explosion--and I guess where! Get help, Polke--come on to
the Cornmarket! Get the firemen out."

He set off running towards the end of the Market-Place, followed by
Easleby, and at a slower pace by Lord Ellersdeane and Betty. Crowds were
beginning to run in the same direction: very soon the two detectives
found it difficult to thread a way through them. But within a few
minutes they were in the Cornmarket, and Starmidge, seizing his
companion's arm, dragged him round the corner of Joseph Chestermarke's
house to the high garden wall which ran down the slope to the river
bank. And as they turned the corner, he pointed.

"As I thought!" he muttered. "It's Joseph Chestermarke's workshop!
Something's happened. Look there!"

The wall, a good ten feet high on that side, was blown to pieces, and
lay, a mass of fallen masonry, on the green sward by the roadside.
Through the gap thus made, Starmidge plunged into the garden--to be
brought up at once by the twisted and interlaced boughs of the trees
which had been lopped off as though by some giant ax, and then
instantaneously transformed into a cunningly interwoven fence. The air
was still thick with fine dust, and the atmosphere was charged with a
curious, acid odour, which made eyes and nostrils smart.

"No ordinary burst up, this!" muttered Starmidge, as he and Easleby
forced their way through branches and obstacles to the open lawn. "My
God!--look at it! Blown to pieces!"

The two men stood for a moment staring at the scene before them, as it
was revealed in the faint light of a waning moon. Neither had ever seen
the effect of high explosives before, and they remained transfixed with
utter astonishment at what they saw. Never, until then, had either
believed it possible that such ruin could be wrought by such means.

The laboratory was a mass of shapeless wreckage. It seemed as if the
roof had been blown into the sky--only to collapse again on the
shattered walls. The masonry and woodwork lay all over lawns and
gardens, and amidst the surrounding bushes and trees. In the middle of
it yawned a black, deep cavity, from the heart of which curled a wisp of
yellowish smoke. Between these ruins and the house a beech tree of
considerable size had been completely uprooted, and had crashed down on
the lower windows of the house, part of the wall and roof of which had
been wrecked. And on the opposite side of the garden a great gap had
been made in the smaller trees, and the shru