at whose
concert he had met the girl of his life. He learned two facts that made
him perk up and think.

One was that the Mad Musician had had offices and a studio in the
Colossus and was one of the first to move in. The other was that the Mad
Musician took great delight in shattering glassware with notes of or
vibrations from a violin. Nearly everyone knows that a glass tumbler can
be shattered by the proper note sounded on a violin. The Mad Musician
took delight in this trick. Jenks courted his acquaintance, and saw him
shatter a row of glasses of different sizes by sounding different notes
on his fiddle. The glasses crashed one after another like gelatine balls
hit by the bullets of an expert rifleman.

Then Jenks, the engineer who knew his mathematics, put two and two
together. It made four, of course.

"Listen, Linane," he said to his co-worker: "this fiddler is crazier
than a flock of cuckoos. If he can crack crockery with violin sound
vibrations, is it not possible, by carrying the vibrations to a much
higher power, that he could crack a pile of stone, steel, brick and
cement, like the Colossus?"

"Possible, but hardly probable. Still," Linane mused, "when you think
about it, and put two and two together.... Let's go after him and see
what he is doing now."

Both jumped for their coats and hats. As they fared forth, Jenks cinched
his argument:

"If a madman takes delight in breaking glassware with a vibratory wave
or vibration, how much more of a thrill would he get by crashing a
mountain?"

"Wild, but unanswerable," said Linane.

* * * * *

Jenks had been calling on the Mad Musician at his country place. "He had
a studio in the Colossus," he reminded Linane. "He must have re-opened
somewhere else in town. I wonder where."

"Musicians are great union men," said Linane. "Phone the union."

Teddy Jenks did, but the union gave the last known town address as the
Colossus.

"He would remain in the same district around Times Square," reasoned
Jenks. "Let's page out the big buildings and see if he is not preparing
to crash another one."

"Fair enough," said Linane, who was too busy with the problem at hand to
choose his words.

Together the engineers started a canvass of the big buildings in the
theatrical district. After four or five had been searched without result
they entered the 30-story Acme Theater building.

Here they learned that the Mad Musician had leased a