CHAPTER II.—A CALL FROM THE DARKNESS
Yes, the hoarded money was gone!
The square box with the red cover was empty. The boys dropped back in their chairs and turned their eyes away, neither caring to read what was in the faces opposite. The money that had been ready for the hoard still lay on the table. Case was first to break the silence.
“Our professional worry man,” he said, “would better start on his job to-night. He’ll have a nice little task to begin on.”
“Don’t get sarcastic, Case,” Clay remonstrated. “This may be one of the worries that won’t catch up! Perhaps Jule has placed the money in a safer place.”
“That’s it!” cried Alex. “Of course that’s it! Who would come in here and get our money?”
“Then, where is Jule?” demanded the boy addressed. “Why doesn’t he come in and let us know where the money is?
“Jule will be home in good time,” Clay said, grimly, “and for the present it won’t be healthy for anyone to suggest that he has done anything mean or dishonest. He’ll be back, all right, and then we’ll know all about it.”
Case flushed furiously.
“Say,” he expostulated, “I wasn’t saying anything against Jule! At least I didn’t mean to. I know that he’s true blue. Perhaps he discovered the robbery before we did and chased off after the thief. Don’t you ever think I’m blaming him!”
“Of course not,” admitted Clay, doubtfully. “He’s above anything of that kind, you know. He’s as honest a boy as ever lived!”
“If he has put the money in another place,” began Alex, but Case, still in bad humor, interrupted him.
“What a pleasant world this would be if there were no if words in it! Someone said, not long ago, that if it wasn’t for that word he could put Paris in a bottle! He meant, of course, if Paris was smaller or the bottle was larger. If he has put the money in another place!”
“I wonder why he doesn’t come?” Alex put in. “We left him here to look after things, you know.”
“He wasn’t here when I came,” Clay contributed. “Everything was just as you see it now, only there wasn’t any supper cooking, as there is now. He never went off like this before.”
There was an apparatus on board the Rambler for making electricity when the boat was under way, but, this being inoperative during the winter, the boys had caused the motor boat to be wired so the light came from the city lines. The cooking was partly done by electricity, the stove being concealed in a false couch at the back of the cabin. During the cold weather the cabin had been warmed by a tiny, soft-coal stove which now stood near the door, and some of the cooking had been done on that.
A smell of burning meat now filled the room, and Clay hastened to switch off the current. The coffee, neglected, was bubbling over on the coils of wire at the bottom of the stove, and he set the coffee-pot on the floor.
“I don’t think I want any supper right now,” he declared.
“I’m not going to lose my supper,” argued Alex. “I’ve lost my job and my trip to the Amazon, but I’m not going to lose my supper. These sausages are all right yet.”
“I haven’t lost my trip to the Amazon,” Clay gritted, his jaws setting. “Nor Jule hasn’t lost his trip, or his one chance of life! I’ll have to think out some way, but I’m going, and Jule’s going with me!”
Alex and Case both sprang up and reached for the speaker’s hands.
“And we’re with you!” they cried.
“We’re for the Amazon, too! No matter if I do get a grouch on now and then,” Case continued, giving the hand he held an extra squeeze, “I’ll show up right in the end!”
“I know you will,” Clay said. “I know you’re an all right boy, Case, he continued, “but you’d be a better companion if you wouldn’t get such grouches!”
“If I ever get another,” pleaded the boy, “just throw me out of the combination!”
“I’ll set my white monkey on you, after we get into the jungles of the Amazon valley,” laughed Alex. “Do you know I’ve got a white monkey there?” he added, with a look which he intended to be serious. “Surely I have! He’ll throw Brazil nuts down to me. Do you know how Brazil nuts grow? I’ll tell you. They grow in nests, like kittens, and when they get ripe the nest opens, just like a kitten basket, and there you are. The nuts fall to the ground and hunters gather them and bring them to Chicago and we put them on Christmas trees.”
Alex was the most imaginative one of the party, and sometimes he permitted his quaint fancies to break into words. Just now he was doing his best to seem cheerful, but, after all, it was hard work. The money had meant so much to them. It had been gathered together dime by dime, and every dollar of it had meant, to them, an hour or a day on the Amazon. Now it was gone, and Jule——
But no one should say a word against Jule. That was a point settled beyond dispute. They could suspend judgment until he came back.
“I’m going to bring home a cargo of Brazil nuts,” the boy went on, “all packed in an elephant’s trunk. I’ll sell ’em down on Water street and build a motor boat that can put the Rambler into her pocket. I wonder what Dr. Holcomb will say?”
“He’ll just tell us to dig in and get more money!” Case observed.
“And that’s just what we’ll do,” Clay added. Alex brought out plates and cups and began setting the table, which was not very large, and which was securely fastened to the floor in the center of the cabin.
