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give me dud cartridges and he was afraid I’d investigate too soon.
    â€œYou see this white sand in my palm? Well, Petey claimed
that another mobster bribed him to plant this gun on me and take me for a ride.
But this white sand says differently. Have you ever noticed that old sand
blotting box on Swartz’s desk?”
    â€œYes,” admitted Halloway.
    â€œWell, this is the same kind of sand.” Mat bounced it in
his hand. “If my mineralogy doesn’t tell me wrong, it’s identical—and there’s
very little in this part of the world. Then, too, see that black grain there?
That’s ink.”
    â€œThen,” concluded Halloway, “he replaced the powder in
the cartridges with the sand from the box on his desk. Well, well, and well.
But that evidence isn’t necessary. I’ve enough on him to bring him to trial.
I’d better take him into custody now. Drop around to the station tomorrow and
we’ll get everything straight.”
    Mat juggled the mound of sand in his palm and carefully
pocketed the faked bullets for future evidence. He gave the room a brief sweep
with smiling eyes and then slowly made his way out into the hall where Petey
and Blake still dangled from the coat hooks. They hung there like abandoned
marionettes from some wild apache puppet show, their faces set in an
emotionless, fatalistic stare.
    Grinning now, in appreciation of the joke, Mat stopped
before them. He presented the little white mound in his palm, beside which he
had placed the key to the safe-deposit box which held a fortune.
    â€œYou know,” remarked Mat Lawrence, “it takes sand to get
along in this world. But,” he made the mound jump again, “your boss in there
has just a little too much.”
    And Petey and Blake, with their hard, emotionless eyes,
watched him saunter out through the ornate doorway—back to a world where
buzzards flew and coyotes howled and wheels were waiting to be turned in the
construction of a mammoth power dam.

Flame City

CHAPTER ONE
    Sifting Evidence
    T HE shrieks and moans of sirens
greeted Tom Delaney as he swung into the corridor which led to his father’s
office. He paused for a moment to listen, feeling somewhat ill at ease and out
of place.
    To a detective-sergeant,
fires were the business of another world. But his father, old Blaze Delaney,
chief of the fire-eaters , had called him and Tom Delaney had responded,
wondering just how a detective could hope to extricate a fireman from an
intricate web of circumstances.
    Before
Detective-Sergeant Tom Delaney could knock, his father swooped out of his
office, drawing on slicker and helmet as he ran. Blaze Delaney’s fire-reddened
face was set and hard and his smoke-stung eyes caught and held the image of his
son.
    â€œAnother one!” he
shouted, his mustache bristling. “Come on!”
    The detective swung
into line, hard put to keep up with the racing old man. When Blaze Delaney
swung into the red car without pausing and sent it hurtling away from the curb,
his son was forced to catch a precarious hold on the side, swinging from there
into the seat.
    â€œWhat’s up?” asked
Tom.
    â€œWhat’s up, be
hanged !” bellowed Blaze Delaney. “There’s plenty up, and if you didn’t keep
your big ears so close to the woes of petty thieves you’d know that your old
man was about to be thrown out.”
    Blaze Delaney thrown
out? The detective blinked and tried to imagine such a circumstance. As long as
he could remember, his father had been lord of the city’s fires. His father was
an immovable institution, a character of great repute.
    Tom Delaney watched
the old fire-eater’s anger vent itself against the traffic. He always drove his
own cars, did Blaze, for the good reason that he could drive faster than anyone
on the department’s rolls.
    â€œI’ve noticed,” began
Tom, cautiously, “that we’ve been having more