THE TRAP IS SPRUNG
As a rule, Johnny was a heavy sleeper. All the strange doings of the past
few days must have gotten on his nerves, for next morning, more than an
hour before dawn, he found himself lying in bed wide awake, thinking.
The ceiling of his room, he noticed, had dropped again during the night.
This neither surprised nor disturbed him. In fact, in this strange house
had the attraction of gravity been reversed and had he found his bed
resting on the ceiling instead of the floor, he would not have been
greatly surprised.
He was, however, curious about many things. This room that had a way of
growing small, with its strange light where there were no lamps,
intrigued him.
The matter of the locked door of the previous day had been solved. Felix
had been experimenting with a new type of time lock and had forgotten to
throw the electrical switch that controlled it.
"But that living picture on the wall!" Johnny thought to himself. "How is
one to explain that?
"And the whisper? Where does that come from? It can't be a broadcast, and
he can't be close at hand." Drew had told him the evening before that
Grace Krowl had said she had heard the Whisperer in her room more than a
mile away.
"The message was not the same," he told himself. "Not nearly the same.
She did not get my message. I did not get hers. He is a very particular
person, this Whisperer."
His thoughts went back to that day he bought the express package that had
come so near causing his death.
"And I had those bonds!" he groaned aloud. How was this affair to end?
Would Drew Lane and his band come up with these outlaws? Would there be a
battle? Would he, Johnny Thompson, be in at the finish? He devoutly hoped
so. He thought again of Madame LeClare and her fine children who had lost
a father. He saw the dark, smiling eyes of Alice. "As long as God gives
us breath!" he repeated. It was a pledge and a prayer.
His thoughts had returned to the mysterious Whisperer when he was given a
sudden start by the loud jangle of a bell.
He sprang out of bed. The bell appeared to be in the room. "Like an alarm
clock," he told himself. "But there is no clock."
He looked at the reflector on the wall. The moonlight was falling upon
it--or was that some other form of light? He could not tell. The sound
seemed to come from there.
He began pacing the room. The bell still jangled. But of a sudden he
halted in amazement. As he crossed before the reflector the sound had
ceased for the space of a second, then began again. He tried it again and
got the same result.
"That's strange!" he told himself.
Just then the jangling ceased and in its stead came the familiar voice of
the Whisperer:
"Johnny! Johnny Thompson! Are you there? Are you awake?"
"The Whisperer?" Johnny breathed.
"Johnny," the message went on, "I have an important message for your
friends. Phone them at once. The men they want are at 1046 Blair Street.
They are in a small, yellow sedan. They are in a garage, having their car
repaired. Hurry!"
Johnny did hurry. He called the shack and had Drew on the wire at once.
"Yes," Drew said, "Tom is here with me, and so are the Captain and
Spider. Thanks for the tip, Johnny. We are on our way at once."
"Well, that's that!" Johnny sighed. He knew, though he regretted it
tremendously, that he could not hope to join them in this adventure.
"Stay here and wait for any further message," he told himself. "Wonder if
Drew and the rest will really come up to Iggy and his gang? If they do,
man! oh, man!" He could just hear the guns popping.
There was, however, no such luck, at least for the moment. As the happy,
fighting four, Drew and his band, neared the garage at 1046 Blair Street,
they saw a low, yellow sedan pop out of the garage door and go speeding
north.
"That's sure to be them. After them! Give her the gas!" the Captain
shouted.
Drew sent the Captain's powerful car speeding after.
The yellow car shot straight north for a mile. Then it whirled round a
corner on two wheels.
When Drew and his band rounded that corner there was no car in
sight--only a huge, lumbering moving-van two blocks to the east.
"Street ends two blocks west," the Captain snapped. "Must have gone east.
Drive slow and watch the north and south streets."
This they did. They were still going slow as they passed the van. Spider,
who had been sitting in the back seat with Tom Howe, was startled a
moment later to find that Tom was no longer with him. He was not in the
car. He was gone.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime, Johnny Thompson was in the midst of a strange discovery.
Ten minutes after the first message had been delivered, the bell began
its jangle once more.
"Hello!" Johnny exclaimed. "Big Ben again!"
Springing to his feet, he began walking back and forth before the round
reflector. As on the other occasion, the bell ceased jangling as he
passed.
A series of rapid experiments with a hat held in his hand showed him he
could shut off the bell by holding the hat in certain positions. These
positions, he found, must be higher and higher as he receded from the
reflector toward the window.
