When Fatty Bascom, surging heavily against the narrow and jagged
opening, found that he could not get out, he could not credit his
senses. He was there, he had come through the split in the rock with
but little personal damage. Why, therefore, was he unable to
withdraw? There must be some trick about it. He tried backing out,
but just escaped wedging himself so tightly that he could move
neither out nor in. However, he managed to free himself and tried it
front-wise, side-wise and every other way he could think of. Fatty
was a prisoner.
Then his eyes fell on the pile of empty paraffine papers on the small
box lying at one side of the chamber, and the truth dawned on Fatty.
Fatty, empty and hungry, the lunchless Fatty had pressed through the
tight fit of the stone crevice. The well-fed Fatty, augmented by
that most ample and filling lunch, had attained a girth _just too
much_.
Physiology never had interested Fatty. And now he wondered with a
chill of apprehension how long it would take him to shrink to his old
dimensions. Perhaps it would take days. If, thought the worried
one, if food, good food went to feed and build up the tissues as the
physical culture teacher said, it might be a day or two before he was
starved down to the size he had been before that generous meal!
He sat down on the box and gave himself up to dismal reflections. A
day or two! In the meantime what might happen to him? Then he
smiled. Of course the fellows would come and look for him. All he
had to do was to lounge around and wait until they came to look for
him. He knew Skinny! Skinny would stay with him. The thought of
Skinny, who would not trouble his mother and so took a single cake of
sweet chocolate, made Fatty vaguely uncomfortable. He had no watch,
and the time passed on leaden wings. He hung a handkerchief on one
of the spits of rock, and thought perhaps it would guide his
rescuers. Just how they would proceed to rescue him Fatty didn’t
know; couldn’t imagine. Fatty knew that no human agency could get
him through that crevice after his own frenzied efforts had failed.
All they could do would be to come inside and wait for him to shrink.
He commenced to look around. Opposite the opening was another narrow
opening into a black, forbidding space. Fatty approached and leaning
in, turned his dim flashlight cautiously around the walls. It was a
large, long chamber. He could not see the end, and as he commenced
to wonder if by chance there might be wild animals lurking inside, he
withdrew and stationed himself by the outside slit.
At least human beings had been there before him. There were the two
flat boxes lying almost hidden by a pile of rocks. He went up and
looked them over. They were empty. As Fatty hauled them over
something glistened on the ground beneath and he picked up a small
cylinder made of brass and closed at either end. It was a neatly
made, pretty toy and Fatty felt in his pocket for a knife, but he had
none. Knives always dug into him. He picked with his fingers at the
seam but it did not give. Fatty wanted it for a pencil case. It
would hold about four pencils. So he slipped it into his pocket to
show Skinny, and carefully buttoned the flap.
It was a nice, shiny brass case, and Fatty thought he could swap it
some day for an ice-cream cone or a stick of fruiteena gum.
There was nothing else to look at, and Fatty kicked the boxes back
where he had found them. He looked at them several times in a vague
way. He was conscious that he had seen them before, but as he
thought it must have been in some grocery, with figs or something of
the sort in them, he gave it up. It made him somehow uncomfortable.
Oh, Fatty, Fatty Bascom! What a pity you did not remember that top
box! What a shame that you never trained your eyes to remember what
they saw! How much trouble it would have saved!
There was some sand over by the “door” as our poor prisoner called
the opening, and there Fatty sat down and waited for the diminishing
process to continue.
While he sat there an airplane went humming overhead, and then for
awhile there was silence; a silence only broken by the sound of rock
crumbling in the inner chamber. Fatty thought of wildcats, and his
scalp crept. It worked on him so that he gave up watching for
someone, some mountaineer to go past on the narrow mountain trail,
and fastened his eyes on the door that led into the mountain. The
airplane returned and after awhile went over again. Fatty decided
that it was Ernest taking the boys up for a flight. He tried the
door for the twentieth hopeless time.
The silence was dense; it covered him like a cloak. The place was
cool and shadowy, but there was no chill. Fatty found the sand not
at all unpleasant, and wriggled down until he lay on his back, with
his cap under his head.
And presently he went sound asleep.
When he awoke he did not know where he was, and lay for a moment
trying to place himself. It came to him with a jolt. The chamber
was dark, and even outside Fatty could see that the sky was grey with
the dusk of night falling. Cramming his cap on his head, he flung
himself at the opening and in a flash was through and running down
the trail. Stumbling, half falling, running, panting along, he
followed the trail, now almost invisible in the waning light, around
and down the mountain towards the plateau where the camp lay
twinkling with electricity. Fatty’s heart and soul reached forward
wildly toward those lights as he raced forward. Behind him he
imagined soft padding footsteps and the light, slinking forms of
great, gaunt cats stalking him. He had heard that the mountains were
full of wildcats. Fatty reflected that they would be glad to dine on
anything so juicy and tender as his own plump self. Fear lent him
wings.
