either you or Darrin?"

"Not beyond the big scare, and the shock to our ear-drums."

"I wonder what the explosive could have been?" mused the chief
aloud.

"I don't know what was in the mortar in the first place, sir,"
Dick Prescott went on. "All Amos Garwood put in the mortar after
we got there was some chlorate of potash. Then he put the pestle
in and began to grind."

"And then the explosion happened?" followed up Chief Coy.

"Chlorate of potash, eh?" broke in a local druggist, who had halted
and was listening. "Hm! If Garwood ground that stuff with a
pestle, then it doesn't much matter what else was in the mortar!"

"Is the chlorate explosive, sir?" questioned Dick.

"Is it?" mimicked the druggist. "When I first started in to learn
the drug business it was a favorite trick to give an apprentice
one or two small crystals of chlorate to grind in a mortar. After
a lot of accidents, and after a few drug clerks had been send
to jail for playing the trick it became played out in drug stores."

"But I've seen powdered chlorate of potash," interposed Tom Reade,
who was always in search of information.

"Yes," admitted the druggist. "I can show you, at my store, about