After a hasty glance up and down the alley, he gripped the handle of Knobs’ automatic with his right hand, and carrying the black bag in his left, walked with a leisurely and nonchalant air down the alley and out on the side street. To all appearances the street was deserted. Apparently no one had seen him emerge from the alley. He was thankful for that.
Hardly had he walked a dozen paces on that street when there struck his ears a cry that had grown familiar:
“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”
“Fire!” he said to himself. “I wonder where now?” He was to know soon enough.
There is something strange about a city street. Though it be deserted from end to end, let one cry of “Fire!” ring out upon its deserted stillness, and within the space of thirty seconds it is thronging with people. It was so now. In a moment the place was swarming with people.
Johnny Thompson did not join the throng. He was far too wise for that. The black bag he carried contained something of vital interest to that smooth villain, Knobs. Knobs would want it back. Nor would he be alone. There might be twenty of his gang in that crowd. For them to surround Johnny and beat him up in such a mob would be a simple enough matter. He would leave no chance for that. Turning, Johnny sped down an alley, crossed a street, shot down a second alley and, reaching the river, he raced along the wall that lined its banks, climbed the bridge, then to the back of a building, paused once more to listen, then climbed the stairs to his room.
“Shook them!” he puffed as he bolted the door and carefully placed the black bag under the bed.
His next move was to throw back the steel blinds to his own windows and to look in the direction of that building on Randolph Street that he had just left.
The sight that met his eyes brought an exclamation to his lips.
“Pant!” he called, “Pant! Wake up! If you want to see a fire that is one, come here!”
Tumbling from the cot where he had been sleeping, Pant stumbled toward the window. Then he, too, stared in wonder.
“Talk about quick burners!” exclaimed Johnny. “Did you ever see anything quicker or hotter than that?”
“No,” said Pant solemnly, “I never have.”
The building, filled with chemicals, diamonds, books and novelties, was a white hot furnace. Johnny had seen blast furnaces, open hearths, and the white flames of the Bessemer, but never had he seen a fiercer, hotter flame than this one. Even at this great distance it seemed to fairly scorch his face.
“Enough chemicals in that place to stock an army for the next war,” he said aloud.
At once he thought of the truck load of chemicals that had arrived at a quarter of six, and of the heavy rolling sound he had heard shortly after the truck drove away.
Never in all the history of Chicago had there been a hotter fire. Johnny could see the firemen, forced from one position to another, fall back, back, and back again. They made no attempt to quench this white fury. The best they could do was to throw a water screen against the buildings next to this to prevent disaster from spreading to the entire business district.
“Oh man!” exclaimed Pant. “Only look! Red flames, white flames, purple, yellow and blue. Must have burned its way through the crust of the earth and turned the thing into a volcano.”
“Chemicals,” said Johnny. He had been looking for an explosion; such an explosion as would wreck every building in the block and perhaps cross the river and shake bricks down upon his own head. But as the moments passed, he began to hope that it would not come. When a quarter of an hour had worn itself slowly away and the fierce flames began to die down, he knew that it would not come, and breathed a prayer of thankfulness for that.
“Pant, I promised Mazie and that little girl we saved from the school fire that we’d go out to Forest City to-night. This is the last night of the Carnival. It’s not too late yet. There’s nothing I can do about that fire over there until it has cooled down. Want to go?”
“I don’t mind,” said Pant. “In fact, I’d rather like to go.”
“All right. Throw on your glad rags and come on.”
A little later, as Johnny locked the door on the outside, he hesitated for a moment. He had thought of the black bag he had thrown under the bed.
“Safe there as anywhere in the world,” he told himself. “I’ll break the lock and look inside to-morrow.”
Then he followed Pant down the stairs.
As the elevated train rattled noisily along over the low roofs of cottages and between endless rows of apartment houses, Johnny Thompson sat staring dreamily at the lattice-like covering of the floor of his car.
