ONE MORE LINK
ONE MORE LINK
ONE MORE LINK
“We’re not licked yet. Come on.” Sandy took hold of Ken’s arm with sudden vigor.
“Come where?” Ken asked.
“Just follow me. It’s my turn to have a hunch. But hurry!”
Sandy dragged him quickly to the top of the stairway, hesitated there a moment trying to orient himself in the confused underground labyrinth beneath Grand Central Station, and then demanded, “Which way is Lexington Avenue?”
“Over that way.”
“That’s the way we go then.” Sandy darted toward the exit, and Ken followed.
Like a broken-field runner Sandy ducked, pivoted, and plunged through the crowd, with Ken always close behind him, until they emerged into the street. Just in front of them a taxicab was discharging a baggage-laden passenger. Sandy crossed the sidewalk in a single leap.
“Come on!” he shouted to Ken. To the driver he said, “Chatham Square—as fast as you can get there!”
Ken barely managed to pull the door shut behind himself as the taxi started off. He collapsed breathless against the cushions.
“Where’s he taking us?” he asked, as soon as he could speak.
Sandy opened his mouth to answer, but the words were pushed back down his throat as the driver swung left, with wildly squealing brakes, an instant before the green light blinked off.
“Wherever it is,” Ken gasped, “do we have to go in this much of a hurry?”
“It’s Chatham Square,” Sandy answered. “And we do.”
Ken blinked. “What makes you think—?” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence. The cab driver was sounding his horn so loudly, in impatience at a slow-moving truck up ahead, that speech was useless.
When the taxi finally rounded the truck and darted forward into the clear, Sandy answered the uncompleted question.
“I told you it was a hunch,” he said. “But the Tobacco Mart’s on Chatham Square, isn’t it?”
Ken nodded. “So?”
“Well, Barrack said he worked there, but it looks now as if he doesn’t.”
Ken interrupted. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you before, but the label on that package Barrack left on top of the box said Spectrum Printing Company.”
“Then Barrack must have been lying about his job with the Tobacco Mart. Why would he have been mailing packages for a printing firm if he didn’t work there?”
“As a favor, maybe,” Ken suggested.
Sandy ignored him. “I’m assuming, therefore, that he doesnotwork for the Tobacco Mart. But the fact that he used its name must mean he knows the outfit—and may be tied in with it somehow. And therefore our friend Watch Crystal might also be tied in with it. Anyway, my hunch is that that’s where he’s going. If I’m wrong we haven’t lost anything, except the price of the taxi fare.”
“You think then,” Ken said slowly, bracing his feet on the floor as the cab tore around another corner to head downtown, “that they definitely recognized each other in the restaurant—that the exchange of the package was a planned thing?”
Sandy stared at him. “What else could it have been? Sure, Barrack might honestly have left a package behind in a restaurant. And some stranger sitting near by might have noticed it, and been dishonest enough to pick it up and make off with it. Sure, it could all have happened that way. But not to those two. Not after Barrack admitted to us that he’d been with Watch Crystal the other day. Besides, there was something mighty smooth and furtive about the way that exchange was made. If that whole deal wasn’t carefully planned I’ll—I’ll—”
“You can’t eat your hat in this weather,” Ken said. “It’s too cold. You’ll need it.”
The taxi driver, skillfully edging his way through the traffic, spoke over his shoulder. “Any special number on Chatham Square?”
“No,” Sandy told him. “Just drop us off when you get there.”
A few minutes later the driver was saying, “O.K. Drop off. You’re here—and fast, like you ordered.”
“Swell. Thanks.” Sandy added a tip to the fare registered on the meter.
When the taxi started back uptown the boys stood uncertainly for a moment on the sidewalk. Chatham Square was a junction point of several streets and alleys, all radiating out from its open area like the spokes of a crazily designed wheel. Evidence of New York’s large Chinese population was everywhere.
