He did go and he did discover something. At the time of this discovery the thing appeared insignificant, but Johnny’s motto was, “You never can tell,” and so he filed it away in his memory.
Mazie did go down to the central alarm station on the very next night, and that night there came in over the wires the thrilling third alarm.
CHAPTER III
THE FALSE ALARM
After receiving Mazie’s assurance that the little waif of the schoolhouse would be properly cared for, Johnny went at once to his own room, where he caught ten winks before the sun was high.
After a hasty breakfast, he returned to the scene of the fire. He found heaps of charcoal and broken timbers smouldering beneath piles of brick, but fortune favored his search. The section of basement that had been directly beneath the office was entirely free from fire and bricks. He was soon busily poking round in the ashes.
“A mechanism”; he thought to himself, “a thing of wheels and a spring like an alarm clock is what I’m looking for—a thing that runs just so long, then starts something.”
“But not necessarily so complicated,” he thought a moment later as he recalled the story of a firebug who, having soaked a common wooden mouse trap with kerosene, had baited it carefully and had so attached a match to the spring of the trap that when a mouse sprang it the match would light. He had then set the trap at the bottom of a huge waste paper basket into which the papers and scraps from noon hour lunch boxes had been cast.
“Simple, but possibly effective,” he said to himself. Then, almost humorously, he began keeping an eye out for the heat reddened wires of a mouse trap.
Not even these rewarded his search. Only the things common to a school office were to be found. Pencil ends, the remains of a pencil sharpener, metal backs to loose-leaf blank books, the charred remains of a telephone, blackened electric light fixtures and wires, wires, wires running everywhere.
“Nothing to be learned here,” he told himself.