CHAPTER VII
When Fatty Bascom, surging heavily against the narrow and jagged opening, found that he could not get out, he could not credit his senses. He was there, he had come through the split in the rock with but little personal damage. Why, therefore, was he unable to withdraw? There must be some trick about it. He tried backing out, but just escaped wedging himself so tightly that he could move neither out nor in. However, he managed to free himself and tried it front-wise, side-wise and every other way he could think of. Fatty was a prisoner.
Then his eyes fell on the pile of empty paraffine papers on the small box lying at one side of the chamber, and the truth dawned on Fatty. Fatty, empty and hungry, the lunchless Fatty had pressed through the tight fit of the stone crevice. The well-fed Fatty, augmented by that most ample and filling lunch, had attained a girth just too much.
Physiology never had interested Fatty. And now he wondered with a chill of apprehension how long it would take him to shrink to his old dimensions. Perhaps it would take days. If, thought the worried one, if food, good food went to feed and build up the tissues as the physical culture teacher said, it might be a day or two before he was starved down to the size he had been before that generous meal!
He sat down on the box and gave himself up to dismal reflections. A day or two! In the meantime what might happen to him? Then he smiled. Of course the fellows would come and look for him. All he had to do was to lounge around and wait until they came to look for him. He knew Skinny! Skinny would stay with him. The thought of Skinny, who would not trouble his mother and so took a single cake of sweet chocolate, made Fatty vaguely uncomfortable. He had no watch, and the time passed on leaden wings. He hung a handkerchief on one of the spits of rock, and thought perhaps it would guide his rescuers. Just how they would proceed to rescue him Fatty didn’t know; couldn’t imagine. Fatty knew that no human agency could get him through that crevice after his own frenzied efforts had failed. All they could do would be to come inside and wait for him to shrink.
He commenced to look around. Opposite the opening was another narrow opening into a black, forbidding space. Fatty approached and leaning in, turned his dim flashlight cautiously around the walls. It was a large, long chamber. He could not see the end, and as he commenced to wonder if by chance there might be wild animals lurking inside, he withdrew and stationed himself by the outside slit.
At least human beings had been there before him. There were the two flat boxes lying almost hidden by a pile of rocks. He went up and looked them over. They were empty. As Fatty hauled them over something glistened on the ground beneath and he picked up a small cylinder made of brass and closed at either end. It was a neatly made, pretty toy and Fatty felt in his pocket for a knife, but he had none. Knives always dug into him. He picked with his fingers at the seam but it did not give. Fatty wanted it for a pencil case. It would hold about four pencils. So he slipped it into his pocket to show Skinny, and carefully buttoned the flap.
It was a nice, shiny brass case, and Fatty thought he could swap it some day for an ice-cream cone or a stick of fruiteena gum.
There was nothing else to look at, and Fatty kicked the boxes back where he had found them. He looked at them several times in a vague way. He was conscious that he had seen them before, but as he thought it must have been in some grocery, with figs or something of the sort in them, he gave it up. It made him somehow uncomfortable. Oh, Fatty, Fatty Bascom! What a pity you did not remember that top box! What a shame that you never trained your eyes to remember what they saw! How much trouble it would have saved!
There was some sand over by the “door” as our poor prisoner called the opening, and there Fatty sat down and waited for the diminishing process to continue.
While he sat there an airplane went humming overhead, and then for awhile there was silence; a silence only broken by the sound of rock crumbling in the inner chamber. Fatty thought of wildcats, and his scalp crept. It worked on him so that he gave up watching for someone, some mountaineer to go past on the narrow mountain trail, and fastened his eyes on the door that led into the mountain. The airplane returned and after awhile went over again. Fatty decided that it was Ernest taking the boys up for a flight. He tried the door for the twentieth hopeless time.
The silence was dense; it covered him like a cloak. The place was cool and shadowy, but there was no chill. Fatty found the sand not at all unpleasant, and wriggled down until he lay on his back, with his cap under his head.
And presently he went sound asleep.
When he awoke he did not know where he was, and lay for a moment trying to place himself. It came to him with a jolt. The chamber was dark, and even outside Fatty could see that the sky was grey with the dusk of night falling. Cramming his cap on his head, he flung himself at the opening and in a flash was through and running down the trail. Stumbling, half falling, running, panting along, he followed the trail, now almost invisible in the waning light, around and down the mountain towards the plateau where the camp lay twinkling with electricity. Fatty’s heart and soul reached forward wildly toward those lights as he raced forward. Behind him he imagined soft padding footsteps and the light, slinking forms of great, gaunt cats stalking him. He had heard that the mountains were full of wildcats. Fatty reflected that they would be glad to dine on anything so juicy and tender as his own plump self. Fear lent him wings.