The window of the drugstore just behind them was so covered with Chinese characters that no street number was visible. A sign on the adjoining building announced—in English—that tattooing was done on the premises, next door was a Chinese grocery whose windows were heaped high with strange items of food including a variety of dried fish and meat. A few steps beyond the grocery a blank wall was covered with large sheets of paper bearing freshly inked Chinese characters. Beneath them, in a cluster on the sidewalk, stood several Chinese huddled in warm coats.
“They’re reading the news bulletins,” Ken murmured, as Sandy stared. He let his eye wander farther around the square until finally he saw a street number on the front of a souvenir shop. “The Tobacco Mart must be down that way,” Ken decided, gesturing toward the right. “Let’s cross the square and try to sight it from there.”
They dodged through the square’s congested traffic, walked past a motion-picture theater whose lobby was decorated with stills from Oriental pictures, and then backtracked quickly into the protection of the theater’s posters. They had found what they were looking for—a weathered sign atop a dilapidated three-story building on the other side of the street. The sign read TOBACCO MART—Smokers’ Supplies and Novelties—WHOLESALE ONLY. The two upper floors of the building were pierced by dusty blank-staring windows, the top ones dingily curtained. The street floor was fronted by glass display windows, but they had been painted black to a line above eye level, so that the passer-by could see nothing of what was beyond them.
Sandy shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other. “Well, there it is,” he said unnecessarily. “Now all we have to do is see if my hunch—” He broke off because Ken had grabbed his arm.
“There’s Watch Crystal!” Ken said. “Coming around the corner there! You were right!”
Instinctively they backed farther into the theater lobby as the man they watched hurried toward the entrance of the Tobacco Mart. He paused a moment in front of it and looked quickly around. His eyes, beneath a lowered hatbrim, surveyed the front of the theater opposite, and the upper stories of the buildings on either side of it.
Ken could feel his heart thudding heavily. He had no idea whether they had been noticed or not.
And then, as if satisfied, the man hurried through the black-painted door of the wholesale tobacco shop.
Ken took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “you sure outsmarted him! And I was ready to give up when he disappeared back there at Grand Central Station. Do you think he spotted us—that that’s why he was going through all those evasion tactics?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he has reasons of his own for thinking that he’s always in danger of being tailed. We can’t even guess about what’s going on here. We don’t know enough. The question is,” Sandy added, “how to go about learning any more. I suppose we could go into the Tobacco Mart and inquire the price of cigars by the thousand lot.”
Ken shook his head. “No use tipping our hand—on the chance that Watch Crystal hasn’t seen us yet.” He glanced toward the cashier’s window and saw that the ticket seller was already eying them with marked disapproval. “But we can’t hang around here any longer. Let’s see if we can’t find a better vantage point, where we can keep an eye on the Tobacco Mart for a while. Then if Watch Crystal comes out and goes somewhere else—”
“Right,” Sandy agreed. “If we follow him long enough we’re bound to get some clue as to what he’s up to.”
They found what they were seeking almost immediately—an observation post that seemed custom-made for the job of watching the grimy store across the square. It was a small branch library—one of the many subdivisions of New York’s huge public library system. It occupied a narrow building not more than twenty-five feet wide, but it appeared to use all three floors of the structure. In any case, as the boys could see through a large window running almost the full width of the building, the second floor was clearly a reading andreference room. Several elderly men were seated there at broad tables, reading by the gray light of the winter afternoon.
“That’s for us,” Sandy agreed, when Ken suggested that they go in. “I’ll keep an eye on the Tobacco Mart until you get set up there, and then I’ll join you.”
Ken pushed through the heavy doors on the street level and found himself in the library’s lending room. There were long rows of stacks at the rear, and a charge desk near the entrance presided over by a single librarian. She looked up only briefly as Ken walked past her to the flight of stairs mounting against one wall.
The reading room on the second floor was larger than it had seemed from the street, and entirely occupied by heavy oak tables set parallel to each other down its entire length. But the half-dozen readers—all men—were clustered around the two tables nearest the front, where the light was best. Ken took a newspaper from the periodical rack as he went by, and sat down in one of two adjoining vacant chairs at the front table. He had only to look through the window, over the top of his paper, to see the Tobacco Mart across the square.
