The Telltale Transmitter
The Telltale Transmitter
© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer
H
ENRY M
ULLIGAN has always had
a generous supply of what is called scientific curiosity. Sometimes it
gets us into trouble -- like the time Freddy Muldoon and Dinky Poore got
kidnapped for being too nosy about something Henry had discovered.
Henry is a great one for thinking ahead, and he always has some new
project planned for the Mad Scientists' Club to work on during vacation
periods. Last Easter we had about ten days off from school, and he was
all ready for it with a carefully thought-out program to study earth
tremors in the vicinity of Mammoth Falls. We spent the first couple
of days building seismographs that Henry had designed and calibrating
them in our clubhouse in Jeff Crocker's barn. It isn't very difficult
to build a good seismograph. Knowing what to do with it is something else.
Most scientific projects boil down to two things; some serious thinking
and a lot of hard work. In the Mad Scientists' Club we split it up
evenly. Henry and Jeff do most of the thinking, and the rest of us do
the work.
The seismograph project was no exception. Henry had figured out just
where he wanted to place the instruments so that we could develop a
good record of the pattern of earth movements around the Mammoth Falls
area. He decided that we should keep one in the clubhouse in Jeff's
barn and make it the central recording station where he and Jeff would
analyze all the data we got. The other three instruments we built would
be placed in three distant points, so as to form a large triangle with
the town in the center.
Naturally, Henry had picked out three places that were hard to get
to. But, as I said, he and Jeff only had to do the thinking. The rest
of us had to set up the field instruments and then trek out to each one
of them every day to change the graph paper on the recording drums and
bring the last day's data back in to Henry.
We set one up on the very top of Brake Hill and another one on the floor
of the old abandoned quarry out west of Strawberry Lake. The third one we
set up on the big stone slab that's used as the throne in the council ring
on top of Indian Hill. We had to get permission from the local chapter
of the Daughters of Pocahontas to do this, because they always use the
place for their meetings even though they don't own it. The ladies were
very nice about it, though, and decided they couldn't stand in the way
of science. Besides, none of them could think of any business they had
to bring up at that month's meeting, anyway.
We had to balance each instrument very carefully and make sure the main
beam with the bob on it was precisely leveled. Then we had to adjust
the tension on the recording arm so that it would make a good trace
on the graph paper and still not interfere with the free movement of
the beam. All of this took a long time; Homer Snodgrass and Mortimer
Dalrymple did most of it, because they have a lot of patience and like
to work with fussy little stuff like dissecting flies and soldering
transistors in place and stuff like that. Freddy and Dinky and I do a
lot better on the big things like hauling rocks and digging and chopping
down trees. Freddy always says it's because we think big.
Anyway, we just sat around chewing the fat most of the time while Homer
and Mortimer fussed with each seismograph. Then, when they were satisfied
the thing would work all right, we went to work and put a pup tent up
over each one to protect it from the weather.
Compared to a lot of the other projects Henry had dreamed up for us,
this one seemed pretty dull. All we got out of it was sore feet and
a sunburn. We'd make the rounds of the seismograph locations each day
and bring back three pieces of graph paper with a squiggly line running
down the center. It was always late in the day when we got back, and we
were usually pretty hot and tired. Meanwhile, Jeff and Henry just bummed
around the clubhouse all day, swapping jokes and eating apple pie that
Jeff swiped out of his mother's kitchen.
"O Great Mogul! Would you mind telling us just what this is all
about?" said Freddy Muldoon one afternoon, as he plumped his ample bottom
onto an apple crate and mopped the sweat and dirt off his face.
"I don't mind," said Henry indulgently, as he looked up from the graphs
he was studying and pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. "That is,
if you think you can understand it."
"Let's give it a try," said Freddy, unperturbed.
|
"Well, those 'squiggly' lines, as you call them, are a record of
every movement in the earth's crust around this area for twenty-four
hours. With four recording stations we can get a good picture of how
strong the tremors are and what direction they're moving."
"So who cares?" said Freddy, fanning himself.
"A lot of people care," said Henry. "Someday we might have a big
earthquake in this area. Who knows?"
"Big deal!" said Freddy. "After all the buildings are knocked flat,
we'll know what caused it, huh?"
"Don't be a fat fink!" Mortimer Dalrymple chimed in from where he was
lying flat on the floor. "Sometimes I think you just don't know what
science is all about."
"Oh, yeah?" said Freddy.
"Yeah!" said Mortimer.
And that was all that was said about the matter for several days.
But Henry and Jeff did try to keep our interest up by showing us more of
what they were finding out from the graph traces we brought in. They had a
lot of them pinned up on the clubhouse walls that they intended to exhibit
in their science class when school opened again. The prize exhibits were
the three sets of traces that showed how violently the recording arms
on the seismographs had oscillated back and forth each time a dynamite
blast went off on the banks of Lemon Creek, where they were putting in the
footings for a new bridge at Cowper Street. The drums that we mounted the
graph paper on for each seismograph were rotated at a rate of one inch an
hour by a little electric motor run off a battery. Henry pointed out how
we could calculate from the traces just what time each blast went off,
how long it took the shock wave to reach each of our recording stations,
and how strong it was when it got there.
But Henry was proudest of the traces that he claimed showed the change
in earth vibrations when they turned on the reserve dynamos at the
power plant late in the afternoon and then shut them off again late in
the evening. Henry said anybody could detect a dynamite blast with his
ear, but it took a pretty sensitive instrument to detect a dynamo being
turned on.
Even Freddy and Dinky showed more interest in the project after
that. Freddy has a very active imagination, and he began dreaming up ways
that soldiers might use seismographs in combat to tell when tanks were
coming, and things like that. Every time he mentioned this Dinky would
give him a great big raspberry, but Freddy insisted it really wasn't
any different from the way the Indians would put one ear to the ground
so they could tell when the cavalry was coming after them.
On Thursday, when we brought the latest data in from the recording
stations, we found Henry and Jeff poring over the previous day's tracings,
which they had taken down from the wall. Henry grabbed the new sheets
out of my hand and spread them out on the table excitedly.
"Look, Jeff! Here it is again!" he cried, running his finger down the
ink trace on one of the sheets. We all crowded around the table to see
what Henry was so hipped about. He ran his finger across to the time
scale marked on the margin. "See! It's the same time too. It starts
about midnight and ends about four o'clock in the morning. What do you
make of it?"
Jeff scratched his head and puckered his brow. "I don't know, Henry. It's
sure odd. But maybe it's just a coincidence."
"It can't be a coincidence three nights in a row."
"I don't see nothin' but a squiggly line," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Shut up!" said Mortimer.
What Henry was pointing to was a series of extremely small oscillations
of the recording arm that showed up in the ink trace at very irregular
intervals in the early hours of the morning. He spread out the sheets
for the past three days, and we could all see little peaks that had been
recorded in the ink trace during the same hours on each day. Then they
stopped, as though somebody had turned something off, and the line was
smooth again. There wasn't any definable pattern to the peaks. They
just occurred at random during a four-hour period and then disappeared.
"This is a real mystery," said Henry. "If these tremors were caused by
a piece of machinery or anything mechanical -- you'd think they would
come at regular intervals. There'd be some kind of pattern to them. But
there's only one thing regular about this caper. It starts at midnight
and stops at four in the morning."
"That's real weird!" said Mortimer Dalrymple.
"Maybe it's a drunk staggering home from a bar, and every once in a
while he falls flat on his face," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Stow it, Freddy!" Jeff Crocker warned him. "It wouldn't take him four
hours to get home."
"You oughta be on television," sneered Dinky Poore. "You're almost as
funny as the commercials."
"How'd you like to work in my dad's service station?" Mortimer gibed at
him. "He could use a real gasser like you!"
"OK, you characters," Henry interrupted. "Maybe what Freddy said isn't
so stupid. Maybe he put his finger on the key to the whole thing."
"What do you mean?" asked Jeff.
"Whatever is causing these slight tremors is most likely human in
origin. That's what I mean," Henry replied. "Whether he knew it or not,
Freddy was
thinking about the problem when he came up with the
crack about the drunk. Maybe it would help if some of the rest of us
did a little thinking too."
"OK! Everybody think for five minutes!" Mortimer ordered in a loud voice.
"What we've got to think about is who would be up at that time of night,
and what he might be doing that he couldn't do in the daytime," Henry
continued.
"Maybe it's a night watchman," said Dinky Poore.
"Negative!" said Jeff Crocker. "Most night watchmen are pretty quiet."
"What about the garbage collectors?" said Homer Snodgrass. "They're
always banging cans around."
"Too early in the morning for them," said Henry. "Besides, they don't
do anything earthshaking."
Then everybody lapsed into silence, because Henry had tilted his piano
stool back against the wall and was gazing up into the rafters. We all
sat down and waited until Henry got through thinking.
When the legs of the piano stool hit the floor again, Henry's eyes had
that gleam in them that we all recognized as the birth of an idea. He
moved over to the large map of the county tacked on the clubhouse wall.
"I think we can narrow this problem down a bit," he said quietly. "We
can't tell from our recordings
what is causing these tremors. But we
can get some clues from them about
where the vibrations are coming from."
"Good idea, Henry!" Dinky Poore cried, smelling an adventure. "Then we
could sneak up on the place and find out what's going on."
"Exactly!" said Henry. "Now let's get to work."
When Henry said "work" he meant brainwork, so Dinky and Freddy and I
went fishing, leaving the rest of them to wrestle with the seismograph
tracings and Henry's homemade computer.
When we got back to the clubhouse late in the day, we found reams of
paper all over the place, and the county map was all marked up with
little circles indicating the locations of our seismograph stations and
with lines converging on the center of town. On the large map of Mammoth
Falls on the other wall, Henry had marked a large red circle that covered
about a third of the downtown business section.
"We think the source of these tremors is somewhere in this area,"
he said, tracing the circle with his finger. "Now, here's what we've
decided to do." But before he could get started, Jeff Crocker rapped
his gavel on the packing crate he uses for a podium, had the door locked
and the window shades drawn, and called the club into secret session.
Late that night I sneaked out of the house by shinnying down the drain
pipe outside my window and met Dinky and Freddy in the alley back
of Dinky's house. It was near midnight, and we made our way downtown
through vacant lots and back alleys so nobody would see us and wonder
what we were doing out that time of night. I carried a hand transceiver
so we could keep in communication with the clubhouse, where Henry
and Jeff were monitoring the seismograph. Dinky carried a radiosonde
transmitter strapped to the back of his belt that gave out a constant
beep signal. This would make it possible for Henry and Jeff to know where
we were at all times, in case we couldn't talk on the radio. There was
a directional antenna on our receiver at the clubhouse, and Homer and
Mortimer had taken another one out to the seismograph station on Indian
Hill. Between the two of them they could get a fix on our location at
any time. We sneaked through all the alleys of the downtown section as
quietly as we could. Every few feet we would stop and listen carefully and
put our hands lightly on the ground to see if we could pick up any kind
of vibrations. It was pretty slow going, and Henry would keep calling us
on the radio to tell us to move faster or switch over to another block.
We were groping our way down the narrow, cobblestoned alley behind
Jamieson's Variety Store when we heard something that brought us up
short. It was a series of dull thuds, spaced about one second apart.