As he rounded the last curve before hitting the open road that led back to camp, he collided with two tramps coming slowly up the mountain. He bounced back with a cry, and as the ill-looking fellows started to swear, Fatty apologized, and dashed past, giving the strangers a wide berth. Fatty wondered if they were moonshiners. He had heard of them, and each man was heavily loaded with a pack that covered his back. What Fatty could see of their faces in the gathering gloom did not tend to make him want to stop and converse. He fled toward camp. Once he nearly went headlong, but saved himself, and feeling of his pocket to see if he had lost the queer cylinder he hurried toward his goal.
Outside the Adjutant’s office, Fatty recognized the well-known lines of Frank’s little flivver, and around it a dejected group that split up as he approached and greeted him with a volley of questions and reproaches.
Fatty, absent and possibly hurt, had taken on the aspect of a dear departed. Fatty, turning up perfectly hale and hearty, was an object of scorn and reproaches.
Ernest and Frank and Eddie and Dee, ably assisted by Bill and Skinny, demanded to know what he meant by it, where he had been, why had he gone away, and what ailed him anyway.
When the hubbub subsided a little and they were on their way, it transpired that the whole party had gone all the way back along the trail to see if they could see anything of the lost one. They had found no trace of him, and there had been no answer to their shouts.
Fatty thought guiltily that he must have been asleep. The more they talked, giving him no chance to explain, the more Fatty felt that he would not tell anything about his experience. So when at length Frank quelled the uproar by saying, “Let’s let Fatty tell us what he has been doing,” Fatty serenely told them that he had gone off in the woods, had fallen asleep, and that was all there was of it. No adventure, no excitement, nothing. Just that.
“Well, I am sorry for you!” said Eddie with scorn. “You can’t tell me! I know why you went, and that’s what you get for going off and hogging all that lunch. Just went to sleep all afternoon. Serves you right! We had a peach of a feed. Frank bought some dandy eats, and pop, and ginger ale, and say! we went up in Ernest’s plane and ran across an eagle. Say, his wings were twenty or thirty feet across, and we had a fight with him!”
“Now I know you are lying,” said Fatty glumly.
“No, sir,” said Eddie. “Didn’t we have a fight with an eagle?” he appealed to Dee.
“I should say we did!” said Dee.
“Well, show us a feather,” demanded Fatty.
“What do you think we did?” said Eddie scornfully. “Reach over and pull out some of his tail?”
“I’d ’a’ done it,” said Fatty. “I found something dandy up where I was, and I brought it home for a souvenir.”
“Well, trot it out!” said Eddie.
“Not much!” retorted Fatty. “Not on your life! It’s a peach of a thing too, but let’s see your feather, and I will let you see what I found.”
“Aw, I don’t care what you found,” said Eddie. “You have missed the best time you ever had, and the best swim, and I’m sorry for you.”
It turned hot again next day, and Fatty hung his flannel shirt away. The queer cylinder was in the pocket. Mrs. Bascom found that shirt a few days later and put it in the wash. The cylinder, looking nice and bright and brassy, she laid in the drawer beside Fatty’s handkerchiefs.
Fatty found it there on Sunday when he dressed for Sunday School, and thinking that there might be a chance for a dicker between lessons, he rubbed it up on his pocket handkerchief, and putting it in his breast pocket where the end gleamed out enticingly, he started off.
Now it happened that the innocent looking cylinder that looked like a new sort of pencil case was an infernal machine of the deadliest kind!
Filled with the most powerful explosives, the compact little engine of destruction was powerful enough to shatter a building. If Fatty had known ... if Frank had known when he bounced and jolted home in the flivver.... if Mrs. Bascom had known when she shifted it to the pile of handkerchiefs—well, this would have been a different story, with a different ending.
As it was, Fatty walked sedately to church, and with no trip or jolt violent enough to send Fatty skyward in scraps.
He could not stick it out until after Sunday School, however, and during the service brought it forth for the admiration of the boys in his class. A group of heads gathered about some object held under the back of the seat caught the attention of the Superintendent. Walking down the side aisle, he came back toward the front of the church by way of the middle aisle and leaned suddenly over the shoulders of the interested group. He quietly took the cylinder out of Eddie’s hand.
“Rowland,” he said sternly, “I regret to see you acting thus during Sunday School. If you cannot deport yourself in a proper manner I shall have to report you to your parents. I will give you your toy after service.”
Without giving Eddie a chance to explain he walked off, bearing the cylinder which he deposited on the desk.
“He thinks it’s mine,” whispered Eddie with a grin.
“You give it right back as soon as you get it!” hissed Fatty.
“Who wants your old cylinder, anyhow?”
“I do,” said Fatty. With a possible swap in view it was wise to boost his prize. “If I can get the top pried off it will make a dandy pencil case.”
“It might do for that,” said Eddie. “Tell you what, Fat. I will give you a nickel for it.” And Eddie who always had honestly earned money in his pocket took out a bright coin and with one eye on the Superintendent, danced it in his palm where Fatty could see it.