A few minutes later Sandy slid quietly into place beside him, shaking his head to indicate that he had seen nothing of interest while he kept guard below.
The three shabbily dressed men who shared their table glanced at them curiously, as if unaccustomed to seeing strange faces in that room, and then returned to their half-dozing perusal of magazines or newspapers.
The minute hand on a large wall clock crept slowly on its way. The big room was warm and quiet, shut off from the traffic noises below. The creaking of Sandy’s chair, as he shifted his weight on the hard seat, sounded loud in the silence.
At the end of half an hour the door of the Tobacco Mart still remained closed. No one had left or entered the shop.
Sandy shrugged, got up to exchange the photographic magazine he had been looking at for another one, and sat down again.
Another old man came in, glared at Ken as if he were occupying his own favorite chair, and settled himself noisily at the second table. His arrival was the only event that broke the peaceful monotony of the second half hour.
Finally Sandy pulled an envelope out of his pocket, and the stub of a pencil, and appeared to be making notes from an article in his magazine. But he held the envelope so that Ken could see what he had written.
“What do you think really goes on over there?” Sandy’s scrawl read. “Is the Tobacco Mart an innocent place of business—or is it not? And if it is why did Watch Crystal behave so mysteriously?”
Ken shrugged his shoulders as a signal that he had no answers to Sandy’s questions. They were the same questions he had been asking himself. He tilted his head in a gesture toward the street that asked, “Do you want to leave? Shall we give this up?”
Sandy grinned and shook his head slightly. “Why?” he scribbled on the envelope. “Always like to catch up on my reading during vacation. And I’m not hungry yet.”
By the end of the next hour several of the room’s other occupants had departed. The square outside was beginning to fill with the first early shadows of winter darkness.
Suddenly Ken sat erect in his chair. An instant later he was getting to his feet, motioning Sandy to follow. But Sandy had already shut his magazine and stuffed his envelope and pencil back into his pocket.
They had both seen the boy who emerged from the Tobacco Mart and started briskly down the street, pushing a two-wheeled cart laden with packages.
“Delivery boy,” Ken said, as the library door shut behind them and they hurried along the sidewalk in the same direction. “Maybe we can learn something from him.”
The boy’s destination was not far away. It proved to be—as Ken and Sandy had suspected—the nearest post office. The place was crowded at that hour of the day. The boy from the Tobacco Mart took his place at the end of a lengthy line waiting in front of the parcel-post window. The pile of packages he had brought with him was heaped at his feet, so that he could shove them along as the line moved up.
Ken got into place just behind him. “Quite a load you’ve got there,” he said conversationally.
“That?” The boy touched the pile of packages with the toe of his shoe. His voice sounded contemptuous. “That’s nothing. You should have seen what I had to lug around in the old days.”
“Old days?” Ken repeated casually, as if he had no other interest than idle talk to pass the time. “Business better then?”
“The boss was better,” the boy corrected him. “Fellow who used to own the business knew his stuff. But the new owner—!” He shook his head in disgust. “Our line is smokers’ supplies—tobacco and stuff, see? But sometimes I think he doesn’t know the difference between a good Havana cigar and a—a cigar-store Indian.”
Ken laughed what he hoped sounded like a sympathetic laugh. His mind was racing, busy with the interesting news that the Tobacco Mart had a new owner—a man who seemed to know nothing about tobacco. Sandy, behind him, gave him a poke in the ribs to indicate that he too had heard.
“Too bad,” Ken said. “But I suppose it takes time to learn a new business, if it’s been dumped in your lap unexpectedly—if you inherit it or something.”
“He didn’t inherit this.” The boy moved his packages ahead with a small angry kick. “He bought it. And that’s what I can’t understand. Why? He doesn’t lay in hardly any new stock. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to fill the orders that come in! So naturally not so many are coming any more. And I’m telling you we used to have orders from all over the country!”
