“All right. Throw on your glad rags and come on.”
A little later, as Johnny locked the door on the outside, he hesitated for a moment. He had thought of the black bag he had thrown under the bed.
“Safe there as anywhere in the world,” he told himself. “I’ll break the lock and look inside to-morrow.”
Then he followed Pant down the stairs.
CHAPTER XXI
A TRIP TO FOREST CITY
As the elevated train rattled noisily along over the low roofs of cottages and between endless rows of apartment houses, Johnny Thompson sat staring dreamily at the lattice-like covering of the floor of his car.
He was allowing the events of the past few days to move before his mind’s eye. It seemed much like a moving picture. There was a scene showing the central fire station with its leaping yellow lights. A click, a flash, and there was a fire, a city school building burning, a pink-eyed man, a child in the school loft, a tall ladder, he ascended, descended, then searched for the pink-eyed man.
A second flash of light, a second fire; this time the great Simons Building, and Mazie in a tenth-story window. There was the fireman’s monkey, and again the pink-eyed man, also for the first time the man of the hooked nose, the stoop and limp.
Once more a flash of white film: a boat in a marsh, black birds and a mysterious rifle shot.
A third fire, the Zoo. A wild chase ending at the breakwater, and after that a fight on the island and little old Ben Zook.