He looked and was lost. After all he didn’t want the old brass thing. So the nickel became his and after Sunday School was over, Eddie went meekly down to the desk and waited for the cylinder.
The Superintendent was talking to one of the elders and saw Eddie out of the corner of his eye. He picked up the brass tube, but fumbled it. It rolled down the slope of the desk and would have fallen had not Eddie caught it deftly as it fell.
“Never do that again!” said the Superintendent severely.
“No, sir,” promised Eddie, and went off, little knowing that his quickness of movement had saved a perfectly good Sunday School and all the innocent people in it.
He looked the cylinder over and decided that the top had been screwed on. A wrench would take it off, but as Eddie did not carry a wrench in his Sunday clothes, he put the cylinder in his pocket and, whistling happily, went home to dinner, where his mother at once insisted on the Sunday suit being put away.
So once more the pretty brass tube with its deadly load found a temporary resting place in a clothes press where nothing more deadly than Christmas plum pudding had ever been harbored. Once more, all unconscious, Fatty and Eddie had handled the frightful thing and there it hung within reach of Eddie’s little baby brother Jack and the careless hands of Virginia.
Fatty forgot all about it.
He was not at the club room the next time the boys gathered to take some messages. Theirs was, thanks to Bill’s three aunts, the only wireless in the city capable of carrying long distance messages. So they seldom bothered with any of the short circuit lines that crossed and inter-crossed. They were tuned for far-away messages. This night, however, as Dee sat idly tapping out the words that crossed his instrument, he heard something that caused a strange alertness to take possession of his mind. And these were the words:
“From the adjutant’s office, two shivering maples make the brows, a slit the nose. In the inner chamber, six. Wash Seattle.”
With breathless intentness Dee listened for more. A faint “Correct” reached him, then the word “When?” “The Thirteenth” was the answer. After that silence save for the weather reports coming from the Great Lakes and a jumble of messages flying from here and there from boy to boy across the city. The words Dee had heard might well have been some of these, but where had he heard of the “shivering maples” for eyebrows? He racked his mind in vain. Eddie, clamoring for the table, came raving up, followed by Bill.
The three boys were alone. Dee told them what he had heard but for awhile they were able to make nothing of it. Suddenly Eddie exclaimed, “I know what! Do you suppose it is the face we saw on the hillside out at camp that day?”
“I don’t know,” replied Dee, startled.
“What was that?” asked Bill.
The boys told him.
“Well, if there is a face there, what do they want with it?” he asked. “I bet that is it, but how are we going to know what they mean? Say, suppose it has something to do with all that dynamiting? What would 'Wash Seattle’ mean?”
“Washington and Seattle,” said Dee. “The next places to be dynamited.”
“My, my, you are cheerful!” said Bill, shivering. “I say we report this to somebody!”
“We can’t,” answered Eddie. “Frank and Ernest are both away, and I am afraid to tell the police.”
“If we mix up in it, we will get our own little heads blown off like as not,” said Bill ruefully. “Mine is a nice head.”
“Aw, what ails you?” said Eddie. “Nobody is going to know! What did you do with that book anyway, Dee—the one you showed Anna the day the man was run over?”
“I gave it to the police, but I copied the writing in it,” said Dee. “If Anna won’t tell me exactly what it says, I am going to take it down to the Public Library and find out just what it means. I can translate it near enough by one of the dictionaries there.”
“That’s a scheme!” said Bill.
“I am going home now,” said Dee. “I want to take a look at it.”
“Come back if you find it. It is early,” called Bill.
“All right, I will,” answered Dee, and went down the stairs three at a time.
When he reached the house his father and Zip had just crossed the street on their way around the Park. Dee could not help a feeling of sadness as he saw his stepfather, a man who should have been in full health, shuffling carefully along with the hesitating gait of the nearly blind. He called a greeting, to which Zip replied and his father nodded. Then Dee hurried up to his room. But he stopped there only long enough to get a key, and went up to the attic. He required no light but went over to his mother’s trunk, opened it, and found the paper he had hidden there.
As he retraced his steps he heard a familiar ticking, crackling noise. He smiled as he thought what tricks his brain was playing him. A mouse in Zip’s room of course, but it sounded exactly like a wireless that needs adjustment. With a smile he stepped down the hall and paused at Zip’s door. The noise continued, and with a paling face, blank with amazement, Dee recognized the sound of a wireless trying to pick them up!
Racing down the stairs, he heard Zip’s high prattle as the two returned. Dee slid off the side of the porch and sank down into the depths of the honeysuckle bush. The two men came up the steps.
They were talking rapidly but close as he was Dee could catch nothing of the low sentences until Zip turned the door knob. Then Mr. De Lorme said: “What was it—the thirteenth? We will have to make haste!” and together they disappeared in the house.
For a long while Dee dared not move.
The thirteenth!