Before Ken could ask him a new question he went on again. He seemed only too glad to talk to somebody who was willing to listen to his complaints.
“I’ve been working there for three years,” he muttered, “after school and on Saturdays and all. But believe me, I’m thinking about quitting. At first I tried to help the guy out—give him a right steer once in a while when I saw he didn’t know anything. But would he listen? Oh, no! According to him, he knows everything.”
“Stubborn,” Ken suggested, his tone still sympathetic.
“Stubbornanddumb,” the boy added. “Finally I said to him the other day, ‘Look, Mr. Grace, why don’t you rent out the second floor now that you don’t need it for supplies any more?’ It’s empty, see? And it could just as well be rented, like the top floor is. But you know what he says? ‘No, Pete,’ he says to me, ‘I like it this way—quiet. Tenants right over my head might be noisy.’ Can you beat that? I know he’s losing money on the business. He can’t even be making expenses, the way he runs things. And here he won’t eventryto make a little extra money!”
“Sounds as if you could do a lot better for yourself somewhere else,” Ken said.
“And, brother, I’m going to! Why that—!” The boy broke off as he suddenly became aware that he had reached the head of the line.
Ken and Sandy stayed where they were, hoping for further information about the mysterious new owner of the Tobacco Mart. But the boy was busy, conscientiously checking up on each package that he pushed through the window.
As the clerk handed him his change he said, “You’re slipping, Pete. Used to ship out twice this amount—and once a day instead of once a week.”
“You’re telling me!” the boy answered, with his sour grin. “You should tell my genius boss—John D. Grace. The D is for dopey.” He moved aside from the window. “Be seeing you!” He included Ken in his farewell gesture.
“Good luck!” Ken called after him.
“Lift your parcels up here, please,” the clerk said impatiently.
Ken stared at him blankly. “Oh—eh—I just wanted some stamps, please. Two threes and—”
“Buddy,” the clerk said, “can’t you read? That sign in front of you says parcel post. If you want stamps—”
“Oh, sorry. Thanks.” Ken departed hastily, with Sandy close behind him.
Out on the sidewalk again they headed instinctively back toward the Tobacco Mart. Pete, the delivery boy, was only half a block ahead of them, whistling dismally as he pushed his truck along the uneven sidewalk.
“Very interesting,” Sandy murmured.
“Very interesting indeed,” Ken agreed. “Do you suppose Grace is our friend Watch Crystal? Do you think—?”
He let the question die away. They had turned the corner into the block where the Tobacco Mart stood. The man they called Watch Crystal was visible at its door, peering impatiently out and down the street. When he saw Pete approaching he called to him.
“Hurry up! This is a rush order!” He was waving a small package, about the size of two cartons of cigarettes.
“O.K. I’m coming, Mr. Grace.” There was more surprise than anything else in the boy’s voice. “Somebody must want a smoke awful bad,” he added as he drew near his employer.
Grace ignored his attempt at humor. “Take a taxi,” he ordered. “And take one back here. You’ll be bringing another package with you.”
“Somebody returning their old cigar stubs?” Pete asked.
Grace snapped at him. “I don’t pay you to ask idiotic questions. Get going! The address is on the package.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Grace.” Pete turned away, his eyes already ranging the busy square for a vacant taxi.
“There’s one for us!” Sandy had sighted a cab that was just swinging around the corner behind him. He made a dive for it and Ken rushed after him.
“Just pull over to the curb and wait a minute,” Sandy directed.
Ken strained his eyes in the growing dusk to keep Pete in sight. The boy was walking slowly on down the sidewalk, waving his arm occasionally when he thought he saw a taxi approaching.
The driver of the boys’ car turned around in his seat, his eyes curious. “Playing games?”
“Playing games,” Sandy agreed.
The driver shrugged. “It’s all right with me. It’s your dough that’s ticking away on the clock.”
“All right,” Ken said a moment later. Pete had found a cab and climbed in. “Follow that taxi there.” He pointed it out.