"Jeepers!" said Freddy, and we all froze in place with our eyes and
ears alert.
The thudding had stopped, and we waited breathlessly in the darkness. Then
it started again. Dinky moved forward very cautiously, with his tousled
head thrust forward. He paused for a moment, listening intently, then
swung his arm in a wide arc motioning us toward the angle in the back
wall of Jamieson's where the elevator shaft jutted out into the alley. We
waited there for a few moments in the deep shadow of the wall. It was
so quiet you could hear the sweat from Freddy's forehead dripping onto
the cobblestones.
When the thudding noises started again Dinky inched his way around the
corner of the elevator wall, and we followed. Just then Henry called on
the radio. "This is High Mogul," he said. I cupped my hand around the
mouthpiece of the transceiver and said, "Shut up!" in a hoarse whisper
and shut the thing off. We crept along the wall of the elevator shaft
and rounded the second corner to where it joined the wall of the main
building again. There was a thin sliver of light visible at the corner
of one of the basement windows.
"Holy mackerel!" said Freddy Muldoon.
"There must be someone down there," Dinky whispered, with his hand cupped
around my ear. "What'll we do now?"
"We can't back out now!" I whispered back. "Let's go for broke!"
Dinky nodded. "Wait till the noise starts again." When the pounding
commenced once more, Dinky got down on all fours and crept up to the
basement window. A gunnysack had been tacked over it, but the sliver of
light we had seen came from the left edge of the window where the burlap
had curled back. Dinky pressed one eye up close to the window jamb and
peered in.
|
When he pulled his head back he was waving frantically at me. I crawled up
beside him and peeked inside. There were four men in the basement. One
of them was holding a kerosene lantern in his hand at shoulder height.
Another was sitting on a packing crate, smoking a cigarette. The other
two were working at a gaping hole in one wall with a sledge hammer and
a crowbar padded with burlap. I pulled my head back and I looked along
the alley to reorient myself. I was right! The building right next to
Jamieson's was the Mammoth Falls Trust and Deposit Company. I looked
at Dinky, and he looked at me. Just then the pounding stopped. We both
pressed our eyes up to the window. The man with the cigarette had gotten
up off the packing crate and moved to the wall. He took three oblong
objects the color of butter from a wooden box and crammed them into
the farthest recess of the hole in the wall. He must have had to go in
quite a way, because he reached in all the way up to his waist. When he
pulled himself out, the other men went to work and tamped a lot of loose
rubble back into the hole and fixed it in place with some cement. Then
they all sat down and lighted cigarettes.
We waited breathlessly in the darkness. When nothing had happened after
a minute or two, I crept back around the wall of the elevator shaft and
tried to reach Henry on the radio. I had just gotten him to answer when
there was a muffled explosion. I could feel the wall of the elevator
shaft tremble a bit. The seat of my pants seemed to rise an inch or so
off the cobblestones, and I sat back down again, hard.
"What on earth was that?" Henry shouted into the radio. "The needle on
the graph just jumped a mile!"
"I think it was an explosion," I gulped. "There are some men in Jamieson's
basement, and they've been digging through the wall into the bank!"
"Go get the police!" Henry shouted. "We'll try to call them from Jeff's
house."
I started back around the wall of the elevator shaft to get Freddy and
Dinky and stopped just in time. The figure of a big, burly man loomed
out of the shadows. He grabbed both of them by the collar while they
were still peering through the slit in the window.
"Lemme go, you big moose!" Freddy shouted, struggling to get free.
"Shut up, Fatso, or I'll bash your head against the wall!" the man
muttered in a gruff voice.
I didn't wait to hear any more. I crept back around the corner and then
darted down the alley, heading for the police station. A car was backing
slowly up the alley with no lights on. The driver slapped his brakes on
when he saw me flash past, and I heard his door swing open. But I didn't
wait to answer any questions. I just kept running and slid around the
corner into Walnut Street. I could hear footsteps pounding behind me, but
by the time they reached the head of the alley I was already half a block
up the street, and whoever was chasing me turned around and went back.
The next fifteen minutes seemed like one of those nightmares you have
when you're trying to holler for help and no sound comes out of your
mouth. All I could think about was Dinky and Freddy struggling with that
big brute in the alley, and I must have sprinted the six blocks to the
police station in ten seconds flat. But when I got there the door was
locked and there was just one feeble light burning in a goosenecked lamp
on the night desk. I could see Constable Billy Dahr's feet propped up
on the desk, but his head was out of sight in the shadows.
I rattled the door and pounded on it with my fists and hollered like
bloody blazes, but his feet didn't even move. I could hear the phone
ringing and I knew it must be Jeff and Henry calling in, but Billy
was snoring too loud to even hear it. Finally I dashed around to a side
window and threw a big rock through it. You'd have thought Armageddon had
come. Billy Dahr bolted up out of the swivel chair, like a punch-drunk
fighter answering the bell, and sent the goosenecked lamp flying onto
the floor. The office was plunged into darkness. I could hear him cursing
and stumbling around inside, trying to find the light switch.
When he had finally gotten the lights on and unlocked the front door for
me, I knew I'd have a lot of explaining to do. I decided not to answer
any questions.
"Call Chief Putney, quick!" I shouted, before Billy Dahr could open his
mouth. "Some men are trying to rob the bank!"
"What in tarnation?" Billy muttered, rubbing his eyes. "Is them the ones
threw that rock through the window?"
"Forget the rock, Constable Dahr," I said, pushing him back through the
door. "I had to throw it to wake you up. Please call the chief right
away. Freddy and Dinky are back there in the alley --"
Billy Dahr was rummaging through the drawers of the desk. I picked up
the phone and handed it to him. "Here's the phone. Call him, quick!"
"That there ain't no help," mumbled Billy, pushing the phone back down
on the desk. "I don't know his number. Now where's that danged phone
book?" and he went on rummaging through the desk.
I finally picked up the phone myself and dialed the operator.
"Get me the police," I said. "It's an emergency!"
I could hear her dialing, and then she came back on the line and said
she was sorry but the number was busy.
"Please keep trying, operator; it's urgent!"
"OK," she said. "I'll keep trying and call you right back. Where are
you calling from?"
"From the police station," I said.
There was a pause. Then she said, "Maybe that's why the number is busy."
"I'm sorry, operator," I apologized. "I want Chief Putney's home."
"Do you have the number?"
"No!"
"I'll connect you with Information."
And that's the way things went. By the time we got Chief Putney out
of bed and pulled up in the alley back of Jamieson's with a squad car,
the place was quiet as a tomb and there was no sign of Dinky and Freddy.
"I'll betcha they've been kidnapped!" I cried.
"Now take it easy, son," said Chief Putney in his slow methodical
voice. "Let's not jump to conclusions." Two policemen clambered into
the basement of Jamieson's and came back to report that there was a
hole big enough for a man to crawl through right into the vault of the
Mammoth Falls Trust and Deposit Company.
"The vault's been pretty well cleaned out," one of them said. "No telling
how much they got away with!"
"If that don't beat all!" said Billy Dahr.
It was then I remembered that I hadn't told Henry and Jeff what had
happened. When I switched on the radio, Jeff had been trying to reach
me and he sounded like a fishwife.
"Where on earth have you been for the last fifteen minutes? And what
are you doing way out there west of town?"
"I'm not way out west of town," I said, "I'm right here in the alley
back of the bank."
"Well what's going on? We're getting beeps from the radiosonde way out
on White Fork Road. It's been moving west for the last ten minutes."
"That's Dinky and Freddy," I said. "I think they've been kidnapped!
"Kidnapped? Cut the comedy, Charlie. What's going on?"
"Honest, Jeff!" And I told him about the big man grabbing Dinky and
Freddy, and about the car backing up into the alley.
"Is Chief Putney there?" Jeff asked. I told him he was. "Tell him we've
got a fix on where that transmitter is. And if it's still on Dinky's belt,
and Dinky's been kidnapped, then we know where the bank robbers are."
I climbed down into Jamieson's basement and collared Chief Putney and
told him what Henry had told me. At first he didn't seem to understand.
"Why don't you kids mind your own business and stop interfering!" he
growled. "You ought to be home in bed anyway." But then Billy Dahr
reminded him that if it hadn't been for me running to the police station
they wouldn't even have known the bank had been robbed.
"I guess you're right, Billy," said the Chief. "But I never saw such a
nosy bunch of kids in all my life. Some day I'm going to find out how
they always seem to be around when things go wrong."
"Henry says if you'll send the squad car up to Jeff Crocker's barn he
can tell them where the transmitter signals are coming from. Then you
can put it out on the police net."
"OK, OK!" said Chief Putney, clapping one hand to his forehead. "Maybe
your friend Henry would like to run the whole operation."
"We're just trying to help out," I told him.
Chief Putney got on the radio and sent a squad car from the county
sheriff's office to Jeff Crocker's barn. Then he alerted the state
Highway Patrol and asked them to set up roadblocks in a wide circle
around Mammoth Falls.
"What about the FBI?" I asked him. "This is a kidnap case."
"Please go lie down someplace, Charlie!" the Chief groaned. "I don't
want to have to arrest myself for childbeating."
It wasn't long before a squad car from the sheriff's office pulled into
the alley with its beacon light flashing and its siren screaming. An
officer stuck his head out of the window.
"Just got a call from the control car," he said. "They say that car
isn't moving west any more. It's stopped somewhere up in the hills west
of Strawberry Lake. How on earth can they tell where that car is?"
"Magic!" said Chief Putney. "I just caught one of the magicians."
"Who? That kid over there?"
"Yeah! Put him in your car so we know where he is. If you get a chance,
have someone phone his parents so they know he's all right. Let's
get going."
The Chief's car screamed off into the darkness, heading toward the White
Fork Road. My head snapped back against the cushion of the rear seat
of the sheriff's car as we took off after it. Two of Chief Putney's men
stayed behind to guard the bank vault.
Dinky and Freddy, meanwhile, found themselves being bound and gagged
and thrust through the door of a log cabin in the hills overlooking
Strawberry Lake. They had both been blindfolded back in the alley, so
they didn't know where they had been taken or what for. But they knew
the car had been climbing a winding road for some time, and Dinky could
smell the odor of gun oil and kerosene. He guessed they might be in one
of the small hunting lodges that dotted the area around the old zinc
mine and the limestone quarry. The two men who pushed them through the
door followed inside and tied them securely to the end posts of a double
bunk against one wall of the cabin. As the door was closing behind them,
Dinky drove one elbow into Freddy's ribs.
"Ouch!" yelped Freddy.
"I'm glad they didn't steal my transistor radio," said Dinky, in a
hoarse whisper.
"What's that about a radio?" said the big, hulking man, kicking open
the door again.
"It's just an old radio," said Dinky. "It belongs to my little sister."
"I seen something on the back of that kid's belt when we pushed him
through the door," said the other man.
"I think we'll just take it," said the big man. "It might come in handy."
"Please don't take it! My sister doesn't know I have it," cried Dinky,
squirming to press his back against the bunk post.
