WHEN FIRE LIGHTS THE SKY
The accusation, hardly to be called veiled, rather startled Frank
Allen. Lanky, close chum of Frank’s that he was, moved as if to
strike the policeman, but refrained on sober second thought, since it
would certainly have placed him in a bad light.
“You are inclined to jump at conclusions without much thought,”
remarked Frank quietly, though in that quietness there was the glint
and swish of a rapier blade. “We thought you were coming up here to
help find the thieves and not to waste time making wild accusations.”
“Zat so, young man? Well, my advice to you is to keep a quiet tongue
or things won’t be so quiet for you.”
This exchange of remarks brought Mrs. Parsons around from her
hysterical fright to a feeling of resentment.
“Pray, let us not have any trouble of the kind. We have had enough
trouble to worry us. Let us proceed to learn whether we might not
find a way to gain proof against the men who have done this.”
“I quite agree with you, Mrs. Parsons. If there are such things as
clues which will help us fasten this on the men who did it, let’s try
to find the clues.” Frank was keeping his cool demeanor.
“I’ll see to the clues.” The policeman still held to his manner,
which was bellicose, to say the least. “We do not need your help,
young man, and you may leave.”
“This is my house, sir!” The widow spoke angrily. “Mr. Allen will
stay here until he pleases to leave.”
“No, Mrs. Parsons, I think it wise that I leave. I thank you ever so
much for what you have said, but since it might merely slow things
down if I stayed, I will be getting back home, for it is already
late.”
With this Frank and Lanky bowed themselves out of the house and were
gone down the river bank.
Walking at a medium pace across the great spread of carpeted grass,
the two boys said nothing to each other, though both were thinking
deeply.
The vines and shrubs cracked and swished as they pushed their way
through these, and both came out at the river bank at practically the
same time—and with the same thought.
For both were looking, or trying to look, through the darkness to a
point upstream. Seeing in this inky blackness was impossible. Even
their boat, the _Rocket_, was a slightly darkened blob against the
river.
Not until the boat had been pushed into the stream and Frank had
guided it away after Lanky had turned the engine over, was the
silence between these two friends broken.
“What does it mean?” asked Wallace.
“It really, down to brass tacks, doesn’t mean anything, Lanky, as
you will realize if you think of it for a minute. We know we haven’t
done anything wrong, don’t we? So, all it can mean is that the police
force has one more member on it than we thought who hasn’t all that’s
coming to him.”
“But it doesn’t alter the fact that he has accused us of having
something to do with this robbery.”
“He also hasn’t altered the fact that we didn’t, has he? You’ve got
to battle with facts when you get after things of this kind. Now, I
know a fact which I should like to place before your attention—there
was an old boat tied up to the river bank just above us when we
landed.”
“Yes, and I was remembering the same thing when we came through the
brush. But you can’t see anything in the dark. Let’s go back and see
if it’s there.”
“Sure, it isn’t there! What’s the use of going back? If the fellow
had no reason whatever for being there he would have moved by this
time, because it has been more than an hour, maybe nearly two hours.
And if he did have something to do with it, he wouldn’t be there yet.”
“But those fellows who got into the auto when we came to the
house—how about them? What connection would they have with the boat,
for they had a car?”
Lanky had asked a question that meant something. What, indeed, could
the car have to do with the boat?
Frank was silent, thinking, as was Lanky.
The steady put-put of the exhaust broke the silence, and Frank
steered a course well toward the farther side of the Harrapin,
thinking to skirt close to the next island, for in doing so at the
wide bend of the river below he would gain a short distance.
Wallace was standing close to Frank in the cockpit, and their words
were not spoken, when they did speak, very loudly. The submerged
exhaust did not bother them greatly.
“Wish we could have got some idea of the shape of that car,” muttered
Frank Allen. “When he flashed on the lights to get away we might have
had gumption enough to have noticed the license tag.”
“I did,” replied his mate. “There wasn’t any.”
“What? Are you quite sure?”
“Well,” and Lanky drawled his reply to the question, “maybe I
oughtn’t to have said that. As I recall the impression on my mind
when they started off, the red light did not show any license tag
beneath it.”
“We didn’t even notice whether they turned up the road or down,
either, so there’s that much information that we lost. Instead, we
dashed up those steps and into the house.”
“They must have had a lot of time to do what they did.” Lanky spoke
suddenly after another period of silence. “They could not have done
all that after they bound her in the pantry.”
“That’s what I think. They probably were already in the house before
she got home. But that brings up this question, Lanky—if their car
was standing at the spot where we saw them get in at the time she
came home, why didn’t the driver of her own car notice it and tell
them?”
“Gee, that’s a fact! Now, what does that mean? Does it mean that they
arrived after she did? Does it mean they entered the house after she
arrived home, proceeded upstairs and finished the work, and then came
down and got her?”
“Doesn’t sound reasonable. Let’s see what we would have done if we
had been the culprits.” Frank was reasoning it out slowly. “If I had
gone in there after she returned, and I had known she was there, I
would not have taken a chance on proceeding upstairs, making noise
which she might have heard and reported over the telephone before I
could get downstairs to quiet her.”
“How about this?” Suddenly a thought struck through Wallace’s mind.
“Could not these fellows have left their car outside somewhere, out
of sight, and the driver of it could have brought it up after she had
returned home and after her own driver had gone away?”
