Crime-of-the-Week

August Gobel, stoker, and Adolph Weigand. policeman, sat in the boiler room of the Christian Feigenspan ice plant at Newark, N. J. late one night last week. August Gobel knew policemen and liked them. He had spent several weeks in jail, not because he had done anything wrong but because it was safer for him. He was a man of 47 with a wife and children. He and Policeman Weigand sat on a bench in front of the coal pile. From time to time Gobel banged open his fire door and a bloody glow would spread over the coal. He would cover the white spots on the fire box. with an eye on the water gauge, then he would come back to the bench and talk.

Ja, they had killed the other man. the Prohibition agent, in a boiler room like this one. That was two years ago at the Rising Sun Brewery in Elizabeth. Ja, he had tended boiler there, too. He saw it all. The Prohibition man, he had ten bullets in him when they rolled him over and straightened him out--ten. He heard that some of the men in the gang were dead now, too. A fellow named Weissman out in Kansas City. Another in Philadelphia. Another in Atlantic City. So now some men come to the ice' plant last Tuesday looking for him, Gobel. He was the State's star witness to the first murder. So Policeman Weigand had been sent there with his big blue revolver to keep Gobel safe.

It was not cold. Several times Gobel got up to go out in the empty, soot-black courtyard for air. Then he would come back to clatter coal into his boiler. It made a great deal of noise. It was 3:40 (he was off at 6) when Gobel went out in the yard for his next look around. It was his last one. This time there was noise in the boiler room but not from the shovel. Weigand scrambled over the coal pile. A slug shattered his right arm. He dropped his gun on the coal. He picked it up with his left hand. Outside he thought he saw some figures running. He fired at them. Then he fell down, shot in the hip. He got up again. Another policeman ran up. They looked up and down the empty factory streets but they did not see anyone, anything. When they rolled Gobel over he was dead. He had only nine bullets in him--nine.

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