Tom Slade with the Colors

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—it went cheerfully along on its tragic errand.

It appeared to consist of a piece of ordinary stovepipe about twelve inches long. The face and works of an alarm clock, being of a slightly smaller circumference, had been placed within one end of the pipe, the face out, and the intervening space around this was packed with cotton waste. The other end of the pipe was closed with a kind of gummy cement.

Tom observed that the little alarm dial in the clock's face was set for nine o'clock, which of course afforded him infinite relief, for it was not yet seven.

With the greatest of care and hands trembling a little, he pulled out some of the cotton waste around the clock face, holding the dial steady with one hand, and found that nothing save this packing was holding the clock in place. He joggled it very gently this way and that to make sure that it was not connected with anything behind. Then he lifted it out and stood it upright on a shelf with cans on either side of it to keep it in place.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—it went just as before, as if not in the least disappointed that its tragic purpose had been thwarted; tick, tick, tick, tick—like the old alarm clock that used to stand on the shelf above the sink in Barrel Alley.

There was no Gold Cross for this little act of Tom's, and no "loud plaudits," as Pee-Wee would have said, but Tom Slade had saved a couple of hundred lives, just the same.

It occurred to him now that pretty soon he would be expected upstairs. The hands of the clock pointed to a quarter of six and Tom's own watch, which was as honest, plain and reliable as he was himself, said twelve minutes of seven.

"That's funny," said he.

He peered into the open space which the removal of the clock had left in the pipe's end. It ran for about four or five inches, where the pipe appeared to be sealed with the same gummy substance as at the other end.

On the inside of the pipe was a rough-looking, yellowish area about two inches square, and from this two black, heavy cords ran to the cement wall.