THE COLLISION
“Isn’t it a grand and glorious feeling?” exclaimed Bob Layton, a tall stalwart lad of fifteen, as he stretched himself out luxuriously on the warm sands of the beach at Ocean Point and pulled his cap a little further over his eyes to keep out the rays of the sun.
“I’ll tell the world it is,” agreed Joe Atwood, his special chum, as he burrowed lazily into the hollow he had scooped out for himself. “You don’t have to put up any argument to prove it, Bob. I admit it from the start.”
“Same here,” chimed in Herb Fennington, sprawled out in a fashion which if certainly inelegant was quite as certainly comfortable. “Take it from me, it’s great. I could die loafing like this.”
“Seems to be unanimous,” remarked Bob, “although I haven’t heard Jimmy’s musical voice 10 mixing into the conversation and he’s usually right there with the talk. I wonder——”
Just then he was interrupted by a vigorous snore proceeding from a fourth member of the group, a fat round-faced boy slightly younger than the others, who was lying on his back a few feet away.
The boys broke into a laugh.
“There’s the answer,” chuckled Herb. “Trust Jimmy to go to sleep on the slightest provocation. There’s only one thing he can do better, and that is eating.”
“He sure is no slouch at either,” laughed Joe. “The seven sleepers of Ephesus had nothing on Jimmy. And if he went into a doughnut-eating contest, I’d back him to my last dime.”
“It’s no wonder that’s he’s tired,” said Bob, coming to the defense of the unconscious Jimmy. “If either of you fellows had had the tussle he had with the waves that night when he was hanging on to the broken bridge expecting every minute to be his last, you wouldn’t be feeling any too lively, you can bet your boots.”
“Right you are,” admitted Herb. “That was a tough fight. It makes the cold chills run up and down my back now when I think of it. I don’t think there’ll be many times in Jimmy’s life when he’ll come so near death and yet side-step it.” 11
“You were pretty close to it yourself, Bob,” put in Joe. “Your chances of getting by didn’t seem to be worth a plugged nickel. Of course you’re stronger than Jimmy and could have kept up longer if you’d been swept away, but I don’t believe there’s any one living that could have bucked that torrent.”
“I’ll admit that I felt mighty good when I got my feet on solid ground again,” said Bob. “There’s no denying that that was a pretty strenuous night, what with fighting the waves and Dan Cassey too. But we beat them both and came through all right.”
“Talking of Cassey,” said Joe, “I saw the rascal this morning when I went into the town to attend to a little business for my father. I wasn’t far from the jail and I dropped in to see just what arrangements had been made for his trial. The warden was glad to see me—you know he’s been pretty strong for us since we saved the police the work of getting their claws on Cassey—and as he was just about to make the rounds he asked me to go along. So I had a chance to see Cassey behind the bars.”
“I suppose he was glad to see you?” remarked Bob, with a grin.
“Tickled to death,” laughed Joe. “I’m just as popular with him as poison ivy. He got just purple with rage and shook the bars of his cell 12 as though he were trying to break them to get at me. He tried to tell me what he thought of me, but he stuttered so much that he couldn’t get it out. I suppose he’s stuttering yet.”
“It’s not surprising that he’s sore at us,” said Bob. “That’s twice we’ve put a spoke in his wheel; once when he tried to swindle Miss Berwick in the matter of that mortgage and again when he blackjacked Harvey and looted his safe. We sure have been a jinx for him.”
“And he isn’t the only one who has it in for us,” said Joe, as he caught sight of three boys of about their own age who were passing by, and who in passing cast looks of dislike on the little group on the sands. “There’s a sweet bunch—I don’t think.”
The others followed the direction of Joe’s glance and had no trouble in agreeing with him.
“That Buck Looker is sure bad medicine,” remarked Bob. “And Lutz and Mooney who hang out with him are just about as bad. They’re all tarred with the same brush.”
“They’re a blot on the landscape—or perhaps I should say seascape,” put in Herb.
| “Where every prospect pleases, And only man is vile,” |
chanted Joe. “Do you notice how everybody steers clear of them? Outside of each other, not 13 one of them has a friend in the whole colony.”
“It’s a wonder we haven’t had a run in with them before this,” ruminated Herb.
“I guess Buck doesn’t want any of our game,” Joe rejoined. “He’s already had one licking from Bob, and it was only the butting in of Mr. Preston that saved him from getting another one from me. But I have a hunch that he’ll get it yet. My knuckles are itching, and that’s a bad sign—for Buck.”
“You’ll get the chance all right,” predicted Herb. “Ten to one they’re framing up some low-down game to play on us whenever they find an opening. Maybe they’ll try to put our radio set out of commission, just as they stole Jimmy’s set and tried to wreck Bob’s aerial.”
“They’re welcome to try,” said Bob carelessly. “Though they ought to be cured of that idea when they remember how they flivvered the other times. But talking of radio reminds me that we ought to get busy with that lightning arrester we were talking about.”
“What has lightning done that it ought to be arrested?” joked Herb.