As he rounded the last curve before hitting the open road that led
back to camp, he collided with two tramps coming slowly up the
mountain. He bounced back with a cry, and as the ill-looking fellows
started to swear, Fatty apologized, and dashed past, giving the
strangers a wide berth. Fatty wondered if they were moonshiners. He
had heard of them, and each man was heavily loaded with a pack that
covered his back. What Fatty could see of their faces in the
gathering gloom did not tend to make him want to stop and converse.
He fled toward camp. Once he nearly went headlong, but saved
himself, and feeling of his pocket to see if he had lost the queer
cylinder he hurried toward his goal.
Outside the Adjutant’s office, Fatty recognized the well-known lines
of Frank’s little flivver, and around it a dejected group that split
up as he approached and greeted him with a volley of questions and
reproaches.
Fatty, absent and possibly hurt, had taken on the aspect of a dear
departed. Fatty, turning up perfectly hale and hearty, was an object
of scorn and reproaches.
Ernest and Frank and Eddie and Dee, ably assisted by Bill and Skinny,
demanded to know what he meant by it, where he had been, why had he
gone away, and what ailed him anyway.
When the hubbub subsided a little and they were on their way, it
transpired that the whole party had gone all the way back along the
trail to see if they could see anything of the lost one. They had
found no trace of him, and there had been no answer to their shouts.
Fatty thought guiltily that he must have been asleep. The more they
talked, giving him no chance to explain, the more Fatty felt that he
would not tell anything about his experience. So when at length
Frank quelled the uproar by saying, “Let’s let Fatty tell us what he
has been doing,” Fatty serenely told them that he had gone off in the
woods, had fallen asleep, and that was all there was of it. No
adventure, no excitement, nothing. Just that.
“Well, I am sorry for you!” said Eddie with scorn. “You can’t tell
_me_! _I_ know why you went, and that’s what you get for going off
and hogging all that lunch. Just went to sleep all afternoon.
Serves you right! We had a peach of a feed. Frank bought some dandy
eats, and pop, and ginger ale, and say! we went up in Ernest’s plane
and ran across an eagle. Say, his wings were twenty or thirty feet
across, and we had a fight with him!”
“Now I know you are lying,” said Fatty glumly.
“No, sir,” said Eddie. “Didn’t we have a fight with an eagle?” he
appealed to Dee.
“I should say we did!” said Dee.
“Well, show us a feather,” demanded Fatty.
“What do you think we did?” said Eddie scornfully. “Reach over and
pull out some of his tail?”
“I’d ’a’ done it,” said Fatty. “I found something dandy up where I
was, and I brought it home for a souvenir.”
“Well, trot it out!” said Eddie.
“Not much!” retorted Fatty. “Not on your life! It’s a peach of a
thing too, but let’s see your feather, and I will let you see what I
found.”
“Aw, I don’t care what you found,” said Eddie. “You have missed the
best time you ever had, and the best swim, and I’m sorry for you.”
It turned hot again next day, and Fatty hung his flannel shirt away.
The queer cylinder was in the pocket. Mrs. Bascom found that shirt a
few days later and put it in the wash. The cylinder, looking nice
and bright and brassy, she laid in the drawer beside Fatty’s
handkerchiefs.
Fatty found it there on Sunday when he dressed for Sunday School, and
thinking that there might be a chance for a dicker between lessons,
he rubbed it up on his pocket handkerchief, and putting it in his
breast pocket where the end gleamed out enticingly, he started off.
Now it happened that the innocent looking cylinder that looked like a
new sort of pencil case was an infernal machine of the deadliest kind!
Filled with the most powerful explosives, the compact little engine
of destruction was powerful enough to shatter a building. If Fatty
had known ... if Frank had known when he bounced and jolted home in
the flivver.... if Mrs. Bascom had known when she shifted it to the
pile of handkerchiefs--well, this would have been a different story,
with a different ending.
As it was, Fatty walked sedately to church, and with no trip or jolt
violent enough to send Fatty skyward in scraps.
He could not stick it out until after Sunday School, however, and
during the service brought it forth for the admiration of the boys in
his class. A group of heads gathered about some object held under
the back of the seat caught the attention of the Superintendent.
Walking down the side aisle, he came back toward the front of the
church by way of the middle aisle and leaned suddenly over the
shoulders of the interested group. He quietly took the cylinder out
of Eddie’s hand.
“Rowland,” he said sternly, “I regret to see you acting thus during
Sunday School. If you cannot deport yourself in a proper manner I
shall have to report you to your parents. I will give you your toy
after service.”
Without giving Eddie a chance to explain he walked off, bearing the
cylinder which he deposited on the desk.
“He thinks it’s mine,” whispered Eddie with a grin.
“You give it right back as soon as you get it!” hissed Fatty.
“Who wants your old cylinder, anyhow?”
“_I_ do,” said Fatty. With a possible swap in view it was wise to
boost his prize. “If I can get the top pried off it will make a
dandy pencil case.”
“It might do for that,” said Eddie. “Tell you what, Fat. I will
give you a nickel for it.” And Eddie who always had honestly earned
money in his pocket took out a bright coin and with one eye on the
Superintendent, danced it in his palm where Fatty could see it.
