Guy Garrick by Reeve, Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin), 1880-1936

Banging, ripping, tearing, the thin outer door was easily forced. Disregarding the melee I leaped through the wreckage with Garrick. The "ice-box" door barred all further progress. How was Garrick to surmount this last and most formidable barrier?

"A raid! A raid!" cried a passer-by.

Another instant, and the cry, taken up by others, brought a crowd swarming around from Broadway, as if it were noon instead of midnight.

CHAPTER X

THE GAMBLING DEBT

There was no time to be lost now. Down the steps again dashed Garrick, after our expected failure both to get in peaceably and to pass the ice-box door by force. This time Dillon emerged from the cab with him. Together they were carrying the heavy apparatus up the steps.

They set it down close to the door and I scrutinized it carefully. It looked, at first sight, like a short stubby piece of iron, about eighteen inches high. It must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. Along one side was a handle, and on the opposite side an adjustable hook with a sharp, wide prong.

Garrick bent down and managed to wedge the hook into the little space between the sill and the bottom of the ice-box door. Then he began pumping on the handle, up and down, up and down, as hard as he could.

Meanwhile the crowd that had begun to collect was getting larger. Dillon went through the form of calling on them for aid, but the call was met with laughter. A Tenderloin crowd has no use for raids, except as a spectacle. Between us we held them back, while Garrick worked. The crowd jeered.

It was the work of only a few seconds, however, before Garrick changed the jeers to a hearty round of exclamations of surprise. The door seemed to be lifted up, literally, until some of its bolts and hinges actually bulged and cracked. It was being crushed, like the flimsy outside door, before the unwonted attack.

Upwards, by fractions of an inch, by millimeters, the door was being forced. There was such straining and stress of materials that I really began to wonder whether the building itself would stand it.

"Scientific jimmying," gasped Garrick, as the door bulged more and more and seemed almost to threaten to topple in at any moment.

I looked at the stubby little cylinder with its short stump of a lever. Garrick had taken it out now and had wedged it horizontally between the ice-box door and the outer stonework of the building itself. Then he jammed some pieces of wood in to wedge it tighter and again began to pump at the handle vigorously.

"What is it?" I asked, almost in awe at the titanic power of the apparently insignificant little thing.

"My scientific sledgehammer," he panted, still working the lever more vigorously than ever backward and forward. "In other words, a hydraulic ram. There is no swinging of axes or wielding of crow- bars necessary any more, Dillon, in breaking down a door like this. Such things are obsolete. This little jimmy, if you want to call it that, has a power of ten tons. I think that's about enough."

It seemed as if the door were buckling and being literally wrenched off its hinges by the irresistible ten-ton punch of the hydraulic ram.