The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1894-09-16

said Brinckerhoff. You are wanting to
invent a noiseless powder, and are
thinking of chlorate of potash. 1t
won't do. my friend. You can manage
chlorate of potash so as to give you
tremendous explosive force with next
to no noise but you can never harness
it so as to use it in firearms. Other
men have tried it before you ever
thought of it, but they have all failed.
Try something that is slower than
chlorate of potash if you want to sue
Geed in anything except blowing your
head off,
Il had learned all l wanted to learn
of Brinckerhoff, and 1 knew now for
certain that l was on the right track.
/ wondered that the idea had not come
to me before. You remember that the
first of my friends who disappeared
had been last seen at a druggists,
where he had gone to get some medi-
cine for a sore throat, and that there
was some reason to suppose that the
second man who disappeared had
bought chlorate of potash at another
druggists. Looking at these facts in
the light of what Brinckerhoff had said
L felt reasonably sure that in both
cases chlorate of potash was at the
bottom of the mysterious disappear
ances of my two friends, and l set to
work to try to prove it.
DOQSHl couple Ol OunCtS Ol
chlorate of potash, and that evening L
gave good big dose of the drug to
my landlady's cat, putting it in the
! center of a meat pill. The cat bolted
it without the least suspicion, and 1
watched patiently to see if the beast
would disappear. She did nothing of
the kind, but after about half an hour
she curled up on the floor and went
into commissions; and, after freeing her
mind as to the trick that she found
1 had played on her, she died without
showing the slightest inclination to ex-
plode. However, that didn't shake my
faith in my theory. Brinckerhoff had
said that when chlorate Of potash was
combined with some other substance
the name of which he would not give
me, its explosive powers were enor-
mously increased. What was chat
other substance? 1t seemed to me that
| this question could not be a very diff
cult one. The two men who had dis
appeared must have had this substance
somewhere about them, and it must
have come in actual contact with the
drug. That thousands of people take
| chlorate of potash, or carry it in their
| pockets, and don't disappear, must
mean that they don't happen to have
| the other mysterious substance about
them. 1t was then a substance which
my two friends had with them, but
which the average man does not have.
1t must have been carried loosely in
the pocket, or else it could not have
come in contact with the chlorate of
potash. What could this substance be -?
well, / worked over that problem
for weeks, and could not come to any
conclusion. 1 mixed chlorate of potash
with every sort of thing that l could
imagine a sane man might possibly
have in his coat pocket, but 1 could not
produce the terrible explosion that
Brinckerhoff had spoken of. 1t was not
phosphorus, nor sulphur or anything
else that is used in making matches
1t was not tobacco, nor sugar, nor cof-
fee, nor tea, nor gum, nor flour, nor
anything else that 1 could think of.
was beginning to get a little disheart-