NEWS BY MAIL.

Hokitika Guardian, 15 March 1924, Page 4

NEWS BY MAIL.

“BANDIT” SURPRISE. NEW TURK, Jan. 10. the mystery ol the girl bandit with bobbed hair which the police fondly believed they had solved by the arrest of “.Smiling Helen" Quigley and her youthful friend Apples, last night underwent a new and baffling development.

Soon after the lute afternoon newspapers had appeared with stories telling how Helen hud been identified as the author of a sensational series of revolver outrages, a slender girl with bobbed hair, wearing a sealskin coat, ingratiatingly asked the chief clerk if he could change a dollar for her. Ihe clerk opened the cash register and then found himself facing a revolver. The girl sofliy murmured, “Maybe 1 will blow your damn brains out.”

Two men entered, pushed a pistol against the breast of the other clerk, and helped themselves to the contents of the till. As they left with their booty the girl handed her victim a newspaper containing marked passages relating to Helen, to which she had attached a pencilled note, “The police are a bunch of hokum. The girl they have just arrested is the wrong one. 1 am the girl who knows about the JBohack robbery. Leave the other poor innocent*' girl alone. She had- nothing to do with the other robberies.” An hour later, four miles away from the scene of this melodramatic incident, the wearer of the sealskin coat entered another chemist’s shop, asked for perfumes, and then pointed her pistol at the clerk while her two men confederates emptied the till. LESS GOLD IX THE SEA. LONDON. Jan. til. Sun spots have reduced the quantity of gold in the sea. according to Messrs Samuel .Montagu and Company’s annual bullion letter. "It is reported.” they say. “that the quantity has been recently reduced from one.grain to under one-thous- I andth part of a grain per ton of sea water. We have been informed that experts in England and in America have shown that one metal can ’ changed into another at certain periods of radio activity, such as when there are sunspot*. "At such a time there is immense radio action upon the earth, and this is said to he the only possible explanation of the disappearance of so large a proportion of the gold in sea water. “lienee, though gold has been actually recovered from sea water at a considerable cost, its extraction is now. still less a paying commercial proposition.”