He was allowing the events of the past few days to move before his mind’s eye. It seemed much like a moving picture. There was a scene showing the central fire station with its leaping yellow lights. A click, a flash, and there was a fire, a city school building burning, a pink-eyed man, a child in the school loft, a tall ladder, he ascended, descended, then searched for the pink-eyed man.
A second flash of light, a second fire; this time the great Simons Building, and Mazie in a tenth-story window. There was the fireman’s monkey, and again the pink-eyed man, also for the first time the man of the hooked nose, the stoop and limp.
Once more a flash of white film: a boat in a marsh, black birds and a mysterious rifle shot.
A third fire, the Zoo. A wild chase ending at the breakwater, and after that a fight on the island and little old Ben Zook.
Then again the marsh, a boat and Mazie, and after that the mysterious assailant. Then came that tragic scene, the death of poor, old Ben Zook.
The den of the underworld, the dancing girl, Jensie; the attack, Pant’s life saved by the girl, the mysterious light, mystifying darkness, then the outer air.
The building on Randolph Street, the mysterious load of chemicals, the fight with Knobs Whittaker. Flight. The fire that seemed hotter than the flames of a volcano.
“And here we are,” he whispered to himself. “How does it all connect up? Or does it? Sometimes it seems to; at others it appears not to. How is it all to end?”
Pant suddenly interrupted his reveries.
“Johnny,” he said, “men don’t know much about light, do they?”
“I suppose not, Pant.”
“Of course they don’t. It’s all sort of relative, isn’t it? If I have a torch in a dark room it seems a brilliant light. Take it into the sunlight and it dwindles to nothing. Now if an extraordinarily bright light struck your eyes for a second and the next second vanished, the lights of a room might seem no light at all, just plain darkness?”
“Possibly,” said Johnny, without really thinking much about it.
Since this was the last great night of the greatest carnival ever held in the city’s most popular pleasure resort, though the hour was late, the cares were here and there given bits of color by the costumes of pleasure-seeking revelers.
The journey was scarcely more than half completed when the car filled, and Pant felt compelled to give his seat to a slender girl who, like himself, was headed for the scene of gaiety. Dressed as a Gypsy, with red shoes, red stockings, a bright colored striped dress and a crimson shawl, with a mask completely covering her face, she would have been difficult to recognize even by her most intimate acquaintances. But the keen eye of this unusual boy, Pant, detected something vaguely familiar. Mayhap it was the slender, red stockinged ankles, or the constantly bobbing feet that suggested a dance, or the long, artistic fingers that constantly plaited her dress.
He studied her until they left the car. As he turned to leave at Mazie’s station, he felt a sudden tickle above his collar. Turning quickly, he surprised the Gypsy girl concealing the colored end of a feathery reed beneath her cloak.
“Ah there,” he breathed, “I thought I knew you. Here’s hoping I see you at Forest City.”
Quick as thought the girl’s fingers went to her belt, then to the bosom of her dress. She snipped a small red rose from a bouquet at her belt and pinned it to her dress.
The next instant Johnny gave Pant such a pull as drew him half down the car. Two seconds later they were on the platform and the car was speeding away.
“What was holding you?” demanded Johnny.
“That Gypsy girl.”
“What of her?”
“I recognized her.”
“Oh! You did?” said Johnny. “Well, come on, we go down here. It’s late. Mazie and the little girl may not wait. Let’s hurry.”
Mazie and Tillie McFadden had waited. Since the amusement park was only six blocks from Mazie’s home, they walked. In a short time they were mingling with the fun-mad throng that flowed like a many colored stream down the board walks of Forest City, a city which Johnny had once said was doomed. As he entered it now he asked himself whether this were true. The answer was: Who knows?
