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