"Now ain't that just too bad!" said the gruff voice of the big man,
as he whipped Dinky's belt from his trousers. "Maybe that'll teach ya
to mind your own business after this."
The big man thrust the transmitter into one of the money bags taken from
the bank vault, and the two slipped out the door, slamming it closed
behind them.
"You some kind of a nut?" asked Freddy, in a terse whisper. "Now nobody
will ever find us."
"They might find the money, though. And the robbers too," Dinky snickered.
They heard the car start again outside. It passed right behind the cabin,
went a short distance, and then the sound of the engine stopped.
"Maybe they're out of gas," said Freddy.
"I don't think so," said Dinky. "Listen a minute."
Suddenly they heard the sound of branches breaking, followed by a
tremendous crash, more branches breaking, and the clanking and ringing
sound of metal striking stone.
"Holy mackerel! They must have driven over a cliff!" cried Freddy.
"Shut up!" warned Dinky, digging him again in the ribs. "They'll be back
here again. All they did was shove the car down the side of the hill."
"What for? Are they nuts, or somethin'?"
"Don't you ever watch TV?" sneered Dinky. "Robbers always get rid of
the getaway car. That's the one the police would be looking for."
"What are they gonna do? Walk?"
"No! They probably have another car stashed away in the woods somewhere."
Dinky and Freddy waited breathlessly for further sounds from outside the
cabin, but the minutes ticked past and not a sound broke the stillness
of the woods.
But the steady
beep-beep-beep of the telltale transmitter could
be heard clearly by Henry and Jeff back in the Crockers' barn, as it
swung to and fro in the canvas bag carried by one of the bank robbers.
It was moving so slowly now that the directional finders could barely
detect its progress. Henry showed the sheriffs deputies at the barn the
spot on the map where he thought the beeps were coming from. They seemed
to be moving toward the old abandoned zinc mine.
"Maybe they figure on hiding out in the mine until the heat's off,"
said Jeff.
"If they do, they've got a surprise coming!" said one of the deputies,
and he went out to his car to get Chief Putney on the radio.
By this time, Dinky had managed to wriggle free from the ropes that
bound him to the bunk post. Very quietly, he started to untie Freddy.
"How'd you do it?" asked Freddy, in a whisper. "My wrists are so stiff
I can't move 'em."
"It's a cinch!" said Dinky. "When somebody ties you up, just tense all
your muscles and keep 'em as tight as you can. When you relax, the ropes
are loose and you can get out, if you're good."
"Where'd you learn that?"
"I read it in a book about Houdini!"
"About who did what?"
"About Houdini. That's a man's name."
"Oh! One o' them East Indians, huh?"
"No! He was just a plain old American and a real cool magician."
"OK! Whatta we do now?" asked Freddy.
"Well, we don't have any radio, and it's too far to walk back to town,
so we're gonna start a great big bonfire outside and let people know
where we are."
"What about the robbers?" asked Freddy. "Won't they see the fire and
come back and clobber us?"
"I don't think so," said Dinky. "They gotta keep making tracks and clear
out of here. They don't have time to come back now."
"How we gonna start a fire? We don't have any matches."
"I've got a knife," said Dinky. "That's all we need."
"OK, Mac! Make with the knife!" said Freddy. "Is this some more of your
Houdini stuff?"
"No," Dinky said offhandedly. "This is a good old American Indian trick."
Dinky really is a whiz with a knife. In no time at all he had cut a good
springy bow from a small birch branch and stripped a long piece of bark
from a root to make a thong for it. Then he whittled a small hole in a
flat piece of wood he found in the cabin and carved out a blunt-ended
drill about the size of a tent peg from a piece of pine. He had Freddy
strip some dry shreds of tinder from the inside of the bark on an old
log lying in back of the cabin, and he was ready to start a fire.
"C'mon, magician, let's make with the heat!" said Freddy, jumping up
and down. "I'm cold." For all his blubber, Freddy gets cold quicker
than anybody else in our gang. And his teeth were chattering now, from
sitting on the cold cabin floor.
Dinky knelt on the ground with one foot on the flat board and twisted
the thong of the bow around the pine drill. Then he inserted the blunt
end of the drill in the little hole he'd made in the board and started
to rotate it rapidly back and forth, making long, sawing motions with
the bow, like a bass fiddle player. Freddy watched in amazement as the
end of the drill got hot and began to smoke. Pretty soon he could smell
the odor of burning pine. Then, suddenly, Dinky sprang to his feet and
popped a hot spark from the board into a handful of the dry tinder. He
started dancing around in a circle with it, waving it in the wind and
blowing on it. The smoke from the tinder got thicker and thicker, and
then it suddenly burst into flame.
"Ouch!" Dinky yelped, as the flaming tinder burnt his hand.
He dropped the burning mass into a pile of dry leaves, and he and Freddy
sprinkled wood shavings and twigs on it until they had a good blaze
going. Then they built a crib of larger logs around the fire and soon had
a raging inferno that threw a column of flame thirty feet into the air.
You could see the light from the fire all the way back to Mammoth
Falls. The sheriff's deputy outside Jeff Crocker's barn saw it and called
Chief Putney's car on the radio.
"Looks like a big fire up in the hills right where you're heading. Can
you see it?"
"Negative!" Chief Putney called back. "We're in the woods. Can't see
anything."
"The kid inside says it might be one of those hunting lodges up
there. Better check it out. He says he's still getting radio signals
pretty steady from around the old zinc mine."
Just then the car I was riding in shot around a sharp bend in the road,
and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of light from among
the trees over on the next ridge of hills. I pounded the driver on the
shoulder and shouted to him to stop.
"We're on the wrong road," I told him. "I just saw a flash of light
through the trees, and it came from those hills on the other side of
the creek."
The driver slammed on his brakes. "How do we get there?"
"Go back to the wooden bridge," I told him. "There's an old logging road
that goes up to that ridge." The deputy called Chief Putney on the radio
while we backed around in a clearing. Soon we were climbing through the
trees up the slopes of the other ridge, with the chief's car following
us. The sheriff's deputy was really gunning it up the twisting, deeply
rutted road, and I was tossing around in the back seat like a sack of
potatoes, trying to find something to hold on to.
The chief's voice came over the radio. "Don't run your siren! And dim
your lights when we get near the top," he said. "If the men we're
looking for are up there, we want to surprise them."
But when we rounded the last hairpin turn and pulled into the brightly
lighted clearing where the fire was raging, all we could see were the
figures of Dinky and Freddy, silhouetted against the flames.
"The robbers took off into the woods!" shouted Freddy. "They pushed
their car down the hill over there."
"How long ago?" asked the chief.
"Maybe twenty minutes, maybe more," said Dinky. "Bet they got another
car stashed away somewhere."
"If they have, they'd have to come back down this road with it," said
the sheriff's deputy. "There isn't any other road leading off this ridge,
is there?"
"Not that I know of," I told him. "This is the only one."
"Then they must be planning on hiding out somewhere until the heat's
off. The last report on the net said those radio beeps were coming from
up near the old zinc mine."
"I can't figure it out," said Chief Putney. "If they plan to hide out
here in the hills, why did they leave these two kids behind to give us
a lead on where they were? If they hole up in the mine it might take us
a week to smoke 'em out, but all we have to do is blockade the entrance
and they're stuck. I just can't figure it out."
"It almost seems like they
wanted us to follow them," said the deputy.
Suddenly a thought struck me. "Wait a minute!" I cried, grabbing the
chief's arm. "There
is another road off this ridge. Only it isn't an
automobile road; it's a railroad. It's the old branch line running up
to Hyattsville from, the zinc mine. You know the one, Chief. It crosses
Turkey Hill Road right at The Gap."
"That's the third nutty thing you've said tonight!" said the chief. "I
suppose they have the California Zephyr waiting there to take them to
San Francisco!"
"I don't know about the California Zephyr," I said, "but they could use
old Leapin' Lena. That's that old handcar that's parked in the Ioading
yard. It works too!"
"Maybe the kid's right, Chief," said the sheriff's deputy. "Maybe they
hoped we
would follow them on foot -- and get stuck up there by the mine
with no radio while they made a getaway down the railroad. It's downhill
all the way to Hyattsville. They could make thirty miles an hour easy
with that rusty handcar and never come near one of our roadblocks."
Just then the radio in the squad car started squawking. It was Henry,
wanting to talk to Chief Putney.
"We've still got a fix on that transmitter," he said in a shrill voice,
"and it's started moving straight north. Pretty fast too. We figure
they're following that old railroad spur from the zinc mine. They're
probably heading for Hyattsville."
"You ain't telling me nothing I don't already know!" said the Chief
haughtily. "We already figured that out."
"Oh!" said Henry.
"And by the way," said the Chief, "we found your two partners in crime
and they're all right. So you can tell their folks to pick 'em up at
the station in the morning."
"You mean they're under arrest? But we didn't do anything, Chief!"
"Let's just say I have them in protective custody."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm not letting any of you kids out of my sight until we've
nabbed those bank bandits."
"How are you going to do that unless I tell you where they are?" said
Henry. "They've already figured out how to get through all your
roadblocks."
"You can only go one place on a railroad, sonny. We'll be waiting for
them at the end of the line."
"What if they get off before the end of the line?"
"You're full of bright ideas!" said the Chief. "Do you think they're
stupid enough to take off on foot again?"
"No!" said Henry. "I think they planned their getaway better than that."
"Well, if they've got another car waiting where that track passes under
the state highway, we'll catch 'em in one of our roadblocks."
"They've already passed the state highway," said Henry, "and our tracking
antennas tell us they're still heading toward Hyattsville."
"Good! Then we'll get 'em at 'the end of the line."
"You're not thinking, Chief."
"See here, young Mulligan, I'll--"
"Haven't you ever dreamed about what you'd do if you were a bank robber?"
"No, I haven't!" fumed the Chief.
"Well, I have," said Henry. "And I'll bet one of our dinosaur eggs that
I know just what they're planning."
"Is that so? Well, supposing you tell me."
"What about Dinky and Freddy?"
"OK, OK! We'll see they get home all right," said the Chief. "Now,
tell me your brilliant idea."
"Well, if I were a bank robber I think I'd have a boat waiting at the
railroad trestle over Lemon Creek. And with good luck I'd probably be
out into the lakes and all the way to Canada before you figured out
what happened."
There was a long silence.
"Are you still there, Chief?" asked Henry finally. "Do you want me to
phone Mr. Monaghan's boathouse? You could probably nab them at the mouth
of Lemon Creek if you get a couple of patrol cars down there right away."
Chief Putney was fuming and sputtering.
"You're a crazy nut, Mulligan!" he said at last. "Now, suppose you get
off the radio and let me be the Chief of Police."
"I was just trying to help," Henry said.
"That's the kind of help I can do without," said the Chief. "Now get
off the air and let me talk to Officer Riley."
"This is Riley, Chief," came a new voice.
"Listen, Riley, turn your volume down," whispered the Chief. "Now,
is that kid still around?"
"No, Chief. He went back in the barn."
"Good! Now listen, Riley. I want you to get two cars down to Monaghan's
boathouse at the river right away. Call him on the phone and tell him
to get a couple of boats ready. I think those crooks might try to make
a getaway down Lemon Creek."