The mingled sounds that strike one’s ears on a night like this are stunning in their variety and intensity. The dull tom-tom of some Gypsy fortune teller inviting trade by pounding a flat-headed drum; the steady challenge of men who invite you to risk your small change on the turn of a spindle wheel; the inviting shout of hawkers; the high-pitched screams descending from the roller coaster as a car pitches down through space; the minor shouts of revelers on the board walks; all this, blended with the dull rumble of wheels, the clank of machinery, the splash of boats, the murmur of ten thousand voices, produces a sound which in the aggregate blends into a mad jumble that leaves one with no conscious thought of sound. No one sound seems to register above the others. It is all just one greatnoise.
The sights that strike your eye are scarcely less impressive. Great streamers of confetti, red, white, blue, yellow and green tissue ribbons hanging from wires, from plaster-of-paris domes, from windows, from electric lights, from every spot where a sparrow might rest his wings; bushels of bits of paper flying through the air like a highly tinted snow storm; and the amusements—here a car rushing through space, there the whirling invitation of an airplane, and there again the slow and stately Ferris wheel. Beneath all this the colorful throng that, like some giant reptile, moves ever forward but never comes to an end. These were the sights that thrilled the four young pleasure seekers.
The sensations of touch, too, added to the frenzy that appeared to enter one’s very veins and to send his blood racing. A wild group of revelers, playing a game that is little less than crack-the-whip, wrap themselves about you, to at last break up like a wave of the sea and go surging away. A single frenzied reveler seizes you sharply by the arm, to scream at you and vanish. A tickler touches your ear; a handful of fine confetti sifts down your neck; you are caught in a swelling current of the crowd to be at last deposited with a final crush into a little eddy close by some game of chance, or booth where root beer and hot dogs are sold.
They had been cast aside by the throng into such an eddy as this when, finding herself without other occupation, Mazie focused her opera glasses, which hung by a strap at her side, on a wooden tower two hundred feet high. This tower, lighted as it was by ten thousand electric lamps, seemed at the distance a white hot obelisk of steel. The tower stood in the center of the place and there were six bronze eagles at the very top of it.
“How plainly I can see them,” Mazie murmured to herself. “I can even see the copper wire that binds them to the pillars.”
Little did she dream of the awe-inspiring and awful sights she would witness on that tower, with those glasses, on this very night.
It was at this moment that Pant noticed little Tillie McFadden’s eyes, full of longing, fixed upon the roller coaster.
“Ever ride on that?” he asked.
The girl shook her head.
“Want to?”
“You bet I do.”
“You’re on!” exclaimed Pant. “When shall we four meet again, and where?”
“In just an hour,” said Johnny. “Meet us beneath the statue of the two fools.” This immense statue, made of cement, stood near the exit.
“All right, we’ll be there,” smiled Pant. “Come on, Tillie. We’ll do the city right, roller coaster, City of Venice, ferris wheel and all.” Then they were swallowed up by the crowd.
As for Johnny and Mazie, they had visited the park many times before. The amusements were an old story, but the crowd was not. No crowd is ever tiresome to a person who has a keen mind and a true interest in the study of his fellowman.
For these two it was enough to watch the actions of these people—of this crowd in their disguises. Many of them were dressed in ridiculous costumes and nearly all were masked. Thus, with their true natures for the time apparently hidden by a mask, each person gave himself over to the seeking of pleasure in the way most natural to him. Many were truly merry; some merely sordid, and a few were brutal in their manner of extracting pleasure from those about them.
As they drifted in and out among the throngs, Johnny and Mazie were finally caught in a narrow place and forced along against their will.
When, at last, the throng broadened and separated, they found themselves before another table of chance. This time, instead of the spindle wheel there was a board. In the lower end of this board, which was perhaps two feet wide by four long, there were eight holes. Beside each of these holes were numbers. At the top of the board were four balls. The balls rested upon a narrow board. To play, one has but to tip the narrow board and allow the balls to roll to the bottom, where they settle themselves in holes. One then adds up the numbers before the balls and consults a table of numbers before him. This table is composed of red and black numbers. If the sum reached by adding up chances to correspond to a red number, the player wins a watch, a camera, a silver cream pitcher or any other article he may choose.
