“Yep, you’re right. We hain’t had a hotter day in ten years.”
Scoop caught our big chum’s eyes.
“You might as well save your breath,” he advised.
“Anyway,” I sweltered, “he told the truth about the heat. This room is a regular oven.”
Whenever I see a panting dog I am unhappily reminded by its dripping tongue and heavy breathing of our confinement that afternoon in the lock tender’s attic bedroom. We didn’t exactly hang out our tongues, dog-fashion, but we did strip off the most of our clothes. The heat from the low sun-baked roof was almost unbearable. You could have imagined from our dribbling perspiration that we had just been taking a sponge bath and hadn’t dried off.
Following our unsatisfactory conversation with our jailer, we explored our prison in the hope that we would find some avenue to possible safe escape. [[146]]Besides the table and bed the room contained three chairs and a bureau. The plastered, heat-soaked walls and hipped ceiling were decorated with fancy old-fashioned wallpaper, against which, on opposite sides of the bed, were hung framed samplers. One read: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” The other said: “I slept and dreamt that life was beauty; I woke to find that life was duty.”
We met with nothing but discouragement in our exploration of the room. And abandoning the hope of making an immediate escape, we dropped on the floor near the window. Tortured by the heat, we were thirsty, too, and hungry. Here it was about two o’clock in the afternoon and we had had nothing to eat since four o’clock in the morning.
We had now given up all hope of getting to the island in time to help the girl save her Liberty Bonds from the rascally uncle’s hands. Helpless in our sweltering prison, we could picture in our tortured minds what was very probably taking place on the island. The men’s arrival … the girl’s capture … the search for the bonds. The girl would be compelled, under torture, if necessary, to reveal the treasure’s hiding place. And with the bonds in their possession, the two [[147]]thieves could very easily put many miles between themselves and the island before nightfall.
Would the girl be left alone on the island? Or would the thieves take her away with them? We wondered, depressed and discouraged.
Suddenly we experienced new life at the sound of a lilting voice. Crowding in the window, we had a clear view of the buoyant singer as he came jauntily into the yard.