The Brown Fox Mystery (16 page)

“Thanks. Thanks very much,” said Djuna. “We’ll be careful of it.”

When the boys got back to their own cottage Djuna said to Tommy, “You get a pad and pencil and stand on the end of our dock to take down a message I’ll send to you.”

“Where are you going to go to send it from?” Tommy asked.

“I’m going to row out on the lake and anchor over there,” said Djuna, pointing to a spot about three hundred yards away that was exactly on an imaginary line between the old icehouse at the north end of the lake and their own dock, from which the old icehouse was clearly visible. “I’m going to drop both anchors,” Djuna went on, “and fasten the heliograph to the stern thwart. The lake is smooth as glass, so it’ll be easy.”

“Okay,” said Tommy and he dashed for the house to get pencil and paper while Djuna rowed out to the spot he had indicated and dropped his anchors. After he had clamped the heliograph to the stern of the boat and made sure that the boat was absolutely motionless he lined up Tommy through the hole in the mirror and the sight in front. When Tommy signaled that he was ready, Djuna began to “send.”

After they had practiced for a few minutes Djuna tapped out that he was going to send a real message. When Tommy indicated that he was ready Djuna sent each letter with great care and paused, slightly, between each one, and paused even longer between words. It took him nearly five minutes to send the complete message, which he signed with a D.

When he was through he put the heliograph carefully back in its case, and pulled up his anchors and rowed back to the dock. When he got there Tommy had just finished writing out a clean copy of the message. His eyes were bright and his face was flushed with excitement as Djuna stepped from the rowboat to the dock.

“Jeepers! What did you send
that
kind of a message for?” Tommy asked.

“Read it to me and let me see if you got it all right,” said Djuna.

Tommy read it aloud, just as he had taken it down.

“Golly!”
Djuna said, and his face, too, was flushed with admiration. “You got every word right, and every letter!”

“It was easy,” Tommy boasted, and then he repeated his previous question. “Why,” he asked again, “did you send
that
kind of a message?”

“Because I wanted to see if you could get it all right,” said Djuna. “Tomorrow when Mr. Furlong and Mr. MacHatchet are here they might want one of us to go with each one of them on a search and I thought we ought to have some way to signal to each other,” Djuna explained rather vaguely.

“Oh, I see,” Tommy said, but anyone looking at him closely could see that he didn’t “see” at all.

They practiced a little longer with the heliograph, until the sun was too far in the west to use it without a double mirror, and then they went in and began to get their supper ready. Neither of them spoke about Miss Annie, or the search for her, because neither of them could speak about it without having tears creep into his eyes and they didn’t want to cry before each other.

Their supper consisted of four slightly burned lamb chops, frozen French fried potatoes that they heated in the oven just as it said on the package, succotash that they heated in a double boiler, ice cream, milk and more store cake.

When they had finished eating they were both yawning. After they had washed the dishes and while they were playing with Champ on the lawn, they heard the train that was due in Lakeville at eight thirty blow for a crossing south of town. They had debated whether or not they should row over to meet the train but had decided that if Miss Annie were there she would not want them to row over alone in the dark.

They heard the train puff into the Lakeville station, and a few minutes later heard the rackety-rack of its iron wheels as it chugged down the valley behind the foothills to the east. They stood silently on the end of the dock gazing across the lake at the lights of the little town, that were like diamonds on a black silk carpet, and prayed that Mr. Furlong and Mr. MacHatchet had arrived on the train.

They strained their eyes looking for the single light Captain Ben had rigged up on the prow of his dory, and strained their ears for the chug-chug of the outboard motor on the stern. A full moon came booming out of the hills behind them to weave a pathway of silver across the lake, but no sound broke the silence except the faint chatter of distant voices and the deep, full
harumph
of bullfrogs in the lily pads.

After about a half hour of strained waiting Djuna broke the silence, and his voice was husky, and at the same time shrill, in the still night air.