Ten minutes later the boys found themselves far downtown, less than a block from the East River. From inside their parked cab they could see Pete, half a block ahead, getting out of his cab and entering a small cigar store. The boy’s taxi remained at the curb. In almost no time Pete reappeared, clutching a package about half the size of the one he had delivered.
“Back to the Tobacco Mart?” Sandy asked.
Ken thought quickly. Pete’s taxi was already rolling off. “Let’s not. We seem to be following a chain—first Barrack, then Grace, then Pete—and now this. Let’s see what ‘this’ is.”
“Good idea. How much?” Sandy asked their driver.
He was grinning as he joined Ken on the sidewalk a moment later. “Sounded to me as if the driver said, ‘So long, Junior G-men.’”
“Well,” Ken said, “maybe the laugh will turn out to be on us after all. But so long as we can pick up new links in the chain we might as well keep going.”
“That reminds me.” Sandy spoke through chattering teeth. “Link sausage makes a fine meal.” But he moved steadily along beside Ken toward the little shop up ahead.
They approached it warily, but when they got close they saw that its windows were so steamed up that they were no longer transparent.
Ken’s teeth were chattering, too. “Maybe we could go right in,” he said. “At least it would be warm. And nobody in there would be likely to recognize us.”
The wind from the river cut like ice.
“It’s an idea,” Sandy said. “Maybe they sell chocolate. Though right now I think I could even eat chewing tobacco.”
Suddenly a shadow appeared against the steamy glass of the shop’s door. The boys swung around and walked quickly into the entrance to a shop two doors away. Feeling safe in the darkness, Ken poked his head out far enough to see.
The broad-shouldered man who came out of the small cigar store was wearing a pea jacket. A knitted stocking cap perched high on the round head above his short bull neck.
He walked toward the boys and passed within a few yards of them.
“He’s got it,” Sandy said quietly.
“One more link,” Ken murmured. “Come on.”
The package held tightly under the man’s arm appeared to be the same one Pete had delivered a few minutes before.
The boys moved out after him as he walked on into the night.
NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT
NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT
NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT
The man in the pea jacket led them southward along South Street. On their right stood the long row of buildings occupied by wholesale sea-food merchants—identifiable now even in the darkness by an almost overpowering smell of fish. Across the street, on their left, were the great sheds and docks that extended out over the East River itself. Sometimes, beyond them, the black bow of a freighter could be seen looming up against the gray-black sky.
They passed the huge Fulton Fish Market, where only a few lights twinkled now in the vast empty spaces that would swarm with activity when the early-morning deliveries began.
The man ahead of them walked at a steady pace, hands deep in his pockets, the collar of his pea jacket turned up high around his ears. He seemed in no hurry to get inside out of the cold.
“Wow!” Ken said softly, as a sudden bitter gust of wind straight off the icy river almost drove them back against the building they were passing. “If this turns out to be a wild-goose chase—if he’s just a sailor on the way back to his ship with a couple of cartons of cigarettes—”
“Stop!” Sandy told him. “There’s got to be some good reason for us going through all this.”
“There ought to be,” Ken agreed grimly.
His eyes were watering from the wind. He rubbed his gloved hands across them, clearing his blurred vision in time to see the man they were following veer across the street on a long diagonal. Suddenly he vanished around the corner of a ramshackle building built directly on the river. The boys speeded up.
“Easy,” Ken said, when they reached the building.
Just beyond it the sidewalk was edged by a tall fence of corrugated iron, but between the building and the beginning of the fence was an opening.
“He went through here,” Ken said, as they approached it. He peered around the edge of the building and saw that the fence walled off a great cement-floored dock, stretching into the river some five hundred feet.
At its far end glowed a single light, which faintly silhouetted the figure of the man in the pea jacket, still moving steadily away from them.
The boys slipped through the opening after him.
“Keep against the wall,” Ken said.
They moved quietly forward, in the deep shadowy protection of the building that bordered the dock for its first hundred feet or so. Beyond the building, in the open water that surrounded the rest of the great pier, the boys could discern a row of moored boats, the stern of one snubbed against the bow of the next.
