Yes; he, Storri, could see how it was constructed--thick walls of masonry--an inner lining of chilled steel that would laugh at drills and almost break the teeth of nitric acid--the steel ceiling and sides bolted to the masonry--the floor, steel slabs two feet in width, laid side by side but not bolted, and bedded upon masonry that rested on the ground! Surely, nothing could be more solid or more secure! The door and the complicated machinery that locked it were wonders, marvels! Nowhere had he, Storri, beheld such a door or such a lock, and he had peeped into the strong rooms of a dozen kings.

The gold, too, one hundred and ninety-three millions in all, packed five thousand dollars to a sack in little canvas sacks like bags of birdshot, and each sack weighing twenty pounds--Storri saw it all! "And yet," quoth Storri, giving the polite Assistant Secretary a kind of leer, "do not that door and lock remind you of the chains and locks upon your leathern letterbags ?--a leathern bag which the most ignorant of men would slash wide open with a penknife in an instant and never worry chains and locks ?" Storri traced that drain in its course to the river.

It ran south past the corner of the Treasury Building for the matter of a hundred yards or more, and then broke south and west across the White Lot between the White House and the Monument.

In the end it abandoned this diagonal flight and soberly took to the center of a street that lay to the west of the White House, and followed it to the Potomac.
Storri, hands in pocket and puffing an easy cigar, sauntered to the water front and took a look at the drain where it finished.

The inspection gratified him; the drain was like a great tunnel; one might have driven a horse and wagon into it.