The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-06-11

Margory and Manley as they made their way back to their waiting limousine. "Ten thousand one-armed crooks couldn't batter their way into that bank"
 A certain one-armed criminal, nev- ertheless, was at that precise moment very busily engaged in preparing for his assault on this Gibraltar of gold so proudly regarded as impregnable. Two workmen in the uniform of Gen. eral Electric employees, exploring a section of abandoned cable gallery, were busily engaged in enlarging 8 wire conduit which met this gallery at right angles. There, by means of an electric mining drill, they bur- rowed like two moles deep beneath the level of the street along which the traffic of a great city so ceaselessly ebbed and flowed. From a manhole opening into this gallery was quietly passed a. huge cylinder of iron capped by a drum of Zinc having hinged cover. The two subterranean workers had been warned to handle the cylin- der with the utmost care. And this they did, knowing full well that it's weight was due to the fact of its being tightly packed with high ex- plosive, while the zinc drum was merely a screen for an ingenious de- tonating mechanism consisting of an alarm clock with a few inches of pie ture wire attached to the shaft of it's minute hand wheel. This wire, in turn, was wound about the cork in a small bottle of sulphuric acid nest ing in bed of illuminate caps, so that as the winding shaft took up the wire, once the clock was adjusted and set in motion, the tightening wire with drew the cork, liberated the acid and detonated the huge charge.
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 Legar himself, in the meantime, having clothed number of his hench- men In uniforms and caps bearing the inscription Western National Bank" directed his attention to the much more critical task of tracing a sigma ture on a typewriter sheet bearing the embossed imprint of yet another bank, the Third National. This he did by imposing his sheet of paper on an out-of-date municipal reform peti- tion, on which was inscribed, in col umn of others, the signature of Henry H. Stonington." With both sheets placed over square of plate glass under which stood a strong cleo tric globe, the thoughtful-faced man with the pen was able to trace on the upper sheet an exact facsimile of the writing on the lower. Then, having made sure that his secret emissary had duly executed his plan of bridging the Stonington uptown house wire, he telephoned to one McTigue certain orders as to the future movements of a duly designated motor truck.
 He consulted his watch from time to- time. with his eyes always going hungrily back to the heavy pillared bank entrance itself
 Tn one minute" he announced, they'll get a dose of the medicine they gave us this morning." Again he looked at his watch.
 ''In fifty seconds we'll show 'em that two can play at this explosion gamer
 The hand that held the watch trembled little.
 'In ten seconds.'' he whispered.
 One of Legar's men, pushing up to the window to speak with him. stared vacantly into the scared face sud- denly grown so pallid. Instead of speaking he, too, stared into the street. But still the seconds dragged by
 Its time that
 But the sentence was never f1n- ished. A sudden great thud and roar of sound cut off all smaller sounds. A blast, like the blast of a thousand of Thor's hammers on the rocky crust of the world, shook the city like an earthquake. In the same breath came an answering chorus of sharper sounds. the crash and fall of glass, the rumble of rending and trmbling masonry, the rattle of splintered wood and metal once more raining earthward.
 "Fire" was the cry that filled that canyon. "The buildings on fire!"
 And it was then that Legar, replac- ing his watch in his pocket and toss- ing aside the field glasses through which he had been viewing the street, showed that he was once more him. self
 "Now's the time, men," he an-