THE STRANGE BLACK CYLINDERS
The forenoon was all but gone when Johnny stirred in his bed, then sat up
abruptly to stare about him. He had been dreaming, and woven into the web
of his dreams was the face and figure of his one time fellow adventurer,
Panther Eye, known familiarly as “Pant.” He had dreamed of seeing the
dark fights and narrow escapes, and had dreamed of seeing red lights
against a night sky, and blinding white flares. In his dreams he had
again fought a mountain feud. All this with Pant at his side.
“I wish he were here!” Johnny exclaimed as he threw back the covers and
leaped from his bed. “He’d put the thing together letter by letter, word
by word, like a cross-word puzzle, and somehow make a whole of it. The
fire at the school; the pink-eyed stranger; the more terrible fire that
endangered Mazie’s life; the big stooping man with a limp; the fire at
the Zoo; my experience at Ben Zook’s island and at the marsh; for him all
these would fit together somehow. But to me they are little more than
fragments of the sort of stuff life’s made of. Where’s the affair to end?
I’d like to know that.”
Seizing a pen, he wrote a telegram to Pant. Pant, as you will remember
from reading that other book, “The Hidden Trail,” had remained behind to
finish a task he had begun in the Cumberland Mountains.
“No,” Johnny said to himself after reading the telegram, “he wouldn’t
come,” and he tore the paper in four pieces and threw it in the waste
basket.
Drawing the fragment of a black cylinder from his pocket, he studied it
carefully.
“That ought to mean something to me,” he mumbled, “but it doesn’t; not a
thing in the world.”
From a box in the corner he dragged a desk telephone, the one he had
salvaged from the Zoo.
“This,” he said, “would tell a story if only it could talk. And why can’t
you?” He shook his fist at the instrument. “What’s a telephone for if not
for talking?”
Since the instrument did not respond, for the twentieth time Johnny
unwound its wires and sat there staring at them. There was the usual pair
of rather heavily insulated wires and a second pair of lighter ones,
about twenty feet long.
“I ought to know what those second wires are for,” he said again, “but I
don’t. I told the Chief of Detectives about it, and he laughed at me and
said: ‘Do you think there’s someone with a tongue hot enough to set fire
to a house just by talking over the telephone? There’s some hot ones, but
not as hot as that!’ He laughed at his own joke, then saw me politely out
of the room, thinking all the time, I don’t doubt, that I was a young nut
with a cracked head. So, old telephone, if your secret is to be revealed
you’ll have to tell it, or I’ll be obliged to discover it.”
Putting the telephone back in the box, he took the jewel case from
beneath his pillow. As he saw the jewels in the light of day he was more
sure than ever that they were genuine.
“I fancy,” he mused, “that the Chief of Detectives will be a trifle more
interested in this than in my telephone, though in my estimation it’s not
half as important. But of course there’s sure to be a reward. I mustn’t
forget that. It’s to be for Ben Zook.”
The Chief of Detectives was interested, both interested and surprised. He
set his best clerk working on the record of stolen diamonds. In less than
five minutes the clerk had the record before him.
“These diamonds,” he said, looking hard at Johnny, “were stolen from
Barker’s on Madison Street two weeks ago last night. The value is four
thousand dollars.”
“And the reward?” said Johnny calmly.
“Eh, what?”
“How much reward?”
“Nothing’s been said about a reward.”
“All right. Good-bye.” Calmly pocketing the case, Johnny started from the
door.
“Here! Here! Stop that young fool!” stormed the Chief of Detectives.
“Well,” said Johnny defiantly, “what sort of cheap piker is this man
Barker? It’s not for myself, but for a friend who needs it.”
“Tell me about it,” said the detective, bending over and beckoning him
close.
Johnny told the story so well that the Chief got Barker on the wire and
pried an even five hundred dollars out of that tight fisted merchant
before he would promise the return of the diamonds.
“That’ll set your friend Zook up in business,” smiled the Chief of
Detectives as a half hour later he handed Johnny a valuable yellow slip.
