feel.

"So-called bullet-proof cloth," explained Garrick. "At close range, quite powerful lunges of a dagger or knife recoil from it, and at a distance ordinary bullets rebound from it, flattened. We\'ll try it, anyway. It will do no harm, and it may do good. Now we are ready, Dillon."

"Wait just a minute," cautioned Dillon. "Let me see first whether that chauffeur has returned. He can run that engine so quietly that I myself can\'t hear it."

He had disappeared into the darkness toward the road, where he had despatched the car a few minutes before. Evidently the chauffeur had been successful in his mission, for Dillon was back directly with a hasty, "Yes, all right. He\'s backing the car around so that he can run it out on the road instantly in either direction. He\'ll be here in a moment."

Garrick had in the meantime been roughly sketching on the back of an old envelope taken from his pocket. Evidently he had been estimating the distance of the house from the tree back of which he stood, and worked with the light of a shaded pocket flashlight.

"Ready, then," he cried, jumping up and advancing to the peculiar instrument which I had unwrapped. He was in his element now. After all the weary hours of watching and preparation, here was action at last, and Garrick went to it like a starved man at food.

First he elevated the clumsy looking instrument pointed in the general direction of the house. He had fixed the angle at approximately that which he had hastily figured out on the envelope. Then he took a cylinder about twelve inches long............