“Looks easy enough,” smiled Johnny as he watched the operator roll the balls. “Too easy. There’s a trick somewhere.”
Now Johnny got a lot of fun out of discovering tricks. “Mind if we watch him a little while?” he asked.
“Not a bit,” answered Mazie, putting a hand on his shoulder as the crowd pressed about them. The man in the booth, a tall, broad shouldered man, gave them a quick look. Johnny blinked under that look.
“But after all,” he told himself, “we’re masked. If he has seen us before he’ll not recognize us now.”
He looked at the man and started. There was something vaguely familiar about him. Yet he, too, was heavily masked. There was little chance of telling who he might be.
For fifteen minutes Johnny studied the game. Men played, women played and boys as well. There were plenty of red numbers; but only once in all that time, while the operator hauled in the money, did red turn up. Yet, when for a moment the business lulled, the man behind the table could make red come up easily enough.
“It’s strange,” said Johnny, scratching his head. “It seems so absurdly simple. One would say it couldn’t be doctored at all, and yet it is. Ah well, what’s the use? Let’s go on.”
He was turning to go when a long arm reached out from behind the board and touched his shoulder. It was the operator. There was greed shining from the small black eyes that peeped evilly through the holes in the mask.
“See, mister,” the man was saying, “I give you a roll. It don’t cost you noding. I don’t gives you noding. See! It is free.”
“No, I don’t want a roll,” said Johnny, starting away again.
“Dot’s fair enough, mister,” replied the man.
This last remark went through the boy like an electric shock. Those words, that accent, the whole thing—where had he heard it before? Strive as he might, rake down the walls of his memory as he did, he could not recall. And yet something within told him that he should recall, that here was a key to something important; something tremendously big.
“No,” he whispered to himself, “I can’t recall it now, but I can stick around. It may come to me all of a flash.”
“All right,” he thought to himself, “if I have to, I’ll play.”
Fortune favored him. He was not obliged to play, but could watch.
“Set ’em up!” said a stranger, producing a shiny quarter.
“Count ’em,” he said a moment later as the last ball dropped into its hole.
“Four, nine, sexteen, zwenty-zree. Dot’s black. Try again. Anoder times you are lucky.”
The man did try again, again and yet again, and always he lost.
And then, like a flash, the trick of the game came to Johnny. If the balls were carefully placed in certain definite positions on the narrow board, they would always escape falling into holes marked 7 and 11. These numbers were needed if the result was to be a red number.
As if by accident, he brushed the board with his elbow. This moved a ball slightly to the right.
The result was another black number. But by a sudden movement the operator showed that he was startled.
The stranger fed in two more quarters before Johnny tried the trick again.
This time the operator looked at him and uttered an audible snarl before he began to count. He knew he was beaten.
“Three, nine, fifteen, zwenty-zoo. Dot’s red,” he muttered.
And at the sound of that low mutter Johnny remembered.
So struck was he at this revelation, that he could barely repress an audible exclamation. The stranger chose a small pocket camera, and the game went on.
From this time on the question of whether the stranger won or lost did not count. Johnny was trying to think; to plan a course of action. He knew now where he had heard that man’s voice before—at the fire in which Mazie barely missed losing her life.
As he looked at the man he knew he could not be mistaken. The hooked nose was covered by the mask, but the stoop was there and the voice was the same. If he needed further proof it was not long in coming. As the man stepped back to take down the small camera, Johnny noticed that he walked with a decided limp.
“He’s the man,” Johnny thought to himself. “He’s the man who burned the school houses, the welfare center and the zoo, who attempted to kill me, and did kill poor old Ben Zook!” As he thought of Ben Zook he found it difficult to hold himself in hand. He wanted to leap across the board and throttle the man where he stood.
“No! No!” he told himself. “I must not. I must be calm. I must remain here. I must watch the play until I have thought what next to do. One thing sure, I must not bungle my chances now. Too much hinges on doing the right thing.”
