“I surely am up against it!” he muttered.
CHAPTER XVII
OUT OF THE CISTERN
“Where am I and what happened?” Tom asked himself. Rather futile and hackneyed questions, but they were just the points Tom desired to be informed about.
Much easier it was to reconstruct what had happened than it was to answer the first question as to where he was. Beyond the fact that he was in some dark place—very dark—and that it was damp and noisome, Tom could not imagine where he had been taken.
It was coming back to him now, and he helped his dazed brain to clear by talking aloud to himself. He realized that he was alone—or so he judged—for his first exclamation after recovering consciousness had brought forth no answer.
“Let’s see now,” mused the youth. “I knocked off Barsky’s wig and false beard and saw that he had close-cropped red hair. This makes him, beyond doubt, the scoundrel who attacked dad and the others. It also makes me think this Barsky is a prison bird, or has been at one time.
“He got mad when I fired him, and he came at me. I remember that, but it’s the last thing I do remember. He must have given me a crack on the head with a black-jack and knocked me out. It happened in the little passage near the experiment room, and no one saw it. Then he must have tied me up and carried me here—wherever this is.”
And Tom would have given a goodly sum, just then, to know exactly where he was. It did not seem possible that Barsky could have packed him into an automobile and carried him far away.
“He would have been seen by some one in the office or the shops,” reasoned Tom. “Therefore I must be hidden in some place not very far from my own home or the office. Now where is there a locality like this around our shops?”
Having thus considerably narrowed the inquiry, Tom further simplified it by a process of elimination. He sensed that he was in some place below the level of the ground. The close, stuffy atmosphere of his prison proved that.