For a long while Dee dared not move.
The thirteenth!
CHAPTER VIII
When the door closed behind Mr. De Lorme and Zip, Dee scrambled out of the dense bush, cut through into the alley and turned toward Bill’s. He was shaking but whether with fright or apprehension he could not tell. He only knew that something of awful import was close at hand.
There was a wireless in Zip’s room! Actually a wireless in his father’s house! And was it chance that his father was asking about the thirteenth?
When Dee reached the back gate he sat down on the curb and gave himself up to his thoughts. But thinking did not help. It was all a miserable muddle; no head, no beginning, and no end. Dee sneered at himself for a suspicious cub, yet he knew that other houses never had the dark air of mystery that hung over his home. And his mother’s letters. When they flashed into his mind, Dee knew that there was something afoot that at least called for an explanation. What was his part in the dark play unfolding back there? What was it that the blinded chemist was working on so endlessly?
Dee determined to know. At first he decided to talk it all over with the boys, then to keep his own counsel until he had some real clues. At the present he could only connect his father and the scraps of information that he had gathered with the dynamiting that had been going on, and reflection told him that he had very little indeed on which to base his suspicions.
Certainly there was not a word in the letters to his mother; his father’s reference to the thirteenth might have had a very different meaning, and all the other straws of circumstance might have meant nothing at all. Dee realized how suspicion colors everything.
Finally he went up to the club room and said that he had not seen Anna; he would see her the following day. He soon went home, dragging his unwilling feet to the door of the house that now seemed the abode of evil spirits. As he turned the knob he glanced at his wrist watch. Nine o’clock.