Johnny was up against the most puzzling problem of his whole life. A tensely dramatic situation, a novelist would have called it. Having long since abandoned the theory that the pink-eyed man was the firebug, he had fastened upon the hook-nosed man as the real culprit. With this in mind, he had connected past events into an almost unbreakable chain of circumstances. He had now but to find the man. And here he was. He had found him. But under what strange circumstances! What was to be done? If he called upon the revellers to assist him in apprehending the man they would laugh merrily, thinking his request a joke. The man, on the other hand, would not think it a joke. He might choose either to vanish or to put a bullet in Johnny’s heart. That he would do one or the other Johnny did not doubt, for this man was a criminal.
One thing was in Johnny’s favor; since he was masked and there was nothing particularly distinctive about him, it was not probable that he had been recognized.
In vain he looked about him for a passing policeman; in vain racked his brain for a way out.
Then of a sudden there came the flash of a suggestion. He would at least have a picture of the man. Only a few days before he had given a small camera to Tillie McFadden. In his pocket was a film and some flash-light powders he had meant to give her. The camera the stranger had but this moment won was the same size. The films would fit. The man, though not playing now, was still in the crowd. He would borrow or buy it.
Without at all knowing what it was about, the stranger parted with his camera for a five dollar bill, then went back to play.
Johnny gave Mazie the camera, then pressed the film into her hand as he whispered:
“Load the camera. Press my hand when you’re ready.”
She knew about the flash-light powders and appeared to understand, for she squeezed his hand assuringly.
The stranger was again at the board. He rolled again. By some freak of chance, this time he won.
“Zwenty-four. Dot vins,” said the faker. “Vot do you choose?” His voice held a note of irritation.
“What would you suggest?” the stranger asked, turning to Johnny.
It was with the greatest of difficulty that Johnny focussed his mind on this simple task which at other times and under different circumstances would have been a pleasure.
Then a sudden inspiration came to him. At the far corner, and on the top shelf, was a silver pitcher. If the stranger asked for that the man’s back, while he was taking it down, would be turned long enough for Johnny to prepare a flash.
“I’d take that pitcher,” he said steadily, at the same time pointing to the pitcher.
“Are you ready?” he whispered to Mazie.
“Ready,” she answered back.
“When he turns,” he whispered. There followed ten seconds of suspense which was ended by a loud pop and a blinding flash of light.
The silver pitcher fell with a thump at Johnny’s feet. The astonishment and rage of the man conducting the game was a thing to marvel at. His face went white, then purple. As if to snatch the camera away, he leaped at Mazie. She forced her way back into the crowd. Then, just as it seemed that matters were at their worst, there came a wild cry:
“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”
For a second Johnny believed that someone had been unduly frightened by his flash and was spreading a false alarm. One glance toward the far end of the park told him the terrible truth. A building at that end, a sort of office, was all ablaze. He had long felt that the place was doomed, and doomed it was!
“And on such a night, with such a throng!” he murmured.
The fire held his eye but a second. The man—he must get that man! He was gone—no, there he was. He was racing before the fear-mad mob that threatened to run him down. In a twinkling Johnny was on his trail.
He had not followed him twenty paces when, to his astonishment, he saw the man turn and dart through the only door of the great wooden tower which loomed two hundred feet in air.
“He—he’s trapped!” Johnny panted. “He trapped himself. I wonder why?”
Who could tell? Had a mad fear of the mob driven him into that place as the hounds drive a deer over the precipice? Had he hoped to slip safely out a little later?
Whatever the reason, there was little chance of escape. With but one thought in his mind, Johnny Thompson was close behind.
By a single flash of his electric torch Johnny located the man some twenty steps up a rickety winding staircase that led to the very top of the tower. The next second, with his torch off, in utter darkness, Johnny put his foot on the lower step. A roaring furnace of fire was not far behind him; a dangerous man before him; but come what might, he was prepared to do his whole duty.
