THE BURNING OF THE ZOO
One moment Johnny sighted the familiar, stooping figure, the next he had
lost him in the throng which appeared to have sprung up from the ground.
However, he did not despair of finding him again. As for the fire, it was
now none of his affair. Terrible as it promised to be, he could do
nothing to stop it. That was the firemen’s part. Already they were
stretching their hose. After a single thought given to the safety of the
trophy he had hidden under the bushes, Johnny bent his every thought and
energy toward the finding of that man.
“For,” he told himself, “it may result in the unravelling of a great
mystery and bring to a sudden end a series of great catastrophes.” At
that he lost himself in the throng.
With the firemen came Mazie. She had gone to the central alarm station in
the hope of finding Johnny there. Instead she had found the Chief. When
the first and second alarms came in from the Zoo alarm box, the Chief had
bundled her into his car and they had raced for the park.
Hardly had she alighted from the Chief’s car at the scene of the fire
than she felt a slight touch on her shoulder and, on looking up, saw that
Jerry, the firemen’s monkey mascot, was on her shoulder.
She was not surprised at this, but so pleased that tears glistened in her
eyes. From the time Jerry had saved her life by bringing a rope to her in
the burning building, he had apparently thought of her as his especial
charge.
Seeing the Chief about to enter the burning Zoo behind the firemen with
the spurting hose in their hands, Mazie took his arm to enter with him.
Though he frowned at her, he did not say no. It was a terrible sight that
met her eyes. Just as they entered, the fire broke through the wooden
partition between the office and that portion of the Zoo set apart for
birds. The fluttering and screaming of frightened birds was almost more
than she could stand. Beautiful yellow canaries, brown warblers, parrots
of gorgeous green, magnificent birds of paradise, tropical birds with
plumage as varied as the hues of the rainbow—they one and all beat their
wings against their cages and cried for freedom as they never had cried
before in all their captive lives.
“And all in vain,” the girl fairly sobbed.
“It’s no use,” muttered the Chief grimly, “we may save the animals, but
this part of the Zoo is doomed. C’mon. Let’s get out.”
Reluctantly the girl turned away. As she did so she saw a single yellow
canary in a small cage near the door—the commonest bird in the world. Why
he was there alone she could not tell. She only knew that out of all that
priceless collection here was one that might be saved. Seizing the cage,
she tore it from its hanging, then followed the Chief into the outer air.
“Dear little bird,” she whispered, as she hung the cage high on the limb
of a tree well away from danger, “I have given you a new bit of life. May
you sing long and sweetly for that.”
Once more she joined the fire-fighting throng. She was hoping all the
time to come upon Johnny. This was the kind of fire he was supposed to
investigate. He must be here, but where?
“He might be in there,” she thought to herself as she followed a band of
fire fighters into the long, low compartment occupied by the monkey
tribe. Jerry, who was still on her shoulder, let out a scream of delight
at sight of so many of his kind. His scream was answered by one long wail
of terror, for at that very moment a broad tongue of fire came licking
through the thin wooden ceiling of the room.
“It’s the garret,” muttered the fireman. “There’s a garret running the
length of the building. There’s a company coming against the fire from up
there. We can probably stop it here, but this place is doomed. Unless we
can get ’em out, every monkey of the lot will burn.”
There had been times when, in her dreams, Mazie had seen human faces
distorted with fear, peering down from windows where flames reached out
to grip them. But nothing she had ever dreamed of could be as bad as the
sight of hundreds of monkeys, baboons, apes and chimpanzees, clinging to
their cages and uttering plaintive cries and wild shrieks while their
man-like faces were shrunken with fear.
In vain did their keepers attempt to call them down to the doors through
which they might escape.
It seemed that they, like the birds, must meet a terrible death. But just
when matters were at the worst, Mazie felt a tearing at the shoulder of
her coat and turned to see Jerry snatched from his place there. To her
surprise and consternation, she saw that the man who held the mascot
tightly in his right hand was none other than the pink-eyed man whom she
and Johnny suspected of being the firebug.
“Stop him!” she fairly screamed.
But she was too late. The man was already well away and up to the side of
the great cage of monkeys. In his left hand he held a fireman’s axe.
The thing Mazie witnessed in the next three minutes impressed a picture
on the sensitized film of her brain that she will never forget.
Holding Jerry up to the cage, the pink-eyed man allowed him to cling
there for a full half minute. During that entire time the strange little
creature kept up an incessant chatter that could be heard even above the
screams of the frightened prisoners.
