may be used
against you."

"Why--why?" stammered Joe. "What's it all about?"

"An infernal machine!" exclaimed the hotel clerk. "How dare you poke one
out of the window, right toward one of our largest banks, and go out,
leaving the mechanism clicking? How dare you?"

Joe and Blake staggered back, half amused and half alarmed at the
strange charge.

CHAPTER XII

ON A LONG VOYAGE

"This is a serious charge," went on the man in uniform, who was
evidently from the police department. "We have had some dynamiting
outrages here, and we don't want any more."

"Dynamite!" exclaimed the hotel clerk; "do you think it could be that,
officer?"

"That's what it seems like to me," said the other. "I have investigated
a number of infernal machines, and they all make the same sort of sound
before they go off."

"Go off!" cried the clerk, while Joe and Blake were vainly endeavoring
to get in a word that would explain matters. "If it's dynamite, and goes
off here, it will blow up the hotel. Get it away! Porter, go up and get
that infernal machine, and dump it in a pail of water."

"'Scuse me!" exclaimed the colored porter, as he made a break for the
door. "I--I guess as how it's time fo' me to sweep off de sidewalk. It
hain't been swept dish yeah day, as yit. I'se gwine outside."

"But we've got to get rid of that infernal machine!" insisted the clerk.
"It's been clicking away now for some time, and there's no telling when
it may go off. Get it, somebody--throw it out of the window."

"No! Don't do that!" cried the officer. "That will only make it go off
the sooner. I'll get some one from the bureau of combustibles and----"

"Say, you're giving yourselves a needless lot of alarm!" interrupted
Blake. "That's no infernal machine!"

"No more than that ink bottle is!" added Joe, pointing to one on the
clerk's desk.

"But it clicks," insisted the clerk. "It sounds just like a clock
ticking inside that box."

"And it's pointing right at the bank," went on the officer. "That bank
was once partly wrecked because it was built by non-union labor, and we
don't want it to happen again."

"There's no danger--not the slightest," cried Blake, while the crowd in
the hotel lobby pressed around him. "That's only an automatic moving
picture camera, that we set this morning, and pointed out of the window
to take street scenes. It works by compressed air, and the clicking you
hear is the motor. Come, I'll show you," and he star