He caught Silvey's gaze upon him and nodded to show that he had received the note. The pair would have met on the way home from school, anyway, but what was the use of a secret code unless it was used at every possible opportunity?
The shack was a rickety, frame affair, built during the long summer vacation when time hung heavy on the boys' hands, and the tribal desire for a stronghold waxed too strong to be denied. Three of the walls were formed of odd planks scavenged from neighboring woodpiles and fences, eked out, here and there, with a few pantry shelves taken from vacant houses. The fourth was nothing but the picket fence, but as Silvey expressed it when viewing their handiwork, "It doesn't rain much from the north, anyway." Door for the low entrance there was not, and the roof, whose shingles were purchased by an arduously earned half-dollar, became a veritable sieve when the raindrops were pounded through by a driving gale from the lake.
The furnishings consisted of a chair, which had long since parted with its back, and a small, shaky desk which had in some way survived the interval between its Christmas presentation and the fall school term. In the one drawer were kept the original of the "Tigers'" secret code, a twenty-five cent rubber stamp outfit which had been used to print the set of membership rules, beginning, "I. No swearing," and two sadly battered, springless, and rusty revolvers. Where they had originated, no one could remember, but there they lay, unsuspected by parental authorities, to be used as a possible defense against the incursions of the "Jefferson Toughs," who ruled the district to the immediate north, or to be dragged forth, as in the present case, to lend an air of solemnity to the many plots hatched between the four cramped walls.
Red Brown descended the side steps into the yard, in answer to the summons of the clan, and found John in his rôle of master-at-arms, strutting back and forth before the doorway. Silvey, as befitted the holder of the exalted office of president, was sitting inside on the crippled chair. John whipped the more formidable of the two weapons from his back pocket and pointed it at the breast of the intruder.
"Halt!" Brown obeyed.
"Who goes there?" The formula had been borrowed from a thrilling Civil War story.
"Friend," came the prompt reply.
"Advance, friend, and give the countersign."
Red opened his mouth doubtfully, then hesitated.
"Hurry up."