“It’s a cinch,” whispered Billy, “that we can get by on one side or the other if we haven’t forgotten how to do the Indian crawl.”
“If it wasn’t for that talk buzz,” asserted Henri, “I’d be inclined to tell the neighbors that the old plant was as empty as a last year’s bird nest.”
“Not to mention the tracks on the platform,” reminded Billy.
“No definite telling when those marks might have been made,” continued Henri, “and as I was saying, the talkfest mystery is the one absolute assurance that we are not alone in these diggings.”
“In the passing,” intimated Billy, “there may be a crack in that hut in which an eye would fit, and there is no use leaving an unsolved problem behind.”
Henri grinned. “I’ve been expecting that, Buddy,” he said.
Alongside the counting house the boys moved on all fours, and it did not take Billy long to find a place to put his eye. Just over his head was the checking window—a small aperture, masked by a curtain of green baize, from which projected a rounded shelf. There had been a warp between this projection and the window setting, and through the open seam a free view of the enclosure was presented.
When Billy had completed his look-in, he resorted to the sign language as a means of conveying the word that the room was occupied. Henri, surmising as much from the fragments of conversation sifting through the loose lines of the wooden wall, took his turn as an observer.
In the same rough garb of coal heaver that he wore on the day of delivery to the young aviators of the summons to the twin towers, Ricker was lolling on a rickety bench, and another man equally shabby in makeup was perched upon a dingy counter. On the floor at their feet, gagged and bound hand and foot, was the heavyweight policeman, who had officially invoked the services of the silversmith as an expert examiner of the battered remains of the time clock dug out of the ruins of the explosion-rent military storehouse.
Ricker had occasion to several times admonish his companion for getting too high a pitch in his rumbling voice. These vocal lifts at intervals, no doubt, were the sounds that had from the first convinced the boys of the presence of other life than theirs in the building.