CHAPTER XVIII
THE TRAP IS SPRUNG
As a rule, Johnny was a heavy sleeper. All the strange doings of the past few days must have gotten on his nerves, for next morning, more than an hour before dawn, he found himself lying in bed wide awake, thinking.
The ceiling of his room, he noticed, had dropped again during the night. This neither surprised nor disturbed him. In fact, in this strange house had the attraction of gravity been reversed and had he found his bed resting on the ceiling instead of the floor, he would not have been greatly surprised.
He was, however, curious about many things. This room that had a way of growing small, with its strange light where there were no lamps, intrigued him.
The matter of the locked door of the previous day had been solved. Felix had been experimenting with a new type of time lock and had forgotten to throw the electrical switch that controlled it.
“But that living picture on the wall!” Johnny thought to himself. “How is one to explain that?
“And the whisper? Where does that come from? It can’t be a broadcast, and he can’t be close at hand.” Drew had told him the evening before that Grace Krowl had said she had heard the Whisperer in her room more than a mile away.
“The message was not the same,” he told himself. “Not nearly the same. She did not get my message. I did not get hers. He is a very particular person, this Whisperer.”
His thoughts went back to that day he bought the express package that had come so near causing his death.
“And I had those bonds!” he groaned aloud. How was this affair to end? Would Drew Lane and his band come up with these outlaws? Would there be a battle? Would he, Johnny Thompson, be in at the finish? He devoutly hoped so. He thought again of Madame LeClare and her fine children who had lost a father. He saw the dark, smiling eyes of Alice. “As long as God gives us breath!” he repeated. It was a pledge and a prayer.