"Good thinking, Chief! What about these kids?"
|
"Riley, I think we can play cops and robbers without having those kids
underfoot. Leave 'em there in the barn."
"I just thought that direction finder of theirs might come in handy."
"You're not being paid to think! Just follow orders."
"Right, Chief!"
"See that these kids all get home right away," Chief Putney said to the
sheriff's deputy. "Then report to the control center at the Crockers'
barn. I'm heading for Monaghan's boathouse." The Chief's car showered
us with gravel as the driver spun it around and headed pell-mell down
the road.
The deputy helped us throw dirt over the remains of the bonfire, and
then Dinky and Freddy and I clambered into his car.
"I hope the Chief's doing the right thing," he said, as he nursed the
car down the road off the ridge. "It might not be so easy spotting that
boat in the dark. I've been duck hunting in those bulrushes at the mouth
of the creek and they spread out pretty far. There's a lot of places a
boat could slip through without ever getting near Monaghan's boathouse."
"They wouldn't get away if Henry was there with our direction finder,"
I said.
"You got a portable set?"
"Sure! We have a battery power pack, and we can take it anywhere."
The deputy looked at his watch and rubbed his chin. Then there was a
long silence. Suddenly, when he reached the hardtop of the county road,
he flicked on his flashing beacon and the tires screamed as he pushed
the accelerator to the floor.
"This'll be the first time in my life I didn't follow orders," he said.
We must have waked up all of Jeff Crocker's family when we skidded into
the driveway beside the barn. The deputy turned the car around while I
rushed in and got Henry.
"They're heading down Lemon Creek, all right -- as close as we can
figure," said Henry, as we piled into the deputy's car with the battery
set. "Jeff'll keep a track on them and let us know if there's any change."
"Hey! What's going on, Sergeant?" a policeman shouted from the control
car parked beside the barn.
"Just call me 'Corporal'!" the deputy hollered back. "See you in
court!" And we spun out of the driveway with the siren wide open.
The deputy kept glancing at his watch as we sped down the state highway
toward the turnoff for the river. Henry had turned our receiver on and
was holding it up to the window of the car, trying to pick up the signal
of the transmitter. There was nothing coming over the police net.
"I hope we get there in time," said the deputy. "The chief had about
ten minutes' start on us and he didn't have to drive as far."
"Don't worry," said Henry. "Jeff is telephoning Mr. Monaghan. He'll have
another boat ready for us."
"How'm I gonna explain this to Chief Putney?" moaned the deputy, clapping
one hand to his forehead.
"Maybe you won't have to," cried Henry. "I think I've got something! Pull
over! Pull over to the side of the road!"
The deputy braked the car down sharply, and we ground to a halt on
the apron. "What's the matter? What's up?" he asked, twisting round in
his seat. Henry turned his loop antenna a hair to the right and turned
the volume up on the speaker. Then he took his earphones off. The steady
beep-beep-beep of Dinky's little transmitter was clearly audible.
"Have you got a map?" Henry asked the deputy.
"Sure!" He reached in the glove compartment, pulled out a road map,
and spread it on the seat beside him.
"Where are we right now?" asked Henry, shining his flashlight on the map.
"I'd say we were right about here." The deputy pointed to a jog in the
red line marking the state highway. Henry pulled his compass from his
pocket and took a reading in the direction the antenna was pointing. Then
he marked an X on the map where Lemon Creek took a sharp turn toward
the river.
"I figure they're just about there now. They've got at least three miles
to go before they reach the river."
"That ought to take them twenty or twentyfive minutes," said the
deputy. "I'm sure they're using a rowboat or a canoe."
"They must be," I said. "A motorboat would make too much noise."
"Let's get going!" Henry urged. "We won't go to Monaghan's boathouse. Turn
right, down the Old Mill Road."
"The Old Mill Road? Are you nuts?"
"Please, Officer!" Henry pleaded. "We've only got about ten minutes."
"Oh, boy!" said the deputy. "You're going to get me in real trouble!"
"You're in trouble already," said Henry. "How would you like a chance
to be a hero?"
"A live hero or a dead hero?"
"How would you like to capture those bank bandits singlehanded?" Henry
persisted.
"Sonny, I hear you talking, but I've got a wife and kids to think about."
"They'll be proud of you after tonight," said Henry. "Let's get going!"
"Oh, boy! I should have taken you kids home, like the Chief told me,"
mumbled the deputy, as he put the car in gear and pulled it onto the
highway.
As we turned down the road leading to the old abandoned mill on Lemon
Creek, Henry outlined his plan.
"It's simple," he said. "They ought to reach the millpond in about
ten minutes. The only way to get out of it is to go through the sluice
way. That's a natural trap. If we can close the downstream gate before
they get there, we'll have them blocked. And if we close the upstream
gate after they're in the sluice, they can't possibly get out. The walls
are about fifteen feet high and covered with green slime. They'll be
helpless! All we have to do is sit there and wait for the Chief to come."
Even the deputy was smiling now, and he pushed the patrol car down the
winding road even faster than before.
"Great idea, Mulligan! Great!" he exclaimed. Then he frowned. "But what
about those gates? Will they work?"
"Sure they will," I said. "The sluice is still used as a lock to let
boats out of the millpond. The winches are in good shape. We've closed
the gates lots of times to trap fish."
"Remind me to tell the game warden about that," said the deputy.
"Forget it," said Freddy Muldoon. "That's just one of Charlie's fish
stories."
"Do you have any tear gas?" Henry asked.
"Yeah!" said the deputy. "That's a good idea. There's two grenades in
the glove compartment there. Get 'em out."
"Put your lights out before we get to the creek," Henry warned. "We
don't want to tip them off."
"OK, Chief!" said the deputy. "Any other orders?"
The deputy pulled the car off the road about a hundred yards short of
the creek, and we ran the rest of the way to the millhouse. With a half
moon rising in the east there was just enough light to see by. The old
millhouse is a pretty sneaky place to be messing around in when it's
dark, but we knew every nook and cranny of it by heart. Dinky and Freddy
clambered across the catwalk to the other side of the sluice and lay flat
on their bellies on top of the wall. Henry and I took the deputy into
the winch house, and the three of us lowered the downstream gate. It
creaked and groaned a lot, but we figured the bank bandits were still
far enough away so that they couldn't hear it.
"Don't close it all the way," Henry advised. "We don't want the water
level to rise too high in the sluice. After we've shut the upstream gate,
we can let it down the rest of the way."
We crawled out onto the mill dam and lay there behind the railing
holding our breath. The only sound came from the water gurgling under
the downstream sluice gate, and we hoped the men we were waiting for
weren't smart enough to recognize the sound and realize the gate was
closed. Henry had the directional receiver tuned again and was rotating
the antenna, trying to get a fix on the transmitter signal. He had just
picked up the beep when I could see the dim outline of a small boat
ease out of the shadows about two hundred yards upstream and move into
a patch of moonlight. I grabbed Henry by the elbow and he shut off the
receiver. We crawled back to the winch house, leaving the deputy lying
flat on his stomach near the upstream gate.
Inside the winch house we waited, crouched in the darkness, for the
signal that would tell us when to close the upstream gate. It seemed
like it was forever, and I could hear Henry's breathing just as clear
as the blower on our hot air furnace at home. I was sweating all over
and shaking with chills at the same time. I figured this must be how an
eel would feel in a Turkish bath.
Suddenly a flash of light flicked at the window of the winch house. It was
the signal from the deputy that the boat had entered the sluice. Henry
and I sprang into action and threw our weight against the trunnion of
the winch. My feet slipped from under me and I tripped Henry, and we
both fell to the floor, but we managed to spin the winch fast enough
to close the. upstream gate before the men in the boat knew what was
happening. Then we dashed to the other winch and lowered the downstream
gate the rest of the way.
When we scrambled out to our places along the guard rail at the edge of
the sluice, the boat had already rammed against the downstream gate. There
were sounds of confusion and violent cursing coming up from the bottom
of the dark chamber in which the bandits were trapped. The bright beam
of the deputy's flashlight stabbed into the depths of the sluiceway and
came to rest on the figures of four men huddled in a small rowboat. The
deputy's voice rang out in a booming command that resounded back and
forth between the walls of the sluice.
"Throw your guns in the water! You're surrounded!"
Four more beams of light hit the bandits in the face as Dinky, Freddy,
Henry, and I flicked on our flashlights from opposite sides of the
sluice. The men in the boat threw their hands up, and one of them shouted,
"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! We're just going fishing."
"You can't fish with a rod like that!" the deputy shouted back. "Throw
it in the water!"
There was a splash as the pistol dropped from the hand of the man standing
in the stern of the boat.
"Get the rest of them overboard before we load your boat with tear gas!"
Three more weapons splashed in the water. The man in the bow of the boat
reached under the seat and tried to slip a canvas sack over the side,
but the deputy's pistol cracked like a whip and a bullet nicked the
gunwale beside him.
"Leave the money where it is!" barked the deputy. "Put your hands on
top of your head and lie down in the boat!"
It isn't easy for one man to lie down in a rowboat, let alone four. But
when your have to, you find a way to do it, and the four bank bandits
were smart enough to figure it out.
"OK, Mulligan. Get on the radio and tell 'em it's all over," said the
deputy calmly. And Henry made tracks for the patrol car.
"You characters ought to know you can't fish in this county before
daybreak," said the deputy, as he lighted a cigarette. "Now, just as
soon as we can truck a ladder in here, we'll get you out of there."
It only took about ten minutes for two more patrol cars to show up
at the old mill. And we didn't need a ladder to get the captives out
of the sluice. We just opened the upper gate long enough to float the
boat up to the top of the wall, and the bank robbers climbed out meek
as lambs. I don't think they ever knew there was only one policeman on
the scene when they threw their guns in the water.
Freddy Muldoon ran up and kicked the biggest man right in the
shins. "That's for calling me 'Fatso'!" he shouted, and then he retreated
to a safe distance. One of the policemen grabbed him by the collar and
half carried him off the dam. The big man stood there with his mouth open,
rubbing one leg against the other.
"There ought to be a law against kids," he said. "I knew there'd be
trouble when I found them two in the alley."
"What about my transmitter?" Dinky asked. "It's in one of those canvas
bags."
"We'll have to hold it for evidence, sonny," said one of the
policemen. "You'll get it back later on."
Chief Putney didn't get in on the capture. He and three other policemen
were blockading the mouth of Lemon Creek with two motorboats, and they
didn't have a radio. It wasn't until daybreak that they saw Mr. Monaghan
standing at the end of his dock waving a pair of red flannel drawers at
them. When they got back to the police station we were all sitting around
sipping hot chocolate and talking to a reporter from the
Mammoth
Falls Gazette. Henry asked Chief Putney if he could send a patrol
car out to Indian Hill to pick up Homer and Mortimer.
"You've just given me a great idea," grumbled the Chief. "We don't need a
police department around here anymore. What we need is a good all-night
taxi service. Have you got fifty cents for the fare?"
"No!" said Henry.
"Oh, that's really too bad!" said the Chief, sarcastically. Then he
turned to Billy Dahr and told him to send a car out to Indian Hill.