“Golly,” he said. “I—I don’t think they were on that train. I guess we might as well go to bed because we’ve got to get up awful early in the morning. I think prob’ly Mr. Furlong and Mr. MacHatchet will stay at the hotel in Lakeville tonight but I think we ought to get up about five-thirty and find them as soon as we’ve had our breakfast.”

“Oh, sure,” said Tommy. “I think one of us ought to set Miss Annie’s alarm clock so we’ll be sure to wake up.”

“You set it in your room,” Djuna said after a moment of thought. “Then, if it doesn’t wake me up when it goes off, you come in and wake me.”

“Okay,” said Tommy with a yawn. “Jeepers, I’m going to bed.”

Twenty minutes later the little cottage was as quiet as a tomb under its mantle of moonlight and Tommy was sound asleep. But Djuna was lying wide-eyed with a confused jumble of thoughts marching through his mind that caused him to toss and turn, almost feverishly.

After what seemed like all eternity, and Djuna’s screaming nerves could stand it no longer, he reached out and turned on the lamp that was on a table beside his bed. The little clock beside the lamp said ten forty-five.

Without making any noise he pulled out the drawer of the bedside table and took a tablet of paper and a pencil from it. He wrote hastily:

He fastened the note to his pillow with a safety pin so that Tommy would find it when he came in to call him, hurried into his clothes, pulling on a dark blue sweater over his shirt, and went out to the kitchen.

There he made two thick cheese sandwiches that he wrapped in waxed paper and stuffed inside his blouse. Moving silently he slipped his belt through the sheath that held a knife with a five-inch blade, slung the heliograph strap over one shoulder and the sixty foot coil of light rope that he had borrowed from Captain Ben over the other. Before turning out the kitchen light he picked up the small pencil torchlight that was on the kitchen shelf and flashed it twice to make sure that it was working.

Without making a sound that might wake the sleeping Tommy, he stole out into the night. His little black terrier, Champ, was fast asleep, too. Djuna grinned to himself in the darkness, thinking of Champ. Champ slept like a log. But then a lump came into Djuna’s throat, and he almost turned back, to give Champ a farewell hug. No, he couldn’t do that. He must go on, alone, even if he never came back alive! He squared his shoulders and went on.

In a few minutes he reached the corduroy road that had long ago been used to get to the old icehouse on the north shore of the lake. He turned northward, toward the icehouse.

It was difficult, in the darkness, to keep on that grass-grown path. Again and again, as he stumbled on, he brushed against bushes fringing the road, and the branches whipping against his face warned him that he was straying from the path. There wasn’t a sound to be heard, except the occasional hooting of a screech owl, far off in the woods, or the equally startling
harumph
of a bullfrog, coming from the lake on his left.

When he had plodded on for a mile or more, his eyes had grown more accustomed to the darkness, and he was able to distinguish the posts for which he had been looking—two posts, once painted white, that flanked the old driveway leading from the corduroy road to the icehouse. His heart began to beat faster, but he turned resolutely into the driveway. A moment later he was able to make out the great black mass of the icehouse, a darker bulk against the gray clouds hiding the moon. He drew a deep breath. Then he crept cautiously forward.

Soundlessly, he edged himself along the wall of the great barnlike building. As he reached it, a curious sound came to his ears—there was someone moving about inside the building! The sound was faint but regular; and suddenly he knew what it was. It was the sound of digging.

Djuna’s throat was dry with dread. He crept on along the wooden wall of the icehouse, hoping to find some crack or knothole through which he could peer. He remembered that at the front of the building there was a small door, through which Captain Ben and he had entered the icehouse the afternoon before; but when he had crept around the corner of the icehouse and reached the door, he found that although the door stood partly open, a square of heavy canvas had been hung inside, curtaining the space so that no light inside the building could be seen.

Moving with infinite stealth, Djuna lifted a corner of the canvas about half an inch and peered through this narrow opening.

