Desperately reaching up his hands, he found a narrow ledge, and using this as a support, he pulled his feet up until he was sure they were out of sight. Then he moved them cautiously until he found a small ledge where he could gain a toehold. Now he could ease the strain on his hands and arms.
Whoever was in the room had evidently returned to continue his search. A door came open with a jerk, and more papers fluttered to the floor within the boy’s range of vision. “Please, please don’t do any more hunting in the fireplace,” Ronnie prayed.
The minutes dragged on. The muscles in the boy’s arms and legs and back began to ache. Twice he thought of moving, but each time he decided against it. Too risky. He couldn’t take the chance of slipping or making a noise.
Now the intruder was tapping with some heavy object, first against the floor boards in different parts of the room and then upon the bricks of the fireplace. Now, Ronnie thought! Now would be a good chance to ease his muscles. If he moved very carefully, the small sounds he might make would be drowned out by the tapping. Shifting some of his weight to his right leg, he began to slide his palm along the top of the ledge toward the rear of the fireplace. He had moved no more than a few inches when the side of his hand touched an object resting on the ledge. He knew it wasn’t part of the brickwork because it moved along with his hand. It might be—well, perhaps a book of some kind, he decided.
A book! Maybe, just maybe, this was the very thing that the intruder was looking for! And just maybe it was the clue that Grandfather had hunted for and never found! A tingle of excitement and anticipation ran down Ronnie’s back. He just had to get hold of the object and find out for sure what it was.
And he could do it, too—with risk, of course, that he’d lose his balance and fall from his perch. It was going to take a lot of good balancing and some muscle testing, too! But Ronnie loved a challenge such as this.
Summoning all his strength, he rested his entire weight on one small part of his inner wrist. At the same time he curled his fingers up over the object until they reached the flat surface at the top. Then with a quick, sudden movement, he shifted his entire hand to where his fingers had been.
Now his fingers could explore in all directions without fear of losing his balance and falling from his perch. It took him only a few moments to prove to himself that his first guess had been correct: he had discovered a small, thick book!
Outside the fireplace, the sounds suddenly increased. Apparently the intruder was losing patience, and had thrown caution away. Over went the desk on its side with a loud crash. Out came the drawers, one after another. Then the desk went over again. Papers flew over the floor in every direction. “Confound it!” the man growled, “there’s got to be something here somewhere! I’ll find it if I have to tear down the whole confounded building.”
Ronnie grinned to himself in the darkness of his hiding place and his fingers tightened on the book. If the man only knew how close he had come to finding what he wanted those nights he had searched the fireplace with his light!