Last updated 4 Apr 98 by
max
The Telltale Transmitter
The Telltale Transmitter
© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer
H
ENRY M
ULLIGAN has always had
a generous supply of what is called scientific curiosity. Sometimes it
gets us into trouble -- like the time Freddy Muldoon and Dinky Poore got
kidnapped for being too nosy about something Henry had discovered.
Henry is a great one for thinking ahead, and he always has some new
project planned for the Mad Scientists' Club to work on during vacation
periods. Last Easter we had about ten days off from school, and he was
all ready for it with a carefully thought-out program to study earth
tremors in the vicinity of Mammoth Falls. We spent the first couple
of days building seismographs that Henry had designed and calibrating
them in our clubhouse in Jeff Crocker's barn. It isn't very difficult
to build a good seismograph. Knowing what to do with it is something else.
Most scientific projects boil down to two things; some serious thinking
and a lot of hard work. In the Mad Scientists' Club we split it up
evenly. Henry and Jeff do most of the thinking, and the rest of us do
the work.
The seismograph project was no exception. Henry had figured out just
where he wanted to place the instruments so that we could develop a
good record of the pattern of earth movements around the Mammoth Falls
area. He decided that we should keep one in the clubhouse in Jeff's
barn and make it the central recording station where he and Jeff would
analyze all the data we got. The other three instruments we built would
be placed in three distant points, so as to form a large triangle with
the town in the center.
Naturally, Henry had picked out three places that were hard to get
to. But, as I said, he and Jeff only had to do the thinking. The rest
of us had to set up the field instruments and then trek out to each one
of them every day to change the graph paper on the recording drums and
bring the last day's data back in to Henry.
We set one up on the very top of Brake Hill and another one on the floor
of the old abandoned quarry out west of Strawberry Lake. The third one we
set up on the big stone slab that's used as the throne in the council ring
on top of Indian Hill. We had to get permission from the local chapter
of the Daughters of Pocahontas to do this, because they always use the
place for their meetings even though they don't own it. The ladies were
very nice about it, though, and decided they couldn't stand in the way
of science. Besides, none of them could think of any business they had
to bring up at that month's meeting, anyway.
We had to balance each instrument very carefully and make sure the main
beam with the bob on it was precisely leveled. Then we had to adjust
the tension on the recording arm so that it would make a good trace
on the graph paper and still not interfere with the free movement of
the beam. All of this took a long time; Homer Snodgrass and Mortimer
Dalrymple did most of it, because they have a lot of patience and like
to work with fussy little stuff like dissecting flies and soldering
transistors in place and stuff like that. Freddy and Dinky and I do a
lot better on the big things like hauling rocks and digging and chopping
down trees. Freddy always says it's because we think big.
Anyway, we just sat around chewing the fat most of the time while Homer
and Mortimer fussed with each seismograph. Then, when they were satisfied
the thing would work all right, we went to work and put a pup tent up
over each one to protect it from the weather.
Compared to a lot of the other projects Henry had dreamed up for us,
this one seemed pretty dull. All we got out of it was sore feet and
a sunburn. We'd make the rounds of the seismograph locations each day
and bring back three pieces of graph paper with a squiggly line running
down the center. It was always late in the day when we got back, and we
were usually pretty hot and tired. Meanwhile, Jeff and Henry just bummed
around the clubhouse all day, swapping jokes and eating apple pie that
Jeff swiped out of his mother's kitchen.
"O Great Mogul! Would you mind telling us just what this is all
about?" said Freddy Muldoon one afternoon, as he plumped his ample bottom
onto an apple crate and mopped the sweat and dirt off his face.
"I don't mind," said Henry indulgently, as he looked up from the graphs
he was studying and pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. "That is,
if you think you can understand it."
"Let's give it a try," said Freddy, unperturbed.
|
|
"Well, those 'squiggly' lines, as you call them, are a record of
every movement in the earth's crust around this area for twenty-four
hours. With four recording stations we can get a good picture of how
strong the tremors are and what direction they're moving."
"So who cares?" said Freddy, fanning himself.
"A lot of people care," said Henry. "Someday we might have a big
earthquake in this area. Who knows?"
"Big deal!" said Freddy. "After all the buildings are knocked flat,
we'll know what caused it, huh?"
"Don't be a fat fink!" Mortimer Dalrymple chimed in from where he was
lying flat on the floor. "Sometimes I think you just don't know what
science is all about."
"Oh, yeah?" said Freddy.
"Yeah!" said Mortimer.
And that was all that was said about the matter for several days.
But Henry and Jeff did try to keep our interest up by showing us more of
what they were finding out from the graph traces we brought in. They had a
lot of them pinned up on the clubhouse walls that they intended to exhibit
in their science class when school opened again. The prize exhibits were
the three sets of traces that showed how violently the recording arms
on the seismographs had oscillated back and forth each time a dynamite
blast went off on the banks of Lemon Creek, where they were putting in the
footings for a new bridge at Cowper Street. The drums that we mounted the
graph paper on for each seismograph were rotated at a rate of one inch an
hour by a little electric motor run off a battery. Henry pointed out how
we could calculate from the traces just what time each blast went off,
how long it took the shock wave to reach each of our recording stations,
and how strong it was when it got there.
But Henry was proudest of the traces that he claimed showed the change
in earth vibrations when they turned on the reserve dynamos at the
power plant late in the afternoon and then shut them off again late in
the evening. Henry said anybody could detect a dynamite blast with his
ear, but it took a pretty sensitive instrument to detect a dynamo being
turned on.
Even Freddy and Dinky showed more interest in the project after
that. Freddy has a very active imagination, and he began dreaming up ways
that soldiers might use seismographs in combat to tell when tanks were
coming, and things like that. Every time he mentioned this Dinky would
give him a great big raspberry, but Freddy insisted it really wasn't
any different from the way the Indians would put one ear to the ground
so they could tell when the cavalry was coming after them.
On Thursday, when we brought the latest data in from the recording
stations, we found Henry and Jeff poring over the previous day's tracings,
which they had taken down from the wall. Henry grabbed the new sheets
out of my hand and spread them out on the table excitedly.
"Look, Jeff! Here it is again!" he cried, running his finger down the
ink trace on one of the sheets. We all crowded around the table to see
what Henry was so hipped about. He ran his finger across to the time
scale marked on the margin. "See! It's the same time too. It starts
about midnight and ends about four o'clock in the morning. What do you
make of it?"
Jeff scratched his head and puckered his brow. "I don't know, Henry. It's
sure odd. But maybe it's just a coincidence."
"It can't be a coincidence three nights in a row."
"I don't see nothin' but a squiggly line," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Shut up!" said Mortimer.
What Henry was pointing to was a series of extremely small oscillations
of the recording arm that showed up in the ink trace at very irregular
intervals in the early hours of the morning. He spread out the sheets
for the past three days, and we could all see little peaks that had been
recorded in the ink trace during the same hours on each day. Then they
stopped, as though somebody had turned something off, and the line was
smooth again. There wasn't any definable pattern to the peaks. They
just occurred at random during a four-hour period and then disappeared.
"This is a real mystery," said Henry. "If these tremors were caused by
a piece of machinery or anything mechanical -- you'd think they would
come at regular intervals. There'd be some kind of pattern to them. But
there's only one thing regular about this caper. It starts at midnight
and stops at four in the morning."
"That's real weird!" said Mortimer Dalrymple.
"Maybe it's a drunk staggering home from a bar, and every once in a
while he falls flat on his face," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Stow it, Freddy!" Jeff Crocker warned him. "It wouldn't take him four
hours to get home."
"You oughta be on television," sneered Dinky Poore. "You're almost as
funny as the commercials."
"How'd you like to work in my dad's service station?" Mortimer gibed at
him. "He could use a real gasser like you!"
"OK, you characters," Henry interrupted. "Maybe what Freddy said isn't
so stupid. Maybe he put his finger on the key to the whole thing."
"What do you mean?" asked Jeff.
"Whatever is causing these slight tremors is most likely human in
origin. That's what I mean," Henry replied. "Whether he knew it or not,
Freddy was
thinking about the problem when he came up with the
crack about the drunk. Maybe it would help if some of the rest of us
did a little thinking too."
"OK! Everybody think for five minutes!" Mortimer ordered in a loud voice.
"What we've got to think about is who would be up at that time of night,
and what he might be doing that he couldn't do in the daytime," Henry
continued.
"Maybe it's a night watchman," said Dinky Poore.
"Negative!" said Jeff Crocker. "Most night watchmen are pretty quiet."
"What about the garbage collectors?" said Homer Snodgrass. "They're
always banging cans around."
"Too early in the morning for them," said Henry. "Besides, they don't
do anything earthshaking."
Then everybody lapsed into silence, because Henry had tilted his piano
stool back against the wall and was gazing up into the rafters. We all
sat down and waited until Henry got through thinking.
When the legs of the piano stool hit the floor again, Henry's eyes had
that gleam in them that we all recognized as the birth of an idea. He
moved over to the large map of the county tacked on the clubhouse wall.
"I think we can narrow this problem down a bit," he said quietly. "We
can't tell from our recordings
what is causing these tremors. But we
can get some clues from them about
where the vibrations are coming from."
"Good idea, Henry!" Dinky Poore cried, smelling an adventure. "Then we
could sneak up on the place and find out what's going on."
"Exactly!" said Henry. "Now let's get to work."
When Henry said "work" he meant brainwork, so Dinky and Freddy and I
went fishing, leaving the rest of them to wrestle with the seismograph
tracings and Henry's homemade computer.
When we got back to the clubhouse late in the day, we found reams of
paper all over the place, and the county map was all marked up with
little circles indicating the locations of our seismograph stations and
with lines converging on the center of town. On the large map of Mammoth
Falls on the other wall, Henry had marked a large red circle that covered
about a third of the downtown business section.
"We think the source of these tremors is somewhere in this area,"
he said, tracing the circle with his finger. "Now, here's what we've
decided to do." But before he could get started, Jeff Crocker rapped
his gavel on the packing crate he uses for a podium, had the door locked
and the window shades drawn, and called the club into secret session.
Late that night I sneaked out of the house by shinnying down the drain
pipe outside my window and met Dinky and Freddy in the alley back
of Dinky's house. It was near midnight, and we made our way downtown
through vacant lots and back alleys so nobody would see us and wonder
what we were doing out that time of night. I carried a hand transceiver
so we could keep in communication with the clubhouse, where Henry
and Jeff were monitoring the seismograph. Dinky carried a radiosonde
transmitter strapped to the back of his belt that gave out a constant
beep signal. This would make it possible for Henry and Jeff to know where
we were at all times, in case we couldn't talk on the radio. There was
a directional antenna on our receiver at the clubhouse, and Homer and
Mortimer had taken another one out to the seismograph station on Indian
Hill. Between the two of them they could get a fix on our location at
any time. We sneaked through all the alleys of the downtown section as
quietly as we could. Every few feet we would stop and listen carefully and
put our hands lightly on the ground to see if we could pick up any kind
of vibrations. It was pretty slow going, and Henry would keep calling us
on the radio to tell us to move faster or switch over to another block.
We were groping our way down the narrow, cobblestoned alley behind
Jamieson's Variety Store when we heard something that brought us up
short. It was a series of dull thuds, spaced about one second apart.
