Frank Armstrong, Drop Kicker

by Matthew M. Colton

CHAPTER XXII. SAVED BY THE WIRES.

Finding himself trapped, Frank threw himself on the door and wrenched at the knob with all his strength. It held firm. Again and again he drove his shoulder against the panels, but the door, though old, was stout, and resisted his savage attacks. Soon he gave up in despair the attempt to escape that way.

"I'm kidnapped for sure," he said aloud, and his voice sounded strangely hollow in that empty hallway. He shivered, for, although the night outside was mild and warm, inside there was a deadly chill in the air as if the sunlight had never touched it. A half moon was hanging in the sky and lit the countryside faintly, but in here was the deepest gloom. Tiny slits of light came through the chinks here and there in the boarded windows and cast long knife-like bars across the floor, but instead of lighting the place they actually made it seem blacker because of the contrast.

Frank was not a coward, but he would have given a good deal to be safely out of the place. The whole house seemed full of noises. He turned his back to the door and faced the stairway, which, now that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom, he could make out dimly. He could trace it about half way up to the floor above, where it disappeared into utter blackness. As he strained his eyes and ears a board creaked near him, as if a human foot had trod on it. He recoiled as if shot and turned his eyes in the direction of the noise. But there was no repetition of the sound. Away down the hall where his vision could not penetrate came a rustle as of silk, and then what appeared to be a few stealthy steps; then silence, broken only by the sighing of the night wind around the corners of the house.

It was all Frank could do to keep from yelling with fright, for the noises of the old house had gripped his nerve. But by degrees, as he stood there with his back to the door, he gained control of himself. There was nothing to hurt him, he argued with himself; the noises were only natural ones; the rustlings were perhaps made by the wings of birds that had made their nests in the old house, finding entrance through the chimney, maybe, or through a broken upper window.

"Oh, what a dummy I am," said Frank to himself, "to allow myself to be caught this way! I have been spirited off here and locked up for a while so that Gamma may have its own way up at the Library meeting. But David and Jimmy and the Codfish can carry it through as well or better than I could. They can present the scheme and read the constitution—the constitution," he gasped aloud; "I have it in my pocket!" His hand flew to his pocket. There it was, sure enough, a bulky bundle of papers.

"That settles it. I've got to get out of this hole somehow." There was a determined ring to his voice as it echoed from the bare walls. He left his place by the outer door and turned into the room on the right, the door of which stood partly open. Guided by the chinks of light he examined the windows one after the other. Two of them were broken, but they were securely boarded up from the outside. The window at the side of the room had not even a sash. Raising his foot he drove it here with all his might against the barricading boards, but they did not budge to his repeated blows. He gave up this room as a bad job, and felt his way into the hall once more and across it to the opposite front room. Here he had no better luck. The windows were securely shut and boarded like the windows in the other room. At one of them, where there was an opening of several inches between the boards and where the light came through more strongly than at any other of the windows, he smashed the glass with his foot and, getting hold of the edge of the board, tried to wrench it loose with his hands. He might as well have tried to shake down the door post. The nails, driven in years before, had probably rusted, and the boards would have had to be split to fragments before the nails would release them.

Nothing daunted, Frank kept on. He pushed open doors that squeaked on rusty hinges and battered at the barriers across the windows. Once in his rounds he caught his toe on some obstruction on the floor and fell headlong. The crash woke the echoes in the old house and set in motion scores of mice and rats that went scurrying, squeaking and chattering across the floors.

Retracing his steps, Frank once more found himself, without further mishap, in the hall where he had started his futile round. "I'll try it upstairs," he said, and advanced boldly toward the upper regions of the house. The stairs creaked and groaned horribly as he ascended, and he heard the patter of the feet of rats as they scurried before him. It was none too pleasant a sound. Two of the rooms he tried on the second floor brought no better result, but in the third, at the back of the house, he found a displaced board and a broken sash.