CUT ADRIFT
For some time Grace Krowl remained at her small table awaiting some
further message from the mysterious whisperer. No further message came.
Had this whisper told the truth? Was he a mile away? She could not
believe it.
On descending to the floor below, she found her strange uncle prepared to
leave his odd store.
"Today I go to an auction," he said to her with a smile. "Today there is
nothing to unpack. Not many people will come. They come only when there
are trunks. Tomorrow there will be trunks, perhaps many trunks."
"Trunks," Grace thought with an involuntary shudder.
"Today," her uncle went on, "Margot will tend store." He nodded toward an
aged woman bending over a pile of soiled garments. "Today you are free.
You may make yourself at home in your new place."
All that day in her little parlor, Grace had one ear open for the
Whisperer. She heard nothing. He spoke, apparently, only at dawn. The day
was, for her, quite uneventful.
The same could not be said for our young friend Johnny. Late that day,
with a narrow bandage still about his head, he returned to the "House of
Magic." And, almost at once, adventure struck him squarely between the
eyes.
"You are just in time!" Felix, the inventor's son, greeted him. "I have
not tried that new thing. We will begin at dusk, in an hour or two in a
captive balloon,--"
"A captive balloon!" Johnny felt a thrill course up his spine.
"On the Fair grounds," Felix added. "There is one over there. The grounds
are deserted. I have permission to use the balloon. I have had it
inflated. No one will bother us there."
It is better sometimes to do things where there are crowds. Felix was to
learn this. There is safety in numbers.
At the gate of the deserted Fair grounds Felix presented his pass. They
were admitted.
"Sent the equipment over in a small truck," he explained to Johnny.
"Rather heavy."
"What equipment?" The words were on Johnny's tongue. He did not say them.
Just in time he recollected that he was to look, listen, help all he
could and not ask questions. "I'll be told all I need to know in good
time," he assured himself. Had he but known it, that night he was to need
wisdom not written in any book.
The streets they were passing through now were strange. The falling
darkness gave to everything an air of mystery. Here some great man-made
dragon opened its mouth as if to swallow them, there a tattered sign
fluttered and cracked in the wind. "The great Century of Progress!"
Johnny whispered. "Here thousands swarmed along the Midway. Now all is
still. Now--
"What was that?" He stopped dead in his tracks. Had he caught the sound
of scurrying feet? Yes, he was sure of it. And there, well defined
against a wall, were the shadows of two half crouching figures. One was
tall, the other short. Johnny felt a chill run up his spine.
Felix apparently had seen nothing, heard nothing. He had gone plodding
stolidly on into the gathering darkness; was at this moment all but lost
from sight.
With a little cry of consternation, Johnny sprang after him.
By the time he caught up to him they were at the spot where the balloon
was kept.
"We just release this clutch when we are ready to go up," Felix
explained, "then up we go. There is a time arrangement that will set the
electrically operated drum, winding us back down again in two hours. We
only go up about three hundred feet. Cable holds us. Quite safe tonight,
no wind to speak of."
Johnny thought this a rather strange arrangement. "No guard here?" he
asked.
"No need. No one's allowed in the grounds unless they have a pass. Climb
in. All set."
Johnny did climb in, and up they went.
Johnny had been in the air many times. For all that, he experienced a
strange sense of insecurity as they rose a hundred, two hundred, three
hundred feet into the murky air of night. "Pooh!" he exclaimed in a low
breath. "It is nothing!"
That he might throw off this feeling of dread, he busied himself with
other thoughts. His gaze swept the city where lights were gleaming.
"Where," he thought, "are Drew and Tom? Hunting pickpockets perhaps. And
where is Captain Burns? I'm going to like him, I'm sure. He is so solid
and real; but jovial for all that. He said he'd take me places. What
places? I wonder. Dangerous places? He said--"
His thoughts were broken in upon by Felix's voice:
"Here we are at the top. Now for the test."
The young inventor flashed on a powerful searchlight. "All I have to do
is to connect this through a switch, aim my light at a window in our
house, take up this microphone and say, 'Hello father!' He hears me and
no one else in the world can. He--
"What!" he exclaimed in consternation. "The current is off. Someone cut
the light cable!"
"More than that!" Johnny's tone was sober. He was looking over the side
of the balloon basket in which they rode. "The cable that holds us has
been cut! We're drifting!"
"You're right!" Consternation sounded in the older boy's voice. "We're
going out into the night, over black waters. And there is no ballast!"
"They got us, those two!" Johnny muttered.
"What two?" Felix demanded.
"I saw them on the grounds, a tall one and a short one--anyway I saw
their shadows. Should have told you."
"Oh!" Felix groaned. "Wonder what we've done to them. But they haven't
got us--not yet!" There was courage and high resolve in Felix Van Loon's
tone. "We'll beat them yet. You'll see!"
Would they? Johnny silently wondered.
Strangely enough, at that moment thoughts not related at all to this
adventure passed through his mind. He was once more in that place of
mystery, the professor's house, in the hallway seeing eyes in the wall,
shuddering at sight of his own skeleton. "How could all that have
happened?" he asked himself.