"Jeepers!" said Freddy, and we all froze in place with our eyes and
ears alert.
The thudding had stopped, and we waited breathlessly in the darkness. Then
it started again. Dinky moved forward very cautiously, with his tousled
head thrust forward. He paused for a moment, listening intently, then
swung his arm in a wide arc motioning us toward the angle in the back
wall of Jamieson's where the elevator shaft jutted out into the alley. We
waited there for a few moments in the deep shadow of the wall. It was
so quiet you could hear the sweat from Freddy's forehead dripping onto
the cobblestones.
When the thudding noises started again Dinky inched his way around the
corner of the elevator wall, and we followed. Just then Henry called on
the radio. "This is High Mogul," he said. I cupped my hand around the
mouthpiece of the transceiver and said, "Shut up!" in a hoarse whisper
and shut the thing off. We crept along the wall of the elevator shaft
and rounded the second corner to where it joined the wall of the main
building again. There was a thin sliver of light visible at the corner
of one of the basement windows.
"Holy mackerel!" said Freddy Muldoon.
"There must be someone down there," Dinky whispered, with his hand cupped
around my ear. "What'll we do now?"
"We can't back out now!" I whispered back. "Let's go for broke!"
Dinky nodded. "Wait till the noise starts again." When the pounding
commenced once more, Dinky got down on all fours and crept up to the
basement window. A gunnysack had been tacked over it, but the sliver of
light we had seen came from the left edge of the window where the burlap
had curled back. Dinky pressed one eye up close to the window jamb and
peered in.
|
|
When he pulled his head back he was waving frantically at me. I crawled up
beside him and peeked inside. There were four men in the basement. One
of them was holding a kerosene lantern in his hand at shoulder height.
Another was sitting on a packing crate, smoking a cigarette. The other
two were working at a gaping hole in one wall with a sledge hammer and
a crowbar padded with burlap. I pulled my head back and I looked along
the alley to reorient myself. I was right! The building right next to
Jamieson's was the Mammoth Falls Trust and Deposit Company. I looked
at Dinky, and he looked at me. Just then the pounding stopped. We both
pressed our eyes up to the window. The man with the cigarette had gotten
up off the packing crate and moved to the wall. He took three oblong
objects the color of butter from a wooden box and crammed them into
the farthest recess of the hole in the wall. He must have had to go in
quite a way, because he reached in all the way up to his waist. When he
pulled himself out, the other men went to work and tamped a lot of loose
rubble back into the hole and fixed it in place with some cement. Then
they all sat down and lighted cigarettes.
We waited breathlessly in the darkness. When nothing had happened after
a minute or two, I crept back around the wall of the elevator shaft and
tried to reach Henry on the radio. I had just gotten him to answer when
there was a muffled explosion. I could feel the wall of the elevator
shaft tremble a bit. The seat of my pants seemed to rise an inch or so
off the cobblestones, and I sat back down again, hard.
"What on earth was that?" Henry shouted into the radio. "The needle on
the graph just jumped a mile!"
"I think it was an explosion," I gulped. "There are some men in Jamieson's
basement, and they've been digging through the wall into the bank!"
"Go get the police!" Henry shouted. "We'll try to call them from Jeff's
house."
I started back around the wall of the elevator shaft to get Freddy and
Dinky and stopped just in time. The figure of a big, burly man loomed
out of the shadows. He grabbed both of them by the collar while they
were still peering through the slit in the window.
"Lemme go, you big moose!" Freddy shouted, struggling to get free.
"Shut up, Fatso, or I'll bash your head against the wall!" the man
muttered in a gruff voice.
I didn't wait to hear any more. I crept back around the corner and then
darted down the alley, heading for the police station. A car was backing
slowly up the alley with no lights on. The driver slapped his brakes on
when he saw me flash past, and I heard his door swing open. But I didn't
wait to answer any questions. I just kept running and slid around the
corner into Walnut Street. I could hear footsteps pounding behind me, but
by the time they reached the head of the alley I was already half a block
up the street, and whoever was chasing me turned around and went back.
The next fifteen minutes seemed like one of those nightmares you have
when you're trying to holler for help and no sound comes out of your
mouth. All I could think about was Dinky and Freddy struggling with that
big brute in the alley, and I must have sprinted the six blocks to the
police station in ten seconds flat. But when I got there the door was
locked and there was just one feeble light burning in a goosenecked lamp
on the night desk. I could see Constable Billy Dahr's feet propped up
on the desk, but his head was out of sight in the shadows.
I rattled the door and pounded on it with my fists and hollered like
bloody blazes, but his feet didn't even move. I could hear the phone
ringing and I knew it must be Jeff and Henry calling in, but Billy
was snoring too loud to even hear it. Finally I dashed around to a side
window and threw a big rock through it. You'd have thought Armageddon had
come. Billy Dahr bolted up out of the swivel chair, like a punch-drunk
fighter answering the bell, and sent the goosenecked lamp flying onto
the floor. The office was plunged into darkness. I could hear him cursing
and stumbling around inside, trying to find the light switch.
When he had finally gotten the lights on and unlocked the front door for
me, I knew I'd have a lot of explaining to do. I decided not to answer
any questions.
"Call Chief Putney, quick!" I shouted, before Billy Dahr could open his
mouth. "Some men are trying to rob the bank!"
"What in tarnation?" Billy muttered, rubbing his eyes. "Is them the ones
threw that rock through the window?"
"Forget the rock, Constable Dahr," I said, pushing him back through the
door. "I had to throw it to wake you up. Please call the chief right
away. Freddy and Dinky are back there in the alley --"
Billy Dahr was rummaging through the drawers of the desk. I picked up
the phone and handed it to him. "Here's the phone. Call him, quick!"
"That there ain't no help," mumbled Billy, pushing the phone back down
on the desk. "I don't know his number. Now where's that danged phone
book?" and he went on rummaging through the desk.
I finally picked up the phone myself and dialed the operator.
"Get me the police," I said. "It's an emergency!"
I could hear her dialing, and then she came back on the line and said
she was sorry but the number was busy.
"Please keep trying, operator; it's urgent!"
"OK," she said. "I'll keep trying and call you right back. Where are
you calling from?"
"From the police station," I said.
There was a pause. Then she said, "Maybe that's why the number is busy."
"I'm sorry, operator," I apologized. "I want Chief Putney's home."
"Do you have the number?"
"No!"
"I'll connect you with Information."
And that's the way things went. By the time we got Chief Putney out
of bed and pulled up in the alley back of Jamieson's with a squad car,
the place was quiet as a tomb and there was no sign of Dinky and Freddy.
"I'll betcha they've been kidnapped!" I cried.
"Now take it easy, son," said Chief Putney in his slow methodical
voice. "Let's not jump to conclusions." Two policemen clambered into
the basement of Jamieson's and came back to report that there was a
hole big enough for a man to crawl through right into the vault of the
Mammoth Falls Trust and Deposit Company.
"The vault's been pretty well cleaned out," one of them said. "No telling
how much they got away with!"
"If that don't beat all!" said Billy Dahr.
It was then I remembered that I hadn't told Henry and Jeff what had
happened. When I switched on the radio, Jeff had been trying to reach
me and he sounded like a fishwife.
"Where on earth have you been for the last fifteen minutes? And what
are you doing way out there west of town?"
"I'm not way out west of town," I said, "I'm right here in the alley
back of the bank."
"Well what's going on? We're getting beeps from the radiosonde way out
on White Fork Road. It's been moving west for the last ten minutes."
"That's Dinky and Freddy," I said. "I think they've been kidnapped!
"Kidnapped? Cut the comedy, Charlie. What's going on?"
"Honest, Jeff!" And I told him about the big man grabbing Dinky and
Freddy, and about the car backing up into the alley.
"Is Chief Putney there?" Jeff asked. I told him he was. "Tell him we've
got a fix on where that transmitter is. And if it's still on Dinky's belt,
and Dinky's been kidnapped, then we know where the bank robbers are."
I climbed down into Jamieson's basement and collared Chief Putney and
told him what Henry had told me. At first he didn't seem to understand.
"Why don't you kids mind your own business and stop interfering!" he
growled. "You ought to be home in bed anyway." But then Billy Dahr
reminded him that if it hadn't been for me running to the police station
they wouldn't even have known the bank had been robbed.
"I guess you're right, Billy," said the Chief. "But I never saw such a
nosy bunch of kids in all my life. Some day I'm going to find out how
they always seem to be around when things go wrong."
"Henry says if you'll send the squad car up to Jeff Crocker's barn he
can tell them where the transmitter signals are coming from. Then you
can put it out on the police net."
"OK, OK!" said Chief Putney, clapping one hand to his forehead. "Maybe
your friend Henry would like to run the whole operation."
"We're just trying to help out," I told him.
Chief Putney got on the radio and sent a squad car from the county
sheriff's office to Jeff Crocker's barn. Then he alerted the state
Highway Patrol and asked them to set up roadblocks in a wide circle
around Mammoth Falls.
"What about the FBI?" I asked him. "This is a kidnap case."
"Please go lie down someplace, Charlie!" the Chief groaned. "I don't
want to have to arrest myself for childbeating."
It wasn't long before a squad car from the sheriff's office pulled into
the alley with its beacon light flashing and its siren screaming. An
officer stuck his head out of the window.
"Just got a call from the control car," he said. "They say that car
isn't moving west any more. It's stopped somewhere up in the hills west
of Strawberry Lake. How on earth can they tell where that car is?"
"Magic!" said Chief Putney. "I just caught one of the magicians."
"Who? That kid over there?"
"Yeah! Put him in your car so we know where he is. If you get a chance,
have someone phone his parents so they know he's all right. Let's
get going."
The Chief's car screamed off into the darkness, heading toward the White
Fork Road. My head snapped back against the cushion of the rear seat
of the sheriff's car as we took off after it. Two of Chief Putney's men
stayed behind to guard the bank vault.
Dinky and Freddy, meanwhile, found themselves being bound and gagged
and thrust through the door of a log cabin in the hills overlooking
Strawberry Lake. They had both been blindfolded back in the alley, so
they didn't know where they had been taken or what for. But they knew
the car had been climbing a winding road for some time, and Dinky could
smell the odor of gun oil and kerosene. He guessed they might be in one
of the small hunting lodges that dotted the area around the old zinc
mine and the limestone quarry. The two men who pushed them through the
door followed inside and tied them securely to the end posts of a double
bunk against one wall of the cabin. As the door was closing behind them,
Dinky drove one elbow into Freddy's ribs.
"Ouch!" yelped Freddy.
"I'm glad they didn't steal my transistor radio," said Dinky, in a
hoarse whisper.
"What's that about a radio?" said the big, hulking man, kicking open
the door again.
"It's just an old radio," said Dinky. "It belongs to my little sister."
"I seen something on the back of that kid's belt when we pushed him
through the door," said the other man.
"I think we'll just take it," said the big man. "It might come in handy."
"Please don't take it! My sister doesn't know I have it," cried Dinky,
squirming to press his back against the bunk post.