What it was he said, Mazie could not tell. She did realize that this
monkey speech of his had an extraordinary effect upon the other monkeys.
By the time his half minute speech was up, the screams had died down
nearly to a whisper.
It was at this psychological moment that the pink-eyed man made his next
move. With a single stroke of his axe he cut a perpendicular gash four
feet long in the heavy wire screening of the cage. A second slash made a
horizontal one quite as long. By turning out the ragged corners he made a
large hole there. On the edge of this hole he placed Jerry.
Then came the astonishing thing. Jerry seemed to understand his part for,
with a twist of his head toward the nearest monkey, he appeared to say:
“C’mon.” Then, catching hold of the cage, he executed a swinging jump and
landed on the floor. The foremost monkey in the cage followed his
example, then another and another.
Calmly the pink-eyed man slashed the side of cage after cage and out of
each leaped all those man-like creatures, and man-like still, as if
obeying orders, they each and all joined the procession led by Jerry. The
procession grew and grew and grew until at last there was not a living
creature in the cages.
There arose a hoarse shout of approval from the firemen. Mazie looked
around for the hero of the hour—the pink-eyed man. He had vanished!
As she made her way once more into the open air of the park that
surrounded the Zoo, she found the trees full of happy chattering
creatures who were enjoying to the full such freedom as they had not
known for years.
For a time she stood there staring at the burning building. As she turned
to go, there came a chatter from the tree above her, followed by a thud
on her shoulder.
It was Jerry. With cap gone, his red coat scorched and torn, he still
appeared to be the happiest monkey in all the world.
The firemen by this time had the fire somewhat under control, but the
mingled sounds of screams, roars and trumpetings which came from the
other end of the Zoo was all but deafening.
Having always had a desire to know how different wild animals acted under
stress of danger, Mazie decided to re-enter the Zoo and pass through it
until stopped by the fire. She could not do this without considerable
fear and trembling, nor was this entirely unwarranted. The time was to
come, and that within the next quarter of an hour, when she would regret
so rash an undertaking.
In the meantime, what had become of Johnny? While all these things were
happening to Mazie and her strange companion, Jerry, what success had he
had in finding his man?
It is not easy to locate a particular person in a throng of five hundred
or a thousand people at night. Johnny thought he knew all about that. He
had entered upon just such a task more than once before. More than once,
too, he had found himself baffled, beaten back by the mob, in the end
defeated. This time he was determined to win.
But even as he entered into the search he asked himself seriously whether
or not he had any business with the man he sought.
“I may, and I may not,” he mumbled to himself at last, “but one thing is
sure—this thing has got to stop. When the police can’t pin a thing on a
particular man they go out looking for suspects and bring in every
suspicious looking character. That’s what I’ll have to do.”
At once his mind was at work on possibilities. Two men had come under
suspicion; the pink-eyed man and the man with the hooked nose and the
limp. If either was the firebug, which was it most likely to be? Johnny
remembered the look he had seen on the face of the pink-eyed man the
night of the school house fire. It was a look of pleasure which had
seemed to say: “I set the fire. Isn’t it grand!” And yet, had he read
that look correctly? One thing was sure—a moment later the look had
vanished from the man’s face and he was showing an active interest in the
saving of a child from the school building.
“And that,” thought Johnny, “would tend to make a fellow love him.”
“On the other hand,” he mused, “he lives in a disreputable looking place;
at least I saw him go in there. And he was at that second fire. What’s he
doing at every midnight fire if he has nothing to do with them?”
As for the man who limped, he had seen him at but one fire, and that time
there was nothing of a suspicious character revealed other than his
presence behind the lines.
“And yet I have a sneaking notion,” Johnny mused, “that it was he who
shot at me out there on the marsh.”
“Not much proof for that conclusion, either,” he murmured a moment later.
His mind went back to the double telephone wires he had found in the
burned schoolhouse and the one he had hidden beneath the bushes but a few
moments before.
“Might be something to it,” he said suddenly and quite out loud.
“Might——”
He broke short off. Over to the right he had caught sight of his man—the
one who limped, and to his great joy he found the fire Chief close beside
him.
“See!” he exclaimed, gripping at the Chief’s arm, “See that man! Get that
man! He—he—perhaps he’s the firebug!”
The Chief made a lunge toward the man. Johnny followed. It did look too
as if he had spoken the truth, for the instant the Chief made a move in
his direction the suspected man was away. Not fast enough, however, to
escape Johnny’s keen eye.
“This way, Chief,” he exclaimed, then dashed straight away from the fire
toward the shore of the lake, whence came the dull roar of rolling
breakers.