Forest City was on fire. The wind was directly behind the blaze. Before it, beckoning it on, were tons of confetti, board walks, dry as tinder, and flimsy structures of stucco and lath. Nothing could save this play place of the frightened thousands.
Realizing this, and fearing death from the blaze, the throngs that but a moment before were screaming with merriment now raced screaming and shouting with fear toward the back of the park where there were no exits, but where flimsy board fences would offer little resistance to their mad onrush.
To add to the terror of the moment, the powerhouse was at once attacked by the unhindered blaze. The cables were burned. Every chain, every cable, every wheel of the place suddenly stopped. The moving platform which bore the gondolas of the City of Venice majestically on their way, came to a sudden halt. The men, women and children who crowded the gondolas were obliged to leap into the water and to battle their way as best they could through the maze of plaster-of-paris castles, humble homes and shops toward the faint spot of light which marked the exit. This spot of light was but the glare of the fire, for all lights had burned out with the cable.
Only the glare of burning buildings lighted the awe inspiring scene that followed. The roller coaster, pausing with a sudden jerk in its mad rush, left some merrymakers stranded on light trestles, and others so tilted on a down glide that they were standing more on their heads than their feet.
There came the screams of women who had lost their way in some strange place of entertainment and mirth. In this throng were women in thin ball-room costumes; boys and girls with roller skates clanking on their feet; performers from the outdoor stage, dressed in little more than tinsel and tights, and all pushing and shoving, screaming and praying that they might reach the far end and break away into wider spaces beyond before the fire was upon them.
And the fire. Having started in the offices, it has leaped joyfully on to the power-house and thence to the Palace of Fools. The faces on the statue of two fools are seized with a sudden pallor. They become yellow and jaundiced, then turn suddenly black. Then of a sudden they assume a very ruddy hue. As quickly after that they crumble to nothing and fall, a mass of dust. Johnny and Mazie will not meet Pant and little Tillie McFadden beneath the statue of two fools to-night. No, nor on any other night.
And what had happened to Pant and Tillie McFadden? Up to the last few terrible moments they had been having the time of their young lives. Up and down, under and over, they had rushed through space on the roller coaster. With all the solemn majesty of a trip to Europe they had ridden through the City of Venice. For a time they had wandered upon the board-walk. It was during this walk that Pant had caught sight of a familiar figure, a slim girl with a red rose pinned on her breast. He had watched her for but a moment when he was made sure by her skipping step, which was more a dance than a walk, that she was the dancing girl who had saved his life that night in the den of the underworld. Just as he had been about to put his hand on her shoulder, a screeching mob of revelers had come swooping down upon her and, as a torrent of water bears away a leaf, had carried her away.
“Ah well,” he had sighed, “I will come upon her again.” At that he had turned to Tillie McFadden, who was standing staring at the Ferris wheel with the fascination of a child.
“Want to go on there?”
She nodded.
“Come on, then.”
They had waited their turn, had gotten aboard and had gone up over and down, up over and down again, and were starting on their third round when the cry: “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!” high pitched and shrill, sounded above the shouts and screams of the revelers.
“Sit right where you are,” said Pant reassuringly, as the little girl, frightened by the cries and the sight of leaping flames, started from her seat. “The fire is a full block away from us. Long before it reaches us we will have reached the ground, leaped from this cage and scampered away.”
The wheel turned about at a snail-like pace, stopping and starting, stopping and starting again. As they mounted higher and higher, the flames, led on by great masses of confetti which acted like a fuse, leaped from building to building, coming ever nearer, nearer, nearer! Pant became truly alarmed. At last they reached the very highest point and here the great wheel came to a sudden stop. Pant knew, from the nature of the stop, that here they would stay, and his consternation was complete. There they were, swinging in the air a hundred feet from the ground, with a raging conflagration racing madly toward them and with only steel rods and bars between them and the ground.