"Now ain't that just too bad!" said the gruff voice of the big man,
as he whipped Dinky's belt from his trousers. "Maybe that'll teach ya
to mind your own business after this."
The big man thrust the transmitter into one of the money bags taken from
the bank vault, and the two slipped out the door, slamming it closed
behind them.
"You some kind of a nut?" asked Freddy, in a terse whisper. "Now nobody
will ever find us."
"They might find the money, though. And the robbers too," Dinky snickered.
They heard the car start again outside. It passed right behind the cabin,
went a short distance, and then the sound of the engine stopped.
"Maybe they're out of gas," said Freddy.
"I don't think so," said Dinky. "Listen a minute."
Suddenly they heard the sound of branches breaking, followed by a
tremendous crash, more branches breaking, and the clanking and ringing
sound of metal striking stone.
"Holy mackerel! They must have driven over a cliff!" cried Freddy.
"Shut up!" warned Dinky, digging him again in the ribs. "They'll be back
here again. All they did was shove the car down the side of the hill."
"What for? Are they nuts, or somethin'?"
"Don't you ever watch TV?" sneered Dinky. "Robbers always get rid of
the getaway car. That's the one the police would be looking for."
"What are they gonna do? Walk?"
"No! They probably have another car stashed away in the woods somewhere."
Dinky and Freddy waited breathlessly for further sounds from outside the
cabin, but the minutes ticked past and not a sound broke the stillness
of the woods.
But the steady
beep-beep-beep of the telltale transmitter could
be heard clearly by Henry and Jeff back in the Crockers' barn, as it
swung to and fro in the canvas bag carried by one of the bank robbers.
It was moving so slowly now that the directional finders could barely
detect its progress. Henry showed the sheriffs deputies at the barn the
spot on the map where he thought the beeps were coming from. They seemed
to be moving toward the old abandoned zinc mine.
"Maybe they figure on hiding out in the mine until the heat's off,"
said Jeff.
"If they do, they've got a surprise coming!" said one of the deputies,
and he went out to his car to get Chief Putney on the radio.
By this time, Dinky had managed to wriggle free from the ropes that
bound him to the bunk post. Very quietly, he started to untie Freddy.
"How'd you do it?" asked Freddy, in a whisper. "My wrists are so stiff
I can't move 'em."
"It's a cinch!" said Dinky. "When somebody ties you up, just tense all
your muscles and keep 'em as tight as you can. When you relax, the ropes
are loose and you can get out, if you're good."
"Where'd you learn that?"
"I read it in a book about Houdini!"
"About who did what?"
"About Houdini. That's a man's name."
"Oh! One o' them East Indians, huh?"
"No! He was just a plain old American and a real cool magician."
"OK! Whatta we do now?" asked Freddy.
"Well, we don't have any radio, and it's too far to walk back to town,
so we're gonna start a great big bonfire outside and let people know
where we are."
"What about the robbers?" asked Freddy. "Won't they see the fire and
come back and clobber us?"
"I don't think so," said Dinky. "They gotta keep making tracks and clear
out of here. They don't have time to come back now."
"How we gonna start a fire? We don't have any matches."
"I've got a knife," said Dinky. "That's all we need."
"OK, Mac! Make with the knife!" said Freddy. "Is this some more of your
Houdini stuff?"
"No," Dinky said offhandedly. "This is a good old American Indian trick."
Dinky really is a whiz with a knife. In no time at all he had cut a good
springy bow from a small birch branch and stripped a long piece of bark
from a root to make a thong for it. Then he whittled a small hole in a
flat piece of wood he found in the cabin and carved out a blunt-ended
drill about the size of a tent peg from a piece of pine. He had Freddy
strip some dry shreds of tinder from the inside of the bark on an old
log lying in back of the cabin, and he was ready to start a fire.
"C'mon, magician, let's make with the heat!" said Freddy, jumping up
and down. "I'm cold." For all his blubber, Freddy gets cold quicker
than anybody else in our gang. And his teeth were chattering now, from
sitting on the cold cabin floor.
Dinky knelt on the ground with one foot on the flat board and twisted
the thong of the bow around the pine drill. Then he inserted the blunt
end of the drill in the little hole he'd made in the board and started
to rotate it rapidly back and forth, making long, sawing motions with
the bow, like a bass fiddle player. Freddy watched in amazement as the
end of the drill got hot and began to smoke. Pretty soon he could smell
the odor of burning pine. Then, suddenly, Dinky sprang to his feet and
popped a hot spark from the board into a handful of the dry tinder. He
started dancing around in a circle with it, waving it in the wind and
blowing on it. The smoke from the tinder got thicker and thicker, and
then it suddenly burst into flame.
"Ouch!" Dinky yelped, as the flaming tinder burnt his hand.
He dropped the burning mass into a pile of dry leaves, and he and Freddy
sprinkled wood shavings and twigs on it until they had a good blaze
going. Then they built a crib of larger logs around the fire and soon had
a raging inferno that threw a column of flame thirty feet into the air.
You could see the light from the fire all the way back to Mammoth
Falls. The sheriff's deputy outside Jeff Crocker's barn saw it and called
Chief Putney's car on the radio.
"Looks like a big fire up in the hills right where you're heading. Can
you see it?"
"Negative!" Chief Putney called back. "We're in the woods. Can't see
anything."
"The kid inside says it might be one of those hunting lodges up
there. Better check it out. He says he's still getting radio signals
pretty steady from around the old zinc mine."
Just then the car I was riding in shot around a sharp bend in the road,
and out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of light from among
the trees over on the next ridge of hills. I pounded the driver on the
shoulder and shouted to him to stop.
"We're on the wrong road," I told him. "I just saw a flash of light
through the trees, and it came from those hills on the other side of
the creek."
The driver slammed on his brakes. "How do we get there?"
"Go back to the wooden bridge," I told him. "There's an old logging road
that goes up to that ridge." The deputy called Chief Putney on the radio
while we backed around in a clearing. Soon we were climbing through the
trees up the slopes of the other ridge, with the chief's car following
us. The sheriff's deputy was really gunning it up the twisting, deeply
rutted road, and I was tossing around in the back seat like a sack of
potatoes, trying to find something to hold on to.
The chief's voice came over the radio. "Don't run your siren! And dim
your lights when we get near the top," he said. "If the men we're
looking for are up there, we want to surprise them."
But when we rounded the last hairpin turn and pulled into the brightly
lighted clearing where the fire was raging, all we could see were the
figures of Dinky and Freddy, silhouetted against the flames.
"The robbers took off into the woods!" shouted Freddy. "They pushed
their car down the hill over there."
"How long ago?" asked the chief.
"Maybe twenty minutes, maybe more," said Dinky. "Bet they got another
car stashed away somewhere."
"If they have, they'd have to come back down this road with it," said
the sheriff's deputy. "There isn't any other road leading off this ridge,
is there?"
"Not that I know of," I told him. "This is the only one."
"Then they must be planning on hiding out somewhere until the heat's
off. The last report on the net said those radio beeps were coming from
up near the old zinc mine."
"I can't figure it out," said Chief Putney. "If they plan to hide out
here in the hills, why did they leave these two kids behind to give us
a lead on where they were? If they hole up in the mine it might take us
a week to smoke 'em out, but all we have to do is blockade the entrance
and they're stuck. I just can't figure it out."
"It almost seems like they
wanted us to follow them," said the deputy.
Suddenly a thought struck me. "Wait a minute!" I cried, grabbing the
chief's arm. "There
is another road off this ridge. Only it isn't an
automobile road; it's a railroad. It's the old branch line running up
to Hyattsville from, the zinc mine. You know the one, Chief. It crosses
Turkey Hill Road right at The Gap."
"That's the third nutty thing you've said tonight!" said the chief. "I
suppose they have the California Zephyr waiting there to take them to
San Francisco!"
"I don't know about the California Zephyr," I said, "but they could use
old Leapin' Lena. That's that old handcar that's parked in the Ioading
yard. It works too!"
"Maybe the kid's right, Chief," said the sheriff's deputy. "Maybe they
hoped we
would follow them on foot -- and get stuck up there by the mine
with no radio while they made a getaway down the railroad. It's downhill
all the way to Hyattsville. They could make thirty miles an hour easy
with that rusty handcar and never come near one of our roadblocks."
Just then the radio in the squad car started squawking. It was Henry,
wanting to talk to Chief Putney.
"We've still got a fix on that transmitter," he said in a shrill voice,
"and it's started moving straight north. Pretty fast too. We figure
they're following that old railroad spur from the zinc mine. They're
probably heading for Hyattsville."
"You ain't telling me nothing I don't already know!" said the Chief
haughtily. "We already figured that out."
"Oh!" said Henry.
"And by the way," said the Chief, "we found your two partners in crime
and they're all right. So you can tell their folks to pick 'em up at
the station in the morning."
"You mean they're under arrest? But we didn't do anything, Chief!"
"Let's just say I have them in protective custody."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm not letting any of you kids out of my sight until we've
nabbed those bank bandits."
"How are you going to do that unless I tell you where they are?" said
Henry. "They've already figured out how to get through all your
roadblocks."
"You can only go one place on a railroad, sonny. We'll be waiting for
them at the end of the line."
"What if they get off before the end of the line?"
"You're full of bright ideas!" said the Chief. "Do you think they're
stupid enough to take off on foot again?"
"No!" said Henry. "I think they planned their getaway better than that."
"Well, if they've got another car waiting where that track passes under
the state highway, we'll catch 'em in one of our roadblocks."
"They've already passed the state highway," said Henry, "and our tracking
antennas tell us they're still heading toward Hyattsville."
"Good! Then we'll get 'em at 'the end of the line."
"You're not thinking, Chief."
"See here, young Mulligan, I'll--"
"Haven't you ever dreamed about what you'd do if you were a bank robber?"
"No, I haven't!" fumed the Chief.
"Well, I have," said Henry. "And I'll bet one of our dinosaur eggs that
I know just what they're planning."
"Is that so? Well, supposing you tell me."
"What about Dinky and Freddy?"
"OK, OK! We'll see they get home all right," said the Chief. "Now,
tell me your brilliant idea."
"Well, if I were a bank robber I think I'd have a boat waiting at the
railroad trestle over Lemon Creek. And with good luck I'd probably be
out into the lakes and all the way to Canada before you figured out
what happened."
There was a long silence.
"Are you still there, Chief?" asked Henry finally. "Do you want me to
phone Mr. Monaghan's boathouse? You could probably nab them at the mouth
of Lemon Creek if you get a couple of patrol cars down there right away."
Chief Putney was fuming and sputtering.
"You're a crazy nut, Mulligan!" he said at last. "Now, suppose you get
off the radio and let me be the Chief of Police."
"I was just trying to help," Henry said.
"That's the kind of help I can do without," said the Chief. "Now get
off the air and let me talk to Officer Riley."
"This is Riley, Chief," came a new voice.
"Listen, Riley, turn your volume down," whispered the Chief. "Now,
is that kid still around?"
"No, Chief. He went back in the barn."
"Good! Now listen, Riley. I want you to get two cars down to Monaghan's
boathouse at the river right away. Call him on the phone and tell him
to get a couple of boats ready. I think those crooks might try to make
a getaway down Lemon Creek."