“Fishing boats,” Sandy murmured. “But they wouldn’t be going out this early in the evening, would they? He wouldn’t be reporting to work now if—”
He broke off as the man, up ahead, swung toward the opposite side of the long pier.
For the first time the boys saw that there were craft moored there too. It was too dark to make them out clearly, but they were obviously much larger than the fishing boats.
“Barges?” Sandy whispered questioningly.
They flattened themselves against the wall of the building, near its riverward end, to see what the man would do. When he reached the edge of the dock he seemed to wait a minute, perhaps peering around to see if he was alone. And then they could see his shadowy shape mounting what must have been a ladder against the craft’s side.
A moment later there was the sound of a door creaking open and shut, and then a weak yellow light appeared some distance above the water. It flickered, dimmed, and then brightened again.
“It’s a barge all right. He’s gone into the cabin,” Ken said. “Let’s go take a look.”
They hurried across the windswept dock into the partial shelter of the craft moored on the opposite side.
There were three barges, all of them large and each supplied with a small cabin aft. But only the cabin of the barge nearest the shore—the one the man had entered—seemed occupied. The barges were moored end to end, the flat stern of the first one backed up against the shore. Its heavy timber bulwarks rose some six feet above the level of the dock, and the boys could dimlymake out the rough curve of its piled cargo rising even higher. It seemed to be coal or stone. At the aft end they found the ladder the man had mounted.
Their feet were almost silent on the concrete of the pier’s floor, but the wind was noisy enough to have covered any accidental sounds they might have made as they walked on down toward the end of the dock.
“Nobody aboard either of the others,” Sandy said.
“Doesn’t seem to be,” Ken agreed. “Let’s climb aboard the middle one. Maybe from there we can see what’s going on in our friend’s cabin.”
Sandy hesitated only for an instant. “I don’t suppose we have any right to be doing it,” he said. “But come on. Let’s go.”
Ken scrambled up the ladder of the middle barge. He paused when his head was level with the top.
“O.K.,” he whispered down to Sandy below him. “All clear.”
Ken was standing in the protection of the barge cabin’s aft wall when Sandy joined him.
The cabin occupied about two-thirds of the barge’s twenty-five-foot width, leaving a passageway only a few feet wide on either side, between the cabin wall and the bulwark that dropped sheer to the water line. The faint glow from the lights on the street disclosed that the ten-foot space aft of it was mostly open deck, cluttered with heavy coiled lines. To one side a small shed was attached and a sizable bin filled with large lumps of soft coal. Forward of the cabin was the cargo hold, heaped high with crushed stone.
They looked down toward the lighted cabin of the next barge, nearly a hundred feet away. Its hold also was loaded with stone. The single window in the cabin’s forward wall was small and partially covered by curtains.
“We certainly can’t see anything from here,” Sandy said disgustedly.
“I was afraid we couldn’t,” Ken admitted. “If we want to find out what’s in that package, we’ll have to get closer.”
They moved reluctantly aft, away from the wall’s protection, until they were standing at the gunwale. Four feet of black space separated them from the other barge.
“It’s an easy jump,” Ken muttered.
“Sure,” Sandy agreed. They couldn’t see the water, swirling and eddying below, but they could hear it sucking and gurgling against the hulls of the barges. “But I’d hate to miss it. If we fell down between these two tubs—”
“We won’t miss it,” Ken assured him.
He leaped lightly across the expanse of treacherous water. For an instant, as he landed on the far side, he waved his arms to maintain his balance on the eighteen-inch-wide timber that formed the barge’s bulwark. Then he steadied himself and reached a hand back toward Sandy.
“O.K.?” he asked, as the other landed beside him.
Sandy sighed with relief. “O.K.”
They stood there for a moment, considering the best way to get forward toward the cabin.
There was clearly only one route to take. It would be impossible to cross the mound of stone in the hold without causing a clatter that would reveal their presence. They would have to walk around the edge of the barge, along the narrow bulwark.