He looked and was lost. After all he didn’t want the old brass
thing. So the nickel became his and after Sunday School was over,
Eddie went meekly down to the desk and waited for the cylinder.
The Superintendent was talking to one of the elders and saw Eddie out
of the corner of his eye. He picked up the brass tube, but fumbled
it. It rolled down the slope of the desk and would have fallen had
not Eddie caught it deftly as it fell.
“Never do that again!” said the Superintendent severely.
“No, sir,” promised Eddie, and went off, little knowing that his
quickness of movement had saved a perfectly good Sunday School and
all the innocent people in it.
He looked the cylinder over and decided that the top had been screwed
on. A wrench would take it off, but as Eddie did not carry a wrench
in his Sunday clothes, he put the cylinder in his pocket and,
whistling happily, went home to dinner, where his mother at once
insisted on the Sunday suit being put away.
So once more the pretty brass tube with its deadly load found a
temporary resting place in a clothes press where nothing more deadly
than Christmas plum pudding had ever been harbored. Once more, all
unconscious, Fatty and Eddie had handled the frightful thing and
there it hung within reach of Eddie’s little baby brother Jack and
the careless hands of Virginia.
Fatty forgot all about it.
He was not at the club room the next time the boys gathered to take
some messages. Theirs was, thanks to Bill’s three aunts, the only
wireless in the city capable of carrying long distance messages. So
they seldom bothered with any of the short circuit lines that crossed
and inter-crossed. They were tuned for far-away messages. This
night, however, as Dee sat idly tapping out the words that crossed
his instrument, he heard something that caused a strange alertness to
take possession of his mind. And these were the words:
“From the adjutant’s office, two shivering maples make the brows, a
slit the nose. In the inner chamber, six. Wash Seattle.”
With breathless intentness Dee listened for more. A faint “Correct”
reached him, then the word “When?” “The Thirteenth” was the answer.
After that silence save for the weather reports coming from the Great
Lakes and a jumble of messages flying from here and there from boy to
boy across the city. The words Dee had heard might well have been
some of these, but where had he heard of the “shivering maples” for
eyebrows? He racked his mind in vain. Eddie, clamoring for the
table, came raving up, followed by Bill.
The three boys were alone. Dee told them what he had heard but for
awhile they were able to make nothing of it. Suddenly Eddie
exclaimed, “I know what! Do you suppose it is the face we saw on the
hillside out at camp that day?”
“I don’t know,” replied Dee, startled.
“What was that?” asked Bill.
The boys told him.
“Well, if there is a face there, what do they want with it?” he
asked. “I bet that is it, but how are we going to know what they
mean? Say, suppose it has something to do with all that dynamiting?
What would ‘Wash Seattle’ mean?”
“Washington and Seattle,” said Dee. “The next places to be
dynamited.”
“My, my, you are cheerful!” said Bill, shivering. “I say we report
this to somebody!”
“We can’t,” answered Eddie. “Frank and Ernest are both away, and I
am afraid to tell the police.”
“If we mix up in it, we will get our own little heads blown off like
as not,” said Bill ruefully. “Mine is a nice head.”
“Aw, what ails you?” said Eddie. “Nobody is going to know! What did
you do with that book anyway, Dee--the one you showed Anna the day
the man was run over?”
“I gave it to the police, but I copied the writing in it,” said Dee.
“If Anna won’t tell me exactly what it says, I am going to take it
down to the Public Library and find out just what it means. I can
translate it near enough by one of the dictionaries there.”
“That’s a scheme!” said Bill.
“I am going home now,” said Dee. “I want to take a look at it.”
“Come back if you find it. It is early,” called Bill.
“All right, I will,” answered Dee, and went down the stairs three at
a time.
When he reached the house his father and Zip had just crossed the
street on their way around the Park. Dee could not help a feeling of
sadness as he saw his stepfather, a man who should have been in full
health, shuffling carefully along with the hesitating gait of the
nearly blind. He called a greeting, to which Zip replied and his
father nodded. Then Dee hurried up to his room. But he stopped
there only long enough to get a key, and went up to the attic. He
required no light but went over to his mother’s trunk, opened it, and
found the paper he had hidden there.
As he retraced his steps he heard a familiar ticking, crackling
noise. He smiled as he thought what tricks his brain was playing
him. A mouse in Zip’s room of course, but it sounded exactly like a
wireless that needs adjustment. With a smile he stepped down the
hall and paused at Zip’s door. The noise continued, and with a
paling face, blank with amazement, Dee recognized the sound of a
wireless trying to pick them up!
Racing down the stairs, he heard Zip’s high prattle as the two
returned. Dee slid off the side of the porch and sank down into the
depths of the honeysuckle bush. The two men came up the steps.
They were talking rapidly but close as he was Dee could catch nothing
of the low sentences until Zip turned the door knob. Then Mr. De
Lorme said: “What was it--the thirteenth? We will have to make
haste!” and together they disappeared in the house.
For a long while Dee dared not move.
_The thirteenth!_