"Good thinking, Chief! What about these kids?"
|
|
"Riley, I think we can play cops and robbers without having those kids
underfoot. Leave 'em there in the barn."
"I just thought that direction finder of theirs might come in handy."
"You're not being paid to think! Just follow orders."
"Right, Chief!"
"See that these kids all get home right away," Chief Putney said to the
sheriff's deputy. "Then report to the control center at the Crockers'
barn. I'm heading for Monaghan's boathouse." The Chief's car showered
us with gravel as the driver spun it around and headed pell-mell down
the road.
The deputy helped us throw dirt over the remains of the bonfire, and
then Dinky and Freddy and I clambered into his car.
"I hope the Chief's doing the right thing," he said, as he nursed the
car down the road off the ridge. "It might not be so easy spotting that
boat in the dark. I've been duck hunting in those bulrushes at the mouth
of the creek and they spread out pretty far. There's a lot of places a
boat could slip through without ever getting near Monaghan's boathouse."
"They wouldn't get away if Henry was there with our direction finder,"
I said.
"You got a portable set?"
"Sure! We have a battery power pack, and we can take it anywhere."
The deputy looked at his watch and rubbed his chin. Then there was a
long silence. Suddenly, when he reached the hardtop of the county road,
he flicked on his flashing beacon and the tires screamed as he pushed
the accelerator to the floor.
"This'll be the first time in my life I didn't follow orders," he said.
We must have waked up all of Jeff Crocker's family when we skidded into
the driveway beside the barn. The deputy turned the car around while I
rushed in and got Henry.
"They're heading down Lemon Creek, all right -- as close as we can
figure," said Henry, as we piled into the deputy's car with the battery
set. "Jeff'll keep a track on them and let us know if there's any change."
"Hey! What's going on, Sergeant?" a policeman shouted from the control
car parked beside the barn.
"Just call me 'Corporal'!" the deputy hollered back. "See you in
court!" And we spun out of the driveway with the siren wide open.
The deputy kept glancing at his watch as we sped down the state highway
toward the turnoff for the river. Henry had turned our receiver on and
was holding it up to the window of the car, trying to pick up the signal
of the transmitter. There was nothing coming over the police net.
"I hope we get there in time," said the deputy. "The chief had about
ten minutes' start on us and he didn't have to drive as far."
"Don't worry," said Henry. "Jeff is telephoning Mr. Monaghan. He'll have
another boat ready for us."
"How'm I gonna explain this to Chief Putney?" moaned the deputy, clapping
one hand to his forehead.
"Maybe you won't have to," cried Henry. "I think I've got something! Pull
over! Pull over to the side of the road!"
The deputy braked the car down sharply, and we ground to a halt on
the apron. "What's the matter? What's up?" he asked, twisting round in
his seat. Henry turned his loop antenna a hair to the right and turned
the volume up on the speaker. Then he took his earphones off. The steady
beep-beep-beep of Dinky's little transmitter was clearly audible.
"Have you got a map?" Henry asked the deputy.
"Sure!" He reached in the glove compartment, pulled out a road map,
and spread it on the seat beside him.
"Where are we right now?" asked Henry, shining his flashlight on the map.
"I'd say we were right about here." The deputy pointed to a jog in the
red line marking the state highway. Henry pulled his compass from his
pocket and took a reading in the direction the antenna was pointing. Then
he marked an X on the map where Lemon Creek took a sharp turn toward
the river.
"I figure they're just about there now. They've got at least three miles
to go before they reach the river."
"That ought to take them twenty or twentyfive minutes," said the
deputy. "I'm sure they're using a rowboat or a canoe."
"They must be," I said. "A motorboat would make too much noise."
"Let's get going!" Henry urged. "We won't go to Monaghan's boathouse. Turn
right, down the Old Mill Road."
"The Old Mill Road? Are you nuts?"
"Please, Officer!" Henry pleaded. "We've only got about ten minutes."
"Oh, boy!" said the deputy. "You're going to get me in real trouble!"
"You're in trouble already," said Henry. "How would you like a chance
to be a hero?"
"A live hero or a dead hero?"
"How would you like to capture those bank bandits singlehanded?" Henry
persisted.
"Sonny, I hear you talking, but I've got a wife and kids to think about."
"They'll be proud of you after tonight," said Henry. "Let's get going!"
"Oh, boy! I should have taken you kids home, like the Chief told me,"
mumbled the deputy, as he put the car in gear and pulled it onto the
highway.
As we turned down the road leading to the old abandoned mill on Lemon
Creek, Henry outlined his plan.
"It's simple," he said. "They ought to reach the millpond in about
ten minutes. The only way to get out of it is to go through the sluice
way. That's a natural trap. If we can close the downstream gate before
they get there, we'll have them blocked. And if we close the upstream
gate after they're in the sluice, they can't possibly get out. The walls
are about fifteen feet high and covered with green slime. They'll be
helpless! All we have to do is sit there and wait for the Chief to come."
Even the deputy was smiling now, and he pushed the patrol car down the
winding road even faster than before.
"Great idea, Mulligan! Great!" he exclaimed. Then he frowned. "But what
about those gates? Will they work?"
"Sure they will," I said. "The sluice is still used as a lock to let
boats out of the millpond. The winches are in good shape. We've closed
the gates lots of times to trap fish."
"Remind me to tell the game warden about that," said the deputy.
"Forget it," said Freddy Muldoon. "That's just one of Charlie's fish
stories."
"Do you have any tear gas?" Henry asked.
"Yeah!" said the deputy. "That's a good idea. There's two grenades in
the glove compartment there. Get 'em out."
"Put your lights out before we get to the creek," Henry warned. "We
don't want to tip them off."
"OK, Chief!" said the deputy. "Any other orders?"
The deputy pulled the car off the road about a hundred yards short of
the creek, and we ran the rest of the way to the millhouse. With a half
moon rising in the east there was just enough light to see by. The old
millhouse is a pretty sneaky place to be messing around in when it's
dark, but we knew every nook and cranny of it by heart. Dinky and Freddy
clambered across the catwalk to the other side of the sluice and lay flat
on their bellies on top of the wall. Henry and I took the deputy into
the winch house, and the three of us lowered the downstream gate. It
creaked and groaned a lot, but we figured the bank bandits were still
far enough away so that they couldn't hear it.
"Don't close it all the way," Henry advised. "We don't want the water
level to rise too high in the sluice. After we've shut the upstream gate,
we can let it down the rest of the way."
We crawled out onto the mill dam and lay there behind the railing
holding our breath. The only sound came from the water gurgling under
the downstream sluice gate, and we hoped the men we were waiting for
weren't smart enough to recognize the sound and realize the gate was
closed. Henry had the directional receiver tuned again and was rotating
the antenna, trying to get a fix on the transmitter signal. He had just
picked up the beep when I could see the dim outline of a small boat
ease out of the shadows about two hundred yards upstream and move into
a patch of moonlight. I grabbed Henry by the elbow and he shut off the
receiver. We crawled back to the winch house, leaving the deputy lying
flat on his stomach near the upstream gate.
Inside the winch house we waited, crouched in the darkness, for the
signal that would tell us when to close the upstream gate. It seemed
like it was forever, and I could hear Henry's breathing just as clear
as the blower on our hot air furnace at home. I was sweating all over
and shaking with chills at the same time. I figured this must be how an
eel would feel in a Turkish bath.
Suddenly a flash of light flicked at the window of the winch house. It was
the signal from the deputy that the boat had entered the sluice. Henry
and I sprang into action and threw our weight against the trunnion of
the winch. My feet slipped from under me and I tripped Henry, and we
both fell to the floor, but we managed to spin the winch fast enough
to close the. upstream gate before the men in the boat knew what was
happening. Then we dashed to the other winch and lowered the downstream
gate the rest of the way.
When we scrambled out to our places along the guard rail at the edge of
the sluice, the boat had already rammed against the downstream gate. There
were sounds of confusion and violent cursing coming up from the bottom
of the dark chamber in which the bandits were trapped. The bright beam
of the deputy's flashlight stabbed into the depths of the sluiceway and
came to rest on the figures of four men huddled in a small rowboat. The
deputy's voice rang out in a booming command that resounded back and
forth between the walls of the sluice.
"Throw your guns in the water! You're surrounded!"
Four more beams of light hit the bandits in the face as Dinky, Freddy,
Henry, and I flicked on our flashlights from opposite sides of the
sluice. The men in the boat threw their hands up, and one of them shouted,
"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! We're just going fishing."
"You can't fish with a rod like that!" the deputy shouted back. "Throw
it in the water!"
There was a splash as the pistol dropped from the hand of the man standing
in the stern of the boat.
"Get the rest of them overboard before we load your boat with tear gas!"
Three more weapons splashed in the water. The man in the bow of the boat
reached under the seat and tried to slip a canvas sack over the side,
but the deputy's pistol cracked like a whip and a bullet nicked the
gunwale beside him.
"Leave the money where it is!" barked the deputy. "Put your hands on
top of your head and lie down in the boat!"
It isn't easy for one man to lie down in a rowboat, let alone four. But
when your have to, you find a way to do it, and the four bank bandits
were smart enough to figure it out.
"OK, Mulligan. Get on the radio and tell 'em it's all over," said the
deputy calmly. And Henry made tracks for the patrol car.
"You characters ought to know you can't fish in this county before
daybreak," said the deputy, as he lighted a cigarette. "Now, just as
soon as we can truck a ladder in here, we'll get you out of there."
It only took about ten minutes for two more patrol cars to show up
at the old mill. And we didn't need a ladder to get the captives out
of the sluice. We just opened the upper gate long enough to float the
boat up to the top of the wall, and the bank robbers climbed out meek
as lambs. I don't think they ever knew there was only one policeman on
the scene when they threw their guns in the water.
Freddy Muldoon ran up and kicked the biggest man right in the
shins. "That's for calling me 'Fatso'!" he shouted, and then he retreated
to a safe distance. One of the policemen grabbed him by the collar and
half carried him off the dam. The big man stood there with his mouth open,
rubbing one leg against the other.
"There ought to be a law against kids," he said. "I knew there'd be
trouble when I found them two in the alley."
"What about my transmitter?" Dinky asked. "It's in one of those canvas
bags."
"We'll have to hold it for evidence, sonny," said one of the
policemen. "You'll get it back later on."
Chief Putney didn't get in on the capture. He and three other policemen
were blockading the mouth of Lemon Creek with two motorboats, and they
didn't have a radio. It wasn't until daybreak that they saw Mr. Monaghan
standing at the end of his dock waving a pair of red flannel drawers at
them. When they got back to the police station we were all sitting around
sipping hot chocolate and talking to a reporter from the
Mammoth
Falls Gazette. Henry asked Chief Putney if he could send a patrol
car out to Indian Hill to pick up Homer and Mortimer.
"You've just given me a great idea," grumbled the Chief. "We don't need a
police department around here anymore. What we need is a good all-night
taxi service. Have you got fifty cents for the fare?"
"No!" said Henry.
"Oh, that's really too bad!" said the Chief, sarcastically. Then he
turned to Billy Dahr and told him to send a car out to Indian Hill.
Last updated 4 Apr 98 by
max