Ken started toward the left—the side of the barge away from the dock. As soon as he reached the corner and moved carefully around it, to start aft, the wind caught him so fiercely that he had to drop to his knees to keep from being blown off his feet.
He felt Sandy drop down behind him a moment later.
The vicious gust blew itself out shortly, but not until both boys were stiff from holding that huddled position in the freezing air.
“Come on.” Ken barely breathed the words as he got slowly to his feet and started aft again.
There were other gusts after that, not quite so fierce as the first one, but strong enough so that Ken could feel himself tottering toward the sharp-edged pile of stone on his right. And when he leaned his weight against the wind, to steady himself, the black water below seemed to rise toward him, its oily surface glinting with menace.
Halfway along the length of the barge they had to rest, lowering themselves to their knees again and grasping at the splintery timbers with numb hands. The lighted window they were heading for still seemed a long distance away.
When they finally reached the small aft deck, and dropped down from their hazardous perch, they huddled together for a minute. Both of them were shaking, partly from cold, partly from the nervous tension of their precarious journey.
But as soon as Ken could breathe evenly again he started toward the cabin, feeling Sandy behind him. He headed toward the rear corner of the little structure. There was a window in the back wall, too, as he could see, and on that side they would be protected from the worst of the wind.
Bracing himself lightly against the cabin wall for support, he raised himself upright from a crouched position, until he could peer through the narrow slit between the imperfectly drawn dark curtains. When Sandy rose up beside him he shifted slightly to make room for him. Then they turned and looked at each other in the faint light that came through the slit.
“And we risked our necks to see that!” Sandy breathed.
Ken had no answer.
He didn’t know what he had expected to see inside the cabin, but certainly he had anticipated something more dramatic than the scene that showed itself there.
The interior of the tiny room was snug and pleasant. In the light of an oil lamp, hung on an old-fashioned wall bracket, the room glowed warmly.
“Like a picture on a calendar,” Ken thought to himself with anger and amazement.
The man they had followed was no longer wearing his pea jacket or his cap. In a heavy turtle-necked sweater he sat at ease in front of a small, round coal stove. There was a white mug in his hands, and he was in the act of tipping his head back to drain the last swallow from it. Then he leaned forward toward the stove, refilled his cup from a white enameled coffeepot, and settled back again.
His feet were propped on the rim of the sand-filled box in which the stove stood, while his whole big body relaxed in warmth and comfort. As they watched he reached toward a paper bag on a gleaming oilcloth-covered table and pulled out a fat doughnut.
The boys could only see his back, but even the thick folds of his neck seemed to wrinkle with pleasure as he dunked the doughnut in the coffee and carried the dripping object to his mouth.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sandy muttered. “This is killing me.”
“Wait a minute.” Ken craned his neck, trying for a new angle of vision through the narrow slit. Finally he spotted what he had been looking for. The package the man had brought from the cigar store lay, still unopened, on one of the bunks against the port bulkhead.
“I’d certainly like to know what’s in that thing,” Ken whispered.
“I’ll go in and ask him,” Sandy offered. “Maybe he’ll give me a cup of coffee and a doughnut while I’m there. Even if he slit my throat afterward,” he added, “it would almost be worth it.”
The man had finished the doughnut. He took his feet off the box rim and let his chair come down on its front legs with a thump. Still holding his coffee mug in one hand, he reached for a poker with the other, shoved aside the stove lid and shook down the fire.
A shower of brilliant sparks flew out of the chimney above the boys’ heads, immediately followed by a burst of thick acrid black smoke. The wind twisted it down onto them in a choking cloud.
They buried their faces in their arms, trying to protect themselves against the cabin wall.
Ken choked back a cough, his head pounding with the effort. Then he felt Sandy, close beside him, heave convulsively in the first stages of a vast sneeze.
Sandy’s head jerked back, his mouth uncontrollably open.
Ken clamped a swift hand over it. “Quiet!” he begged, in a frenzied whisper.
Sandy made a final effort. The sneeze came, but only as a slight snort muffled by the whipping wind. The thunderous noise Ken had dreaded didn’t occur.