Johnny Thompson was at that moment in a scarcely less perilous position. Having followed the firebug a distance of fifty feet up that rickety stairway, he had paused to flash on his light, only to discover to his intense horror that the man, crouching on a small landing not ten feet above him, was engaged in aiming a knife with a ten-inch blade directly at his head.
Had he not been Johnny Thompson, he would have perished on the spot. Trained for every emergency, he leaped clean of the stairs, but holding firmly to the rail of the bannister. The next instant the knife went clanging against the wall.
For a moment, in utter darkness, the boy clung there. Then, hearing the man he hunted again begin the ascent, he swung back upon the stairs and followed.
In that moment he allowed himself a few darting thoughts as to how the affair would end. His purpose was to get that man! True enough; but how? This he could not answer, nor could he resist the desire to follow. So follow he did, step by step, circle by circle, up, up, up, to dizzy heights. The tower had no windows. He could not see the fire, nor could he realize by what leaps and bounds it was fighting its way toward that very tower.
“Tillie,” said Pant as he saw that the Ferris wheel had made its final stop and had left them high in air, “I am by nature a cat. I have lived in the jungles with great cats. There is one thing a cat can do supremely well—climb. I can climb. I can go down those rods and take you with me if you can but cling to my back. Can you?”
For answer, the girl leaped upon his back to cling there with such tenacity that her nails cut his flesh.
“That’s the girl!” he smiled approvingly.
Cautiously he lowered himself over the edge of the car to grasp a bar of iron. It was at this instant that he heard a shriek from the car to the right. Turning about, he saw a slender girl dressed as a Gypsy, clinging to the side of her car with one hand while with the other she appealed to him for aid. She had torn the mask from her face. He recognized her at a glance—the girl who had saved his life in the den of the underworld.
“Afraid,” he told himself, “afraid of great heights, but not afraid to leap upon the arm of a villain with a knife.”
“Stay where you are,” he shouted, “I’ll be back.”
Rash promise. To catch at a rod here, at a bar there, to swing from bar to bar as an ape swings from branch to branch, going down, down to safety; all this was hard enough, but to ascend, with the fierce glare of the fire upon you—that would be next to impossible! Yet he had promised. He owed his life to that girl and he must fulfill his promise.
As he reached the hub of the wheel he could feel his strength waning. If he covered the remaining distance to the ground he could never return.
“Tillie,” he said soberly, “there is a bar going directly to the ground. Do you think you could grip it hard enough to slide down it without falling?”
The girl’s face went white. One glance at the pitiful creature above her, and courage returned.
“I—I’ll try.”
The next second her arms encircled the bar.
Following on the heels of his man, a hundred and fifty feet in air, Johnny came at last to an open balcony above which a great cupola reared itself to the sky. In his mad fear the firebug had already begun mounting the stair in the cupola. As for Johnny, he paused to consider. It was well that he should.
As he looked down a sudden shudder shook his form like a chill. The fire, leaping across a roof more than a hundred feet below him, was already licking at the wooden foundation of the very tower on which he stood. Even in a vain attempt to retrace his steps, a whiff of smoke borne up from below told him that in a brief space of time the tower would be a roaring chimney of flames. What was to be done? Leaving the unfortunate culprit in the cupola to his well deserved fate, whatever it might be, he turned his every thought to ways of escape. There appeared but one, and that all but impossible. But there was no choice. Sitting calmly down, he pulled off his shoes, then climbing over the railing, disappeared at a point directly above one corner of the tower.
While Tillie McFadden, with no further harm than a few scratches and bruises, was making her way to the ground, Pant was performing what seemed a mad feat. He was battling his way upward on the wheel. Here he gripped a rod to swing outward and upward, there climbed straight up where a real cat must have failed, and then, leaping quite free from any support, flew through the air to grip a rod ten feet away.
Up, up, up he climbed until, utterly exhausted, he dropped in the box occupied by the girl.
For ten seconds he lay there panting. The fire, roaring like a volcano, sent flames two hundred feet in air, scorching their cheeks and showering them with sparks. In a moment Pant was himself again.