“There’s one thing lacking in Clay,” the boy said, whimsically, as he rattled the dishes. “If you could take him apart, or look at him under x-rays, you wouldn’t find any quit in him! The more things happen to stop him, the more he goes ahead!”
“That’s right!” declared Case. “When I get grouches, and you get all discouraged and tell monkey stories to hide what’s really in your mind, Clay just shuts his jaws together and goes right through! I guess this wouldn’t be much of a boat club if it wasn’t for Clay.”
“Why, boys, there’s nothing else to do in this case,” Clay said, a flush of pleasure at such an endorsement. “We can’t lie down before every little hill that looms up before us! We can’t give up this trip, and leave Jule to die in this beastly climate. Now, can we?”
“Not in a thousand years!” cried Alex.
“That will do for you!” Case suggested, turning to Alex with a grin.
“Never said it!” insisted Alex. “We all agreed not to talk slang, so slang’s cut out!”
“Slang is cheap,” Clay remarked, to no one in particular.
“Alex will wash the dishes to-night, anyway, for talking slang!” Case decreed with the air of a judge sentencing a prisoner. “That was the bargain. If anyone talked slang he was to wash the dishes.”
“And Case will assist,” laughed Clay, “for he talked slang, too.”
“What slang?” demanded Case.
“You said that will do for you, and that was slang!”
“All right! I’ll help. But where do you think Jule is?
He was about to say more, but Clay held up a hand for silence.
While the lads stood there, listening, the sausages and coffee on the table, over which a snow-white cloth had been spread, there came a choking cry from somewhere in the darkness which lay over the pier and the warehouse. The boys still listened. Perhaps the next cry would give direction.
Presently the cry came again, evidently from the head of the pier. The boys all headed for the door, crowding against each other in their efforts to get out. A third cry, which was almost a scream, caused them to block the doorway.
“That’s Jule!” Case panted. “Let me out!”
“Wait a second, boys!” Clay advised. “That may be Jule, and it may not. Anyway, we mustn’t all leave the boat at once. This may be a trick to get us away from it. You remain here and I’ll go up the pier and call back to you if I need help.”
Still another cry came, followed, this time, by the sound of blows and running feet.
“Someone is being murdered out there!” Case exclaimed, excitedly, as Clay dashed out into the rain. “I’m not going to stay inside and let someone be killed!”
Alex took him by the shoulder and drew him back as he started off.
“You’ll obey orders and remain here,” he said. “We can stand in the doorway and look out.”
“I know it’s Jule!” prophesied Case. “He’s been out after the thief, and has been attacked. Perhaps he’s brought the money back with him, and that’s why they’re attacking him.”
“If it is Jule, and he comes in without mentioning the loss of the money, don’t you say a word to him about it! What’s the use, if he doesn’t know, of telling him about it to-night? Let the kid get one more night’s sleep before he knows what’s happened!”
“All right,” Case answered, “and perhaps we can tell by the way he acts whether he’s the—whether he knows anything about it or not.”
“Don’t you say it!” warned Alex. “Don’t you ever look at Jule with suspicion in your face! He’s the one that will lose most by this, and you just keep your thoughts and your sneers to yourself.”
“I never——”
“Oh, I know,” Alex hastened to say, as they waited, anxiously, in the doorway, the rain beating in on their uncovered heads, “I know you don’t really believe anything wrong about Jule. You’d fight for him if anyone said there was, just as quick as I would. It is only your grouchy way of looking at things. You go and imagine the very worst that can ever happen, and then try to make yourself believe that is the way of it!”
Case was about to tell Alex how right he was in his analysis of his character, how thankful he was that he was so well understood, when a call came from some distance up the street.
“That’s Clay!” Alex exclaimed.
“I’m going up there!” insisted Case.
“You’ll stay right here with me and watch,” Alex declared, taking his uneasy chum by the arm and holding on tight.
It was dark up at the end of the pier by the side of which the Rambler lay, but farther up, on the north and south street which paralleled the river, a corner lamp threw spears of light toward the stream.
There was no one in sight. Even what could be seen of the thoroughfare under the lamp, and this was not much, seemed deserted. Rainy, windy nights are not popular with pedestrians in Chicago any more than elsewhere.
Even the occupants of vessels tied up at piers above and below the motor boat were silent in cabins or asleep in their bunks. A dull, heavy roar came out of the city, telling of activities in the noisy loop district, but there was little more than the dash of the rain on the deck where the boys stood listening and waiting.
Presently they saw a figure detach itself from the shadows at an angle of the warehouse, where it seemed to have been hiding, and step into the lighted space. There it acted queerly, walking up and down, up and down in the rain! It was too dark for the boys to see the face.
“I don’t believe it is Jule, though,” Case said.