“O.K. Now what?”

“It broke in plain sight of a hundred men who would have noticed a guy whacking it with a chisel.”

“I recall you saying that back in Pittsburgh. But look. It looks like it was cut with a chisel.”

“How?”

Kisley sat back and stroked his chin as if he were grooming a beard. “Several ways to drive a cold chisel through steel spring to mind. Whack it with a hammer.”

“Which didn’t happen,” said Mack Fulton.

“Persuade an eagle to drop the chisel from a hundred feet in the air.”

“Which didn’t happen.”

“Drive it with an explosive charge.”

Isaac watched a rare smile cross Mack Fulton’s grim face. “Which could have happened.”

“Isaac,” said Wish Clarke. “Do you recall hearing a charge explode?”

“I heard a heck of a bang. But how would you detonate it?”

“Fulminate of mercury blasting cap.”

“How would you attach the cap?”

Wally Kisley poked the link. Then he picked it up and smelled it. “Could have stuck it on with tar, I suppose.”

“Maybe just a short length of chisel.”

“Molded in a ball of tar— Mighty cumbersome, though. Mighty cumbersome . . .”

Wally Kisley stared silently out the saloon door into the dark street. Isaac Bell observed that the explosives expert was falling less and less in love with the concept of a dynamite-driven chisel.

Archie Abbott glanced at Bell and raised an eyebrow to ask what was going on. Bell motioned for Archie to join him at the bar. He explained quietly, “They’ve seen it all. They’re just trying to remember which applies.”

“How the heck old are they?”

“Who knows? Wally was already a top agent when he investigated the bomb that set off the Haymarket Riot. They’ve got to be over fifty.”

“Amazing,” Archie marveled.

Finally, slowly, like a newly lighted oil lamp gathering kerosene up into its wick, Wally’s face began to glow. He turned to Mack Fulton. “Mack, you know what’s on my mind?”

“Dynamite.”

“A great improvement over black powder, patented in 1867 by Alfred Nobel.”

“From which Alfred Nobel made so much dough—and felt so guilty for making it easier to kill people—that last year he handed out prizes of money to the best physicist, the best pacifist, the best poet, even the guy who invented X-rays.”

“You know who else should have won a prize last year?”

“Rosania,” said Fulton.

“Laurence Rosania.”

Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke exchanged a look.

Archie asked, “Who’s that?”

“Chicago safecracker,” answered Bell. “Jewel man.”

“Best dynamite man in the business,” said Kisley, his smile growing.

“Aces across the continent, too,” said Fulton, “since he’s taken up travel. If those other guys deserved that Nobel Prize and all that dough, so does he.”

Bell called from the bar, “What about Rosania? Do you see his hand in this?”

“No, no, no. He’s a jewel thief. Too fastidious a dude to muck around coal mines even if he was sabotage-minded, which he ain’t. But I am thinking about a job he pulled last year. Remember, Mack?”