“And say, weren’t you in here a day or two ago with some story about a
telephone and a firebug?”
“Yes sir.”
“Didn’t take much stock in it, did I?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“You bring that back and tell me about it again. I thought you were a
fresh kid and a bit addled, but by Jove, you’ve got a head on your
shoulders and it ain’t stuffed with excelsior above the ears, either.”
“I’ll do what you say,” said Johnny, “but first I’d like to run down
another hunch if you don’t object.”
“No objections. Run down as many as you care to. Bring ’em all in. Mebby
I can help you, and more’n likely you can help me.”
Johnny left the place with a jubilant heart. He had enough money now to
buy Ben Zook a small ranch. He knew the very place, a half acre, ten
miles from the city limits, a sloping bank with oak trees on it and a
cabin at its edge, and a touch of green pasture land with a brook at the
bottom. Wouldn’t Ben Zook revel in it? And wouldn’t his salvaged poultry
thrive there?
He wanted to row right out and tell Ben about it at once. Had he been
able to read the future he would most assuredly have done so, but since
he could only see one step ahead, and had planned to revisit the marsh
and have a look at that black shack at its edge, in the end he cashed the
check for five hundred and deposited it in a savings account for safe
keeping. After that he took a train for the marsh.
An hour later, with a feeling of dread that was not far from fear, and
was closely connected with his startling and mysterious experiences on
two other occasions, he found himself approaching the black shack.
Since this shack was built on the side of the marsh nearest to the lake,
it was flanked by low, rolling sand-dunes. This made it easy for Johnny
to approach the shack without being seen by anyone who might be inside.
After crawling to within fifty feet of it he lay down behind a low clump
of willows, determined to watch the place for awhile. After an hour of
patient watching, his patience deserted him. Gripping something firmly in
his hand, he advanced boldly forward until he was within arm’s reach of
the building.
There for a time he stood listening. His footsteps on the sand made no
sound. If there were people in the shack they could not be aware of his
approach.
Nerving himself for quick action and possible attack, he stepped round
the corner to look quickly in at the window.
Then he laughed softly to himself. There had been no need for all this
precaution. Inside the shack was but a single room. In that room there
was one person, and that person lay stretched full length upon a couch
with his face turned toward the wall. To all appearances he was sound
asleep.
Seeing this, Johnny proceeded to make a calm survey of the room. In one
corner stood a table and chair. On the table were dirty dishes, an empty
can, and a loaf of bread.
In a back corner stood a rifle, and across from that some strange looking
black cylinders. It was the cylinders that interested Johnny. But
realizing that he could get a better look at them from the only other
window of the place, he contented himself, for the moment, with a careful
look at the man. The face could not be seen, but there was about the
large, heavy frame and rounded shoulders something vaguely familiar.
Still, after all was said and done, Johnny could not be sure that he had
ever seen the fellow before, and certainly he did not feel disposed to
waken him to find out.
He passed around to the other window and for a full five minutes studied
those black cylinders. They were strange affairs, about four inches in
diameter and two feet in length. They resembled huge firecrackers coated
black. Instead of fuse, however, each one had on its end two small shiny
screws such as are found at the top of a dry battery.
“Probably what they are,” was Johnny’s mental comment, “just big dry
batteries.”
Yet he could not quite convince himself that this was true. In the end,
however, he concluded that was the nearest he could come to it at a
guess, and since a guess was all he was to get that day, he moved away
from the cabin and was soon lost in the sand dunes.
“Never saw any batteries half that big,” he grumbled to himself as he
trudged along, “and besides, what would he be doing with them out here?”
Again he trudged forward for a half mile in silence. Then, of a sudden he
came to a dead stop, turned about, made as if to retrace his steps, then
appearing to think better of it, stood there for a moment in deep
meditation.
“It might be true,” he murmured to himself. “It don’t seem possible, yet
it might be, and if it is, then the fellow could be miles away when the
thing happens. And if it is true, then that solves it.”
“But then,” he added thoughtfully as he resumed his march toward the
station, “it seems altogether too fanciful.”