Danny the detective

by Vera C. Barclay

There, row upon row, shining, perfect, ready for use, lay a vast store of machine guns.

For there, row upon row, shining, perfect, ready for use, lay a vast store of machine guns. In the yellow light of the guttering candle they seemed to fix a hundred black and hollow eyes upon the boy, like so many traitors startled in their hiding-place. Belts of ammunition lay like piles of coiled snakes; cases, boxes, rose in pyramids to the roof. Rifles were stacked against the wall.

A kind of helpless horror filled Danny. It was all so tremendous, so prepared, so very, very unexpected. His knees knocked together, his heart seemed to thump against his ribs. A great lump rose in his throat. And then, as he gazed with a kind of numb horror, the truth crept into his mind that this great army of death-dealing implements was not alive; was, in fact, weak, useless, powerless. That he was alive! That he, in his small self, had more power than all these guns, for he had life, will, a human brain, and courage. These traitorous slaves of Germany must cower before him; he had found them out; and surely he had found them out in time!

The detective instinct in him tempted him to explore the vault. But the voice of duty had become the loudest in Danny’s ears at last. Curiosity and ambition must have no say. He had been trusted with a momentous secret. Over England hung the possibility of a great catastrophe. Here was his duty—to get out of this place without a single moment’s delay, to make his report as clearly as possible to those who could take action. With his life he would guard this secret; and if the carrying of it, the delivering of it, cost him his life, he would not be afraid to offer it. He had not taken his chance when it was easy. Now that it was hard, nothing would hold him back. But caution as well as courage was necessary. Turning round, he entered the passage once more and began to walk quickly and as silently as possible in the wake of the German spy.

A mile of passage lay before him. At the end of it the steps descended, as he knew, into the chill waters of the pool. He would have to descend these steps. Gradually the water would creep up to his knees, his waist, his neck. A big breath, a duck, four, five, six strong strokes, and his head would be above the surface, he would be breathing the pure air of the upper world; he would be free!

And yet, what lay between him and this freedom? He knew not at all. He dared not try to imagine. But bracing up his spirit with a brave determination to forget self and put duty first, he pressed on. If his heart quailed, it was at the thought of entering the black water. What if he met an enemy down there? So intent was his mind upon this possible horror that he was startled and taken aback at the strange sight and sound that reached him simultaneously as he rounded a sharp bend in the passage.

“Buzz, buzz, buzz-buzz, buzz!” broke on his ears. And there, some twenty yards away, stood the German who had captured him an hour ago. He was standing half-turned away, wholly intent upon an apparatus fixed on the wall. From this the buzzing sound proceeded. Several wires rose from it, up the wall, disappearing through the round hole that Danny had discovered before as the drain pipe by which the spies talked together through the speaking-tube.

Now he realised at once that something far worse was on foot than a mere conversation with a fellow-spy in a ditch. The man was using a telegraph apparatus. He was doing that which the police had feared might happen, and which the Scouts had been called out to prevent, namely, tapping the cables—listening here in his safe hiding-place to the secret communications of England’s statesmen; substituting in their place false messages.

A kind of impetuous rage filled Danny. He clenched his fists, and his whole body quivered with a desire to throw himself, tooth and nail upon this spy, eavesdropping, sucking in England’s secrets. But what was he, a little boy, against this man—armed, as he knew, with a revolver? Yes, there lay the sinister little weapon on the shelf that held the candle.

Danny’s first impulse on seeing the enemy had been to drop to the ground, at the same time extinguishing his candle. Now he squatted hidden by the darkness, his eyes fixed in fascinated horror on the scene. Following up the wires with his eyes to where they disappeared through the pipe, he asked himself how they could be connected with the cable. Then, like a flash, he remembered the telegraph-pole that rose from out a mass of nettles quite close to the drain. Before him rose the picture of the artist-spy, on that sunny morning at 5 A.M., coming along the road with a piece torn off his coat, and the finding of the piece hooked on the nail in the post a few minutes later. That was the day before war was declared.