"Well! What became of you?" the Captain roared as a half hour later he entered the shack. "You lost their trail?" Tom grinned. "I'll say we did!" "So did I," Tom said quietly. "In the end I did. But I stayed with them longer than you did." "You stayed?" Drew exploded. "Sure I did. You remember that van on the street? They were in there, car and all! Pulled a swift one on us. Driver lowered the back gate and they drove up and in. Then he lifted the gate. "I had 'em trapped like rats, I thought. I'd have made the driver take that van right into our squad-car garage. And then, would there have been fun!" "But what happened?" Drew was staring now. "Near as I can find out, the driver released the gate with some foot control. Iggy and his gang took the hint and backed right out while we were going. I saw them shoot round a corner. The trap was sprung, no rat in it--so I came home. "How about a cup of coffee?" He moved toward the stove in the corner. "Well that," Drew said slowly, "is something!" "There'll be another day," the Captain grumbled. CHAPTER XIX A WHISPER FROM AFAR Late that afternoon Captain Burns' car came to a stop before the "House of Magic." "Hop in," he said to Johnny when the boy appeared. "Want to take you somewhere. Been working on clues all day. Tired. Need rest. Need good company. Come along." Johnny, who had spent a quiet day with Felix, being led further into the magic of the electric eye, but being told nothing at all about the mysteries that most intrigued him, was ready enough to go. "Queer boy, that Felix," he said to the Captain as the car sped on through the city. "Didn't really tell me a thing I wanted to know. "Oh, yes," he corrected himself, "he did say that the light about the place was made by neon tubes set in the walls and that the light entered the room through a million pin-pricks in the canvas covering of the walls; also that this light came in slowly because it was filtered through bulbs very like radio tubes." "Interesting, but not so terribly important," the Captain rumbled. "Same with that business of my room getting tall and short," Johnny went on. "Seems his father thinks there's a lot of waste space in modern homes. Bed chambers stand empty all day, living-rooms all night, and there is never enough air space in either. So he's experimenting on floors built like elevators. You flatten out the bedroom furniture and raise the floor; that gives you a tall living-room during the day. By lowering the same floor at night you get a tall bedroom." "In any case," the Captain laughed, "you're not likely to bump your head." "Seems," Johnny concluded, "I had a room intended in the beginning for a sort of parlor. They needed the space above, so they let down the floor. Not a bad arrangement, only they ought to have let a fellow know. These inventors' heads are so full of things, they forget."