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BRUNO TOLD GIRLFRIEND OF COAL STOKER LIKE APE

SOUND FAMILIAR?

Familiar And odd The same man seemed to be everywhere, and it occurred to Isaac Bell that the Acrobat was an unusually deadly type rarely encountered in the underworld — a criminal mastern spy, lone operators were elusive, being immune to betrayal by inept subordinates

Bell chewed on this while he watched a precision rail-yard ballet perforht struck hi Despite the military precision of the Acrobat’s attack that had al Lynds and Beiderbecke off the Mauretania, if he was a soldier, the Acrobat was no ordinary soldier

Military men were not by nature lone operators Soldiers accepted discipline from above and dispensed orders below The Acrobat may have been a soldier once, but he wasn’t one anymore Or if he still was, then he had carved out a unique and exclusive niche above and beyond the supervision and encumbrance of an army

Bell cabled Art Curtis in Berlin:

ACROBAT? MAYBE CIRCUS PERFORMER? MAYBE SOLDIER?

NOW? BUSINESSMAN WITH KRIEG RUSTUNGSWERK GMBH???

Bell was painfully aware that it was expecting a lot to believe a one-ue speculation — even with as superb a detective as Art Curtis — so he wired the sae to Archie Abbott in New York And then, just as the Golden State Limited sounded the double-whistle “Ahead,” Bell fired off another copy to Joseph Van Dorn in Washington

A train wrecker wielded a track wrench by starlight He enty-fiveand ten rade climbed steeply on the Southern Pacific line over which the Rock Island trains ran between El Paso and the West Coast He was unbolting a fishplate that held the butt ends of two rails together

His partner was prying up spikes that fastened the steel rails to the wooden ties With every bolt and spike re cradle built to support hundred-ton locoht on the rails would now spread thele inch would e and eternity

But to ensure success, when the wreckers were done reh a hole in the side of the rail that had carried a fishtail bolt and fastened it to the last link of a logging chain They had already laid the chain out to its full length along an arroyo, a dry creek bed deep enough to hide the Rolls-Royce touring car they had stolen fro

They were just in ti in the east

A piercing two-finger whistle alerted their man, as farther up the hill with the horses The hostler whistled back Message received — he would co with food and water for the long trek to Mexico