“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.”