DANNY’S RING
Bert knew that he must be very careful and cautious this time. Not only must he watch out for the open trapdoor, but he must take care that Danny neither saw nor heard him.
“For if he hears me,” said Bert to himself, “he’ll run out and then I can’t find why he came in here. Danny’s smart, but I’ve got to be smarter.”
Moving slowly across the vestibule floor and looking back to see that his basket of groceries was safe, Bert soon reached a place where he knew the trapdoor to be.
“It’s closed,” he told himself. “That’s good! No danger now of falling down. And I hope nobody else comes in here. They might take the things in my basket, and Nan and the others would go hungry. But I guess I’d have to go back to the store and get more,” silently chuckled Bert.
Having made sure that the trapdoor, down which he had fallen on his previous visit to the church, was closed, Bert stood near it for a while and listened. He could hear Danny moving about “upstairs,” as you might call it, though really it was in the gallery of the church.
This gallery held the big pipe organ, which made such thunderous music on Sundays, and in this gallery the choir singers also had their places.
The remainder of the balcony was given over to pews for the congregation to sit in, when the pews on the main floor of the church were filled. The boys always liked to sit up in the balcony, for they seemed off by themselves when they did this. But the ushers and some of the deacons did not like the boys to go to the gallery, for fear the lads would “cut up.” And sometimes this very thing happened. And you may easily guess that Danny Rugg was among the “cut-ups.”
“Maybe that’s the reason he’s going up there now,” thought Bert to himself. “Maybe he’s getting ready to play some trick in church next Sunday—he and Sam Todd. He couldn’t be coming up to mend the broken window. He wouldn’t know how to put in all the different pieces of colored glass, and, anyhow, he didn’t have any glass with him when he came in here.”
Bert’s thought that Danny might be preparing for some trick to be played in church the following Sunday came about because once before, about a year ago, Danny and Sam had hidden a little dog up in the gallery one Saturday night. And the following Sunday, when the minister was preaching, the dog crawled out from beneath a pew, walked downstairs and up the middle aisle of the church, much to the amusement of Danny and his cronies.