Snatching the girl’s cape from her, he consigned it to the flames.
“Your arms about my neck, your feet about my waist,” he ordered, “and down we go.”
He was instantly obeyed, and down indeed they went. Though that girl may live two lifetimes, never again will she experience a ride like that. With the breath of the fire beating upon them, they swung from rod to rod, shot through space, glided and slid until with a final terrible bump, they came to solid earth and went racing away after the fast disappearing throng.
Strangely enough, as Johnny crept over the railing that hung out over one hundred and fifty feet of empty air, he chanced to think of the black bag beneath the bed in his room.
“What a numbskull I was to throw it there and not tell anyone about it,” he thought to himself. “I shall probably not get out of this alive. The bag may stay there for weeks. Then it is likely to be found by the wrong person. And I am all but certain that it contains evidence which would go far toward putting Knobs Whittaker behind the bars.”
During all this time his friend Mazie, ignorant of the fate of her three friends, had at first been jostled and pushed by the fear-maddened throng until at last she had fought her way out into a little open space where she was allowed to pause for breath.
Stationing herself in a secluded spot, she had watched the little drama played by Pant and his two friends. Without knowing who they were, she had screamed her approval with the others.
Having caught sight of two figures moving about at the top of the tower, and happening to think of her opera glasses, she drew them from her pocket and focussed them upon the top of the tower.
A look of surprise spread over her face as she recognized the topmost man. It was the hook-nosed, stooped figure of the firebug. The glasses dropped from her nerveless fingers as she recognized the other one as her friend Johnny, who was at this moment crawling over the railing with the apparent intention of leaping to the ground.
“He’ll be killed!” she fairly screamed as she closed her eyes to shut out the sight.
When at last she summoned up enough courage to look again she was astonished to see, some twenty feet below the balcony where she had last seen Johnny, a figure that clung to the corner of the tower and appeared by some miracle of skill and strength to be moving downward.
She snatched up her glasses to look again and again came little short of dropping them the second time. The figure clinging to the corner of the tower was Johnny!
Seldom is it given to man to witness such a human spider act as she was privileged to watch during the next five minutes. The chance that Johnny had seen was a slim one, yet it was a chance. At regular intervals of a foot, two double rows of incandescent lamps ran down the corner of the tower. The two rows on the south side were four inches apart; those on the east the same. These lamp sockets protruded for about three inches, and using them as steps to his ladder, Johnny was slowly but surely climbing downward. There was great peril in the undertaking. A broken socket, a sudden slip, and all would be over. Never in all his eventful life had Johnny undertaken a feat which required so much skill and daring. Yet, once he had committed himself to the undertaking, there was no turning back.
By great good fortune, the sockets which held the lamps had been fastened with long nails instead of screws. The wood was strong. One by one the sockets supported his weight. Like a bat, gripping with both hands and feet, he moved cautiously downward. As Mazie watched him she measured the distance:
“A quarter done, a third, a half, a—but there,” she cried, “there’s a flame shooting out below him!”
Johnny saw it, too, but there was no turning back. Trusting to good fortune, he continued steadily downward. Fortune did not desert him; a breath of air sucked the flame back and the next moment he had passed the spot.
Again Mazie resumed her eye measurement. It was a mad thing to do, but it was all that was left to her.
“Two-thirds of the way; three-quarters. But there’s a lower balcony! How is he to pass that?”
How indeed? This balcony, some six feet in width, left no opportunity to climb over its rail and down. Some forty feet from the ground, it threatened to stop the boy’s progress and condemn him to a terrible death.
As Johnny reached this balcony, flames were leaping at him from every side. Directly before him, however, was a clear space. Through that space he caught sight of what at first appeared to be flames, but what proved in the end to be but the reflection of the fire in the pool of water used by the chute. It was fully forty feet below him.
Johnny’s keen brain worked like lightning. One look, and then a racing leap. With arms and figure set for a dive, he shot far out and down.