The interior of the huge empty building was almost in darkness, and only the feeble light of two lanterns lit up even a part of it. But in their dim light Djuna saw two men at work there. He recognized Jones and Baldwin. They had shoveled the sawdust away from part of the dirt floor and piled it in a great heap against one wall. The two men were stripped to the waist, and their bare shoulders gleamed with sweat in the lantern light. Both were working furiously, with a spade and a shovel, and had already pitted the bare ground with a hundred shallow holes. They were grimly intent upon their work, and Djuna stared at them in amazement, wondering what could be the reason for their strange digging and their desperate haste.

He had no time to waste, however. He had work of his own to do. Dropping the curtain, he stole back around the corner of the icehouse to the other end of the building. At that end, he knew, there was a wooden ladder reaching from the ground to the very peak of the high roof, a ladder nailed to the wall. Moving as silently as before, he reached that end of the building and groped in the darkness to find the bottom of the ladder.

The next instant, his heart stood still in sudden terror. Something, only a few feet above his head, something that was alive, moved; and from it came a low hoarse snarl, like the snarl of a wild beast.

He dropped to his knees, poised, with one hand on the ground, the other feebly raised to protect his head, as the snarl made his hair rise on the nape of his neck. And then the snarl changed to a long, moaning sob.

Djuna could feel his whole body trembling as he waited in the terrifying darkness of the night for the sound to come again. When it came, suddenly as before, it had changed to a long throbbing moan that ended abruptly in a snort.

Suddenly Djuna knew what the sound was; and with the realization came such a flood of relief that he sprawled happily on the ground and buried his mouth in the sleeve of his sweater, to keep from snickering aloud.

The sound above him was no more and no less than the sound of a man snoring, and putting his whole heart into it!

And Djuna knew who the man was. It was the man Captain Ben called Lame-Brain, Lem Brayne, who had gone to sleep on the little platform by the ladder, when he was supposed to be on watch to keep the two men working inside the icehouse from being seen by anybody!

Djuna choked down his momentary impulse to laugh, and hoped earnestly that Lame-Brain would keep on sleeping. Scarcely breathing, he groped around in the darkness till he found the bottom rung of the ladder, and cautiously began to climb.

The rungs of the ladder creaked beneath his weight as he mounted them; and just as he came level with the platform where Lame-Brain lay snoring, the full moon came rolling out from behind the clouds that had hidden it and shone full upon him! Motionless, as if turned to stone, he clung to the ladder, not daring to breathe, his eyes fixed on the sleeping guard. Lame-Brain stirred in his sleep, grunted drowsily, and turned over on his side, but did not wake up. After a moment that seemed endless, he began snoring again. With a fast-beating heart, Djuna began again to climb the ladder.

Up and up he went, swiftly and silently, until he reached the very peak of the icehouse roof, thirty feet from the ground. He glanced down, and shuddered. If the topmost rung had given way beneath him, nothing could have saved him. But he looked up again quickly, and, peering over the edge of the roof, saw to his relief that there was a wooden cleat fastened there, which he could reach and grip. Clinging to it with a desperate strength, he got first one knee and then the other over the edge of the roof, and pulled himself, cumbered as he was with the heliograph and the coil of rope, up on to the ridgepole, where he lay utterly spent and gasping for breath.

After a few minutes of rest he wriggled his way along the ridgepole until he reached the cupola which projected from the center of the roof. It was a box-like shed, about ten feet square, with ventilator slats on each side, instead of windows.

Not a sound came from inside the cupola.

Djuna sat there, his legs straddling the ridgepole, his face only a few inches from the slats. One of the slats, at the level of his eyes, had been broken and taken out; and although the gap thus made was about six inches wide, Djuna could not bring himself to look inside. He was afraid of what he might see.

He had come to the very spot that he had set out to reach when he had stolen from Miss Annie’s cottage, leaving Tommy asleep. But now that he was here, he felt a cold terror clutching at his heart. The very stillness frightened him. Had he got there too late?

He hesitated only an instant. Gritting his teeth, he reached out a hand and tugged at the thin wooden slat next to the missing one. To his surprise it came out easily, for the wood had rotted away around the nails which had held it. A third slat was removed with equal ease, and now there was space enough for him to crawl over the window sill, and he lowered himself into the tiny room.