The Panama Plot

"I should like to see Miss Lamar," Craig responded, promptly. "What seems to be the trouble with her?"

"Trouble? Trouble enough! Right in the middle of the scene she was taken with a chill. We had to bring her back in the auto..."

There was a sudden crash of glass and splintering of wood not twenty feet from where we were standing, as though something had come hurtling through the roof of the porch, which at that point was only a one-story extension.

"What's that?" Connelly exclaimed, jumping as if he had been struck. "Something through the roof?"

Burke had sprung forward and now turned, alter picking up something. "Here's one of the things," he cried. "There are a dozen or more of them...went right through the floor...all but this one."

He handed Craig what looked like a queerly shaped steel rod. It was pointed at one end, like a lead-pencil, about six inches long, but at the middle, instead of being cylindrical, it was fluted, milled out into four grooves running the rest of the length of the shaft. Craig turned the thing over carefully, then dropped it. It fell true, sticking in the wooden floor upright, quivering.

"What do you suppose it is?" Connelly asked, nervously.

"A flechette...a steel dart, used in Europe by aviators. A lot of them are placed in a large box and then released. No matter in what position they are let loose, they always land with the pointed end downward. The grooves make what is known as a 'feather top.'"

I looked at Craig, aghast at the startling confirmation of Burke's theory of an attack from the air. Had some one aimed an attack at us, hoping, perhaps, to get us before we could set to work on the case?