"One thing I know," he assured himself. "That sound is produced by some
force outside my window. And the person who produces it must be very high
up.
"In fact--" He caught his breath as he looked out of the window and away
to the east. "There is but one place it could come from. That is the top
of the six hundred foot tower of the Sky Ride on those deserted Century
of Progress grounds. The Whisperer--"
He broke off short to listen with all his ears. The ringing of that bell
ceased, the whispered message was beginning.
* * * * * * * *
What had happened to the slender young detective, Tom Howe? Something
rather strange, I assure you.
Having slipped from the slowly moving police car, he had mounted the
running board of the vast lumbering van. From this point he slid to a
position beside the driver. As he did this he prodded the driver in the
ribs with an automatic and whispered, "You will drive as I say and where
I say, or you are a dead man!"
The driver never took his eye from the road. He drove straight on.
* * * * * * * *
The message Johnny Thompson received after the second ringing of the bell
was but a repetition of the first, so his mind was soon put to rest. He
was left with plenty to wonder about, for all that.
But dawn was now breaking. Like departing fairies, the Whisperer had
other business that must be attended to. He was heard next in Grace
Krowl's little parlor on Maxwell Street.
"Christmas Eve will be here in three more days," he was saying. "On
Christmas Eve everyone is in a mellow mood. That is the time for
confiding secrets. On that evening, my friend Grace, you are to invite
Nida McFay to your room, seat her beside your table and induce her to
tell her story. I shall be looking in upon you from my high tower a mile
away."
"High tower, a mile away!" she thought. "How can one see that far? And
the shade is always half drawn. It is impossible!" And yet, the Whisperer
had more than once convinced her that he did see her face.
"But Christmas Eve!" she exclaimed indignantly. "How can one ask another
to bare her life's secrets at such a time?"
It was a sober-faced Grace Krowl who seated herself before the table for
a few moments of quiet thought. In the days just past she had tried out
her plan of writing to people whose stories she had found in lost trunks.
She had offered to return all their little treasures without cost. The
results had been disappointing and disheartening. Their attitude she had
found difficult to understand. In their letters they seemed to say, "You
have all the things in my trunk. You have a right to none of them." She
had returned the pictures and letters from six trunks. She had paid the
express charges out of her own meager funds. Not one of them all had made
an effort to repay these charges.
"Not one returned to thank me." She stared at the wall. "Can it be that
uncle is right? That I am merely letting myself get 'soft'?"
She thought of the priceless Bible tucked away at the bottom of the
little horsehair trunk. Is it strange that a half-formed hope should
enter her mind, the hope that no one would appear to claim that treasure,
and that she might have it for her very own?
"A fortune! Thousands of dollars!" she whispered. "And yet--"
* * * * * * * *
When Tom Howe mounted to the seat of that lumbering van he took one look
through a narrow slit of a window behind the driver. The inside of the
van at that time was completely dark.
After riding with the driver for fully two miles and directing his course
all this time, Tom cast another sidewise look through that window. His
lips parted in an unuttered exclamation. The back of the van was now
open, the gate was down, and back two blocks, just turning the corner,
was a low, yellow sedan.
His face was a mask as he turned his attention once more to the street
that lay ahead. Two blocks before them a red crossing light gleamed. As
the van paused for this light, he sprang from the seat and was away like
a shot.
"Well! What became of you?" the Captain roared as a half hour later he
entered the shack.
"You lost their trail?" Tom grinned.
"I'll say we did!"
"So did I," Tom said quietly. "In the end I did. But I stayed with them
longer than you did."
"You stayed?" Drew exploded.
"Sure I did. You remember that van on the street? They were in there, car
and all! Pulled a swift one on us. Driver lowered the back gate and they
drove up and in. Then he lifted the gate.
"I had 'em trapped like rats, I thought. I'd have made the driver take
that van right into our squad-car garage. And then, would there have been
fun!"
"But what happened?" Drew was staring now.
"Near as I can find out, the driver released the gate with some foot
control. Iggy and his gang took the hint and backed right out while we
were going. I saw them shoot round a corner. The trap was sprung, no rat
in it--so I came home.
"How about a cup of coffee?" He moved toward the stove in the corner.
"Well that," Drew said slowly, "is something!"
"There'll be another day," the Captain grumbled.