“O.K.” Sandy straightened. “I’m all right now. But let’s move, huh?”
“Might as well,” Ken agreed reluctantly.
He was convinced that the package lying in there on the bunk contained something far more significant than two cartons of cigarettes. But he had no proof for his belief, and he could think of no way of finding such proof.
“Back the way we came?” Sandy’s whisper was definitely unenthusiastic.
Ken took one last glance through the window. The man was seated in his chair again, the coffee mug beside him on the table now and a newspaper spread wide in his hands. He had the air of a man who has settled down for a long quiet evening.
Ken shook himself impatiently. There was certainly no reason for them to remain here longer.
He realized that he hadn’t answered Sandy’s last question. He didn’t want to return the way they had come any more than Sandy did. And the ladder leading down from the barge they were on was less than twenty feet away.
He jerked his head toward it. “Let’s take a chance and use this one.”
Sandy nodded his agreement.
They walked carefully toward it across the deck, sliding their feet in the darkness to avoid the possibility of stepping down on something that might upset their balance.
They had covered only half the distance to the ladder when they both started and froze where they stood.
A car had swept onto the dock, through the same opening in the fence which they had used earlier. It swerved to the right after it had gone only a few feet, and its headlights illuminated the barge in a wash of light.
With a single motion the boys dropped flat on the deck.
Somewhere below them the car stopped. The buzz of its engine was cut off and the lights disappeared.
Ken touched Sandy’s arm. “Get back.”
If the driver of the car came aboard the barge, they would certainly be discovered where they lay. And it was too late to use the barge ladder now. They might walk directly into the arms of whoever had just driven up on the dock below.
Slithering along the deck like eels, they went back the way they had just come, and on past the cabin window to take shelter behind the cabin’s far wall, in the narrow space between it and the bulwark.
As soon as they stopped moving they could hear sounds. Somebody was climbing the ladder. There was a dull thud as the new arrival jumped down onto the deck of the barge.
From inside the cabin there was a metallic banging, and suddenly once more the boys were enveloped in a cloud of choking smoke.
Sandy had learned his lesson. He jerked down the zipper of his windbreaker and ducked his head inside at the first whiff.
Ken, who had been concentrating on the sounds around the corner of the cabin, was caught completely unprepared. He had inhaled a lungful of smoke before he realized it. His shoulders began to heave as Sandy’s had done a few minutes before.
Ken held his breath. He pinched his nose tightly between thumb and finger. But the sneeze pushed harder than ever at the back of his throat.
Even through the buzzing in his ears he could hear the knock at the cabin door and the voice that said, “Open up, Cal. It’s me.”
Ken gasped. He felt as if his eyes were about to pop out of his head. The urge to sneeze was irresistible.
“Coming,” the man inside the cabin answered, and the stove lid clattered back on the stove.
There was nothing Ken could do about it. He sneezed. His whole body seemed to erupt in one vast explosion, loud enough—it seemed to him—to wake the dead.
There was a clang inside the cabin and pounding footsteps across the deck outside.
Before Ken and Sandy could even scramble to their feet an overcoated figure loomed above them at the corner of the cabin wall. Even in the faint light from the window he was recognizable, although he apparently was still unable to see in the darkness.
It was the man they knew as Barrack. His eyes were slitted in an effort to penetrate the black shadow thrown by the cabin wall.
“Who’s there?” It was not the affable voice he had used the night before when he had called so inexplicably at Richard Holt’s apartment. It was a curt, furious snarl.
The boys held themselves motionless. The slightest gesture would give away their whereabouts.
Then Barrack, who had been fumbling in his pocket, drew out a torch and flicked it on. Ken and Sandy, spotlighted in the brilliant glare, instinctively shut their eyes against it.
For a long moment none of them stirred.
Then Barrack spoke in a voice of controlled fury. “What areyoutwo doing here?”
Ken opened his eyes a fraction of an inch into the bright white light. It was enough to show him the gun that Barrack was holding leveled at their heads.