Espionage, German -- United States -- Fiction; Germans -- United States -- Fiction; Spy stories
"Not a chance," he responded. "Every engine has a sieve in its stack,
and anyway there hadn't been a train pass within two hours of the time
this fire started."
"Will meet you at the hotel tonight," Dixie called to Grant, and
started across the field toward the tracks.
"Loan me your handkerchief, will you?"
It was a call from Grant, and it caused the farmer to turn from
watching the pleasing, trim figure of Dixie Mason making her way across
the field. He saw that Grant had already filled his own handkerchief
with soil dug out of the field. Grant took the spacious piece of cloth
which the farmer handed him wonderingly, and walking nearly a hundred
feet from where he had taken his original sample of the soil, he knelt
down and with his pocket knife dug up another generous clod and put
that in the farmer's handkerchief. Then picking up both handkerchiefs,
he turned to the farmer:
"Can you drive me right into town? I have some work to do."
"Sure," answered the farmer, impressed by Grant's manner, and then his
curiosity prompted the question, "Have you found gold or oil?"
"Maybe something more valuable than either to the wheat farmer,"
answered Grant. "I think I have found the cause of the fires in the
wheat fields, but will know for a certainty by tonight."
The farmer asked no more questions but hurried away, soon to re-appear
on the road near the field at the wheel of a speedy little roadster.
On the way into town several more fields which had been shorn of their
yield by fire were passed and Grant stopped at each one of them. He
walked over their blackened lengths carefully until evidently the thing
for which he searched was discovered. Then as before he took a sample
of the soil and a second sample many yards distant from the first
position. By the time the little roadster drove up in front of the one
hotel in the nearest city the pockets of both men were filled with
Minnesota soil.
They had already made a stop at a drug store where Grant taxed the
stock of the proprietor with the demands he made. He succeeded in
getting everything that he wanted, acids, salts and other things of
which the farmer had never heard. Once in Grant's room at the hotel,
the president of the Criminology Club spread out a large piece of white
paper on the floor. On it he marked several circles in parallel rows.
"Empty your right hand pockets on this side, and put the soil from
your left hand pockets on this side," he ordered briefly, and then in
response to the mute request on the face of the farmer he added, "Yes,
stay if you want to," and began emptying his own pockets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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