For answer, Bob scooped up a handful of sand and threw it at the scoffer. Herb ducked adroitly and the sand passed over his head and fell full on Jimmy’s mouth, which at the moment happened to be open. 14
There was a terrific coughing and sputtering, as Jimmy came up to a sitting posture with a quickness that was quite foreign to his nature.
“Who—who the mischief did that?” he demanded, as soon as he could speak, glaring indignantly from one to the other of his comrades, who at first had been alarmed for fear he would choke but now were convulsed with laughter.
“I did,” confessed Bob, as he tried to restrain his untimely mirth. “But I didn’t mean to, old scout. Herb here had just gotten off one of his horrible jokes, and I was trying to make the punishment fit the crime. I’m awfully sorry.”
“You look it,” snorted Jimmy, still trying to get the remainder of the sand out of his mouth. “You look as though your heart was broken, sitting there and grinning like a monkey.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, I didn’t mean to,” declared Bob. “I wouldn’t have disturbed your innocent slumbers for anything in the world.”
“Never mind, Jimmy,” put in Herb. “They say that every one has got to eat a peck of dirt before they die, and you might as well start in early.”
“I guess I got my whole peck then,” grumbled Jimmy, as he rubbed his mouth vigorously with his handkerchief. “I feel like a chicken with sand in its craw.” 15
“You ought to feel pretty good then,” replied Herb, “for they eat it because they like it.”
“You’re the cause of it all,” said Jimmy. “When you try to be funny again, do it when I’m not around. I’ll bet the joke was a rotten one, anyway.”
“Shall I tell it to you?” asked Herb hopefully.
“Not unless you’re prepared to die,” replied Jimmy, and Herb forebore to add insult to injury.
“Now as to this lightning arrester,” resumed Bob, leaving Jimmy to regain his equanimity. “We’ve got to put it up, for the regulations require it and we ought to have done it before.”
Jimmy pricked up his ears but said nothing.
“I don’t think there’s really much need of it,” objected Joe. “It’s too nice an afternoon to work. We’ve got a lightning rod on the cottage anyway.”
“It isn’t so much for the cottage as the set,” said Bob. “If the lightning got into the receiving set it would make short work of it. Now here’s the kind of lightning switch we’ll have to have,” and he launched into an earnest discussion of a type that was required by the radio regulations.
Jimmy took no part in the discussions, but they attributed this to a touch of grouchiness and gave him time to get over it. Bob after a while 16 glanced at him, and saw that he wore a broad grin on his face.
“What’s the joke, Jimmy?” he asked, a little suspiciously.
For only answer Jimmy broke into a peal of laughter.
“Of all the boobs,” he chortled.
They looked at him and then at each other in bewilderment.
“Do you think the sun has affected his brain?” asked Herb, with affected anxiety.
“It might have, if he had any brain to be affected,” replied Joe, in the same strain.
“Let us in on it, Jimmy,” pleaded Bob. “Don’t be selfish and keep it all to yourself.”
“Why, you thick heads,” replied Jimmy, with more force than politeness, “don’t you know that you don’t have to have a lightning arrester with a loop aerial?”
There was a moment’s silence while they let this sink in, and then a sheepish grin stole into their faces.
“Sure enough,” owned up Bob. “I knew that too, but I had forgotten it for the time. I was thinking of the outdoor aerial. Of course on an indoor aerial there’s no need of a lightning arrester. Jimmy, I take off my hat to you. As the leader of the lynching party said to the widow, 17 after they had lynched the wrong man, the joke’s on us.”
“I guess that evens things up,” crowed Jimmy gleefully, his usual good-humor completely restored. “To think of all that waste of good chin music over nothing,” he added mockingly.
“Don’t rub it in,” admonished Joe. “We’ll admit that we’re boobs and let it go at that. Serves us right for thinking of working on a day like this, anyway. Those people out there have the right idea,” he continued, pointing to a party in a rowboat some distance out from the shore.
“Wish we were out there with them,” remarked Herb enviously, as his eyes followed the boat, which had in it three persons, two boys and a girl.
“A sailboat would be good enough for me,” put in Jimmy. “Rowing is too much like work.”
“Or better yet a motor boat like that one coming over from the right,” said Herb. “In that thing the engine does all the work.”
“Those fellows in the rowboat seem to be laboring pretty hard at the oars,” remarked Bob. “They don’t seem to be any too expert, and the waves are pretty rough since that wind sprang up.”
“The reason they’re pulling so hard is to get 18 out of the way of that motor boat,” declared Joe. “It looks almost as though they were going to run them down.”
“There wouldn’t be any excuse for that with the whole broad ocean to maneuver in,” commented Bob. “But, Great Scott!” he cried, jumping to his feet. “That’s just exactly what it’s doing. Look! It’s right on top of them!”
The four boys watched with breathless interest the unfolding before their eyes of what promised to be a tragedy.
The young men in the smaller boat were pulling like mad to get out of the way of the motor boat bearing down upon them with undiminished speed. The girl in the stern of the boat was wringing her hands and screaming.
Whether the two men in the motor boat failed to see the rowboat in their path, or whether they were simply reckless and heartless, it was impossible to tell. In any event, there was no shifting of the helm, no slackening of speed. Swift and relentless as doom the motor craft drove into the rowboat and crushed it like an eggshell.