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“Look,” exclaimed Kennedy eagerly, bending closer over the motor. “This is one of the neatest perpetual motion frauds I ever heard of.”

He had turned the heavy base of the motor upward. One glance left me with little wonder why Creighton had so carefully bolted the machine to the floor. In the base were two rectangular apertures to allow a belt to run over a concealed pulley on the main shaft of the machine in the case. Evidently, when the circuit from the Daniell cells was closed, the pulley, somehow, was thrown into gear. It was loose and the machine began to revolve slowly at first, then faster and with great show of power. The pounding, as Kennedy had surmised, was due to the flywheel not well balanced.

“Well,” I remarked, “now that we have found it, I don’t see that it does us much good.”

“Only that we understand it,” returned Craig. “I left that geophone down there in the room next door which I hired. I think, if Miss Laidlaw will take us down there, I’d like to get it.”

He spoke with a sort of easy confidence which I knew was hard to be assumed in the face of what looked like defeat. Had Craig deliberately let Creighton have a chance to get away, in order that he might convict himself?

In silence, with Miss Laidlaw at the wheel, we went downtown again to the room which Craig had hired next to Creighton’s workshop. As we approached it, he leaned over to Miss Laidlaw.

“Stop around the corner,” he asked. “Let’s go in quietly.”

We entered our bare little room and Kennedy set to work as though to detach the geophone, while I explained it to our client.

“What’s the matter?” she interrupted in the middle of my explanation, indicating Kennedy.

He had paused and had placed the receivers to his ears. By his expression I knew that the instrument was registering something.

“Someone is in the lower room of the shop next door,” he answered, facing us quickly. “If we hurry, we’ll have him cornered.”

Miss Laidlaw and I went out and around in front, while Craig dashed through a back door to cut off retreat that way.

“What’s that? Hurry!” exclaimed Miss Laidlaw.

Plainly there was a muffled scream of a woman as we entered the street door. I hurried forward. It was the work of only a few seconds to batter down the locked door in the room under Creighton’s old workshop, and as the door gave way, I heard the sound of shattered glass from the rear which told that Kennedy had heard the scream, too, and had gained an entrance.

Inside I could make out in the half-light a man and a woman. The woman was running toward me, as if for help.

“Mrs. Barry!” gasped Adele Laidlaw.

“He got me here–to kill me!” she cried hysterically. “I am the only one who knows the truth–it was the last day–tonight he would have had the money–and I would have been out of the way. But I’ll expose him–I’ll ruin him. See–he came in from the roof–“

A blinding flash of light greeted us, followed by a scream from Adele Laidlaw, as she ran past us and dropped on her knees beside a body that had fallen with a thud in the flame before a yawning hole in the side wall.

Mrs. Barry ran past me, back again, at almost the same moment. It was a strange sight–these two women glaring at each other over the prostrate figure of the man.

“Here’s the real demon engine,” panted Craig, coming up from the back and pointing to an electric motor as well as other apparatus consisting of several series of coils. “The perpetual motion machine was just a fake. It was merely a cover to an attempt to break into the bank vaults by electrolysis of the steel and concrete. Creighton was a dummy, a fiction–to take the blame and disappear when the robbery was discovered.”

“Creighton,” I repeated, looking at the man on the floor, “a dummy?”

“Oh–he’s dead!” wailed Adele Laidlaw. “He’s dead!”

“Electrocuted by his own machine rather than face disgrace and disbarment,” cut in Craig. “No wonder she was in doubt which of the two men fascinated her most.”

I moved forward and bent over the contorted form of the lawyer, Tresham, who was wearing the whiskers and iron gray wig of his alter-ego, Creighton.