The idea was a good one, and Frank turned to look fairly at his
friend before he answered.
“Hey! Hold off there! What the dickens!”
The sudden cry had come from out the darkness on the river. Frank’s
head was back again to the forward end of the _Rocket_. Squarely in
his path was a dark object of considerable size!
With a wide sweep of the wheel he threw the _Rocket_ hard over to the
port side, his right hand reaching down to slow the motor so as to
decrease the impact when he struck.
But the _Rocket_ missed the object.
It was a rowboat with three men in it, and a large box or trunk-like
object in the stern. Frank threw his searchlight into play and
dropped it squarely on the rowboat.
But the man at the oars was pulling hard on them, getting out of
range of the light.
“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” came out across the river
to them.
Frank and Lanky said nothing. The searchlight was reaching out in an
effort to locate them, but when it found the mark, two of the men
ducked low in the boat while the third one was plying the oars as
hard as his strength permitted.
“Isn’t that the same boat?” gasped Lanky.
Frank said nothing. Instead, he changed the course of the _Rocket_,
but he was too late to get immediately after the fellows. The island
was squarely in front of him, the one he had aimed at passing on this
side to shorten the run down the river.
Around it to the far side he went, then swung as closely as good
navigation of the _Rocket_ would permit, to get back to the course
made by the rowboat.
Several minutes were consumed in making this return to the former
location, and the path had led completely around the island in an
attempt to head off the rowboat.
Back upstream they went, the searchlight playing here and there,
seeking for the little craft.
“I’d be careful, Frank,” muttered Lanky Wallace. “If there’s anything
wrong about these fellows, they’re very apt to do some shooting.”
“I’ll take the chance,” and Frank gritted his teeth.
Over toward the farther shore they went, then swung back again, but
the searchlight of the _Rocket_, though flung first to one side and
then the other, failed to reveal the boat.
“That’s mighty queer. That boat is on the river. It has no motor. It
can’t move away fast. We are faster than it is. So, it is not far
from here right now.”
“But it isn’t in sight. It is so plagued pitchy dark that one can’t
see, anyhow,” replied the other.
“But we’ve come right across their path. They can’t have gotten far.”
“No—you’re right. But they’ve gotten out of sight whether they got
far away or not.”
“Suppose they turned, too, when they saw us turning, and went to the
upper side of the island? Let’s take a look?”
Lanky said nothing. But he was thinking that he did not relish the
plan. He knew that a bullet could come out of that darkness very
easily, for the willows hung far over the water on the upper side of
this island, as he well recalled, and the boat could easily have slid
somewhere beneath them.
Frank navigated toward the island, the searchlight playing about,
like some great sepulchral hand reaching out to grasp, in weird,
ghostlike fashion, whatever it might find.
Though they searched the waters and around the island for several
minutes, no trace of the rowboat was to be found. It had completely
vanished in the night.
“Frank,” declared Lanky, as they moved down the river after the
fruitless hunt, “that rowboat is on the upper side of the island,
under those willows, snugly tucked away, and there was at least one
gun pointed our way in case we ran in there.”
“Maybe you’re right. Even at that I don’t see that we need to risk
our skins hunting for something that may be as peaceable as a baby.”
“Not much, and you know it!” exclaimed Lanky. “That boat was
something crooked, or they wouldn’t have dodged out of sight. If
everything was all right it would have been in plain sight when we
came up around that island.”
“You’re absolutely right, Lanky. And it was that very idea in my own
mind that caused me to want to hunt it out.”
The _Rocket_ was now headed straight for Columbia. Only a few more
miles and they would be at home—at a rather late hour, and probably
with two families worrying over the two boys.
“We might have been thoughtful enough to have called our people from
Mrs. Parsons and let them know where we were,” ruefully remarked
Frank.
“As if we could have been so thoughtful under such circumstances as
those. I think we did a wonderful thing when we thought to call up
even the police station with all that excitement.”
They looked straight ahead for several minutes. The minds of these
two youths, both active ones, were fully engaged on the happenings of
the evening, which had, to say the least, come rather thick and quite
fast.
“Was that a trunk or a box in that boat?” asked Frank.
“Looked to me like a large box—about the size of one I saw earlier in
the day in the _Speedaway_.”
“Huh?” This had set Frank to thinking.
“And that rowboat looked as much like the one we saw at the bank
above the Parsons place as any other rowboat would look.”
“That’s putting two and two together, Lanky, as rapidly as that
policeman did.”
“What’s that?” Lanky’s startled voice cried as he pointed ahead of
them toward the city of Columbia, whose electric lights were now
dancing across the waters.
The two boys studied a bright reflection in the sky for some seconds,
both figuring what this might be.
“It’s a fire, and a big one, too—or at least it is big enough to look
mighty big in the skies,” said Frank slowly.
“Where can it be? In the heart of town? Or is it further away?”
“Don’t know. But my guess is that it’s right where dad’s place is.
See that smokestack there to the right? That’s right across the
street from dad’s store. How far is the fire from that stack?”
“It’s right there, Frank! Sure as can be, that is your father’s place
on fire—and it looks like it is a real one, too!”
Midnight, almost, with a great fire in the Allen department store—his
father’s place of business—and he on the river, unable to be of aid!
Frank gave the motor all its speed. The _Rocket_ fairly leaped out of
the water on its way!