CHAPTER XV
UNDER THE BED
Scoop and Peg were bitterly angry over our arrest and imprisonment in the lock tender’s attic bedroom. Red was scared. I was neither angry nor scared, but worried.
What gave me that feeling was the unhappy thought that it wouldn’t please Mother and Dad a little bit to learn, upon my return home, that I had been picked up twice in daily succession by the law. To be arrested, even when one is innocent, is something of a disgrace. Jails and prisons are things that any right-minded boy should keep away from. I was sorry now that I had been led into the greased-pig trick. I realized, when it was too late, that we had made a foolish blunder in trying to get funny with the law.
Upon the appearance of the talkative, warty-nosed man, my worries had taken a scattered, anxious turn. I had the feeling that the evil-minded one had a hidden purpose in coming here. I didn’t believe his crazy story about being born on an island in the Pacific Ocean. And he wasn’t half as anxious to get the job of tuning the lock tender’s piano as he let on. He was after something else. His exaggerated piano-tuning talk was just a blind.
Were we the “something else”? Did our presence in the house, as prisoners, have something to do with the hidden purpose of his visit? This was not a comfortable thought to me. Involved in the theft of the Liberty Bonds (we still held to the thought that the evil pair had stolen the bonds from their hiding place on the island and that the other thief was waiting near by with the booty) he plainly was a dangerous man. More than that he was a deep man, as the saying is. His flowery put-on conversation with the lock tender coupled with his acting had proved that. I had no desire to come under his power, either as a friend or an enemy. I was afraid of him. I wished with all my heart that he was a thousand miles away.
As I wrote down in the concluding paragraph of the preceding chapter, there was a stovepipe hole in the floor of our prison. And the entrance of the two men into the house had found us on our stomachs on the floor with our noses hung over the hole’s edge. It wasn’t a big hole—not more than six inches in diameter. And to see into the lower room we had to bring the tops of our heads together, each one sort of pushing forward to hold his place.
The Harmony Hustler, as he had elected to introduce himself into the house as a part of his hidden scheme, let on that he was awfully tickled at sight of an old-fashioned square piano that stood in one corner of the sitting room. He sort of patted it here and there, even on its big round legs, as though he was wildly in love with every part of it, calling it a “magnificent old instrument—a patriarch of piano art,” and a lot of other silly truck like that.
“I don’t know,” the lock tender spoke up, “if you kin play a tune on it or not. Fur a rat got in it last winter an’ made a nest in it. An’ one day the ol’ cat she got a whiff of mister rat an’ got in whar the varmint was, an’ then, let me tell you, they was some action. By gum, I never heerd sech a whangin’ an’ a bangin’ an’ a discordin’ in all my born days. They was bass notes an’ sopranny notes an’ rat whiskers an’ cat fuzz flyin’ every which way.” The speaker paused to spit through the doorway. “The ol’ cat she licked. Yes, sir, by gum, she jest naturally cleaned that ol’ rat’s bones as slick as a polished darn needle. Smart cat, mister. She hain’t furgot ’bout that ol’ rat, nuther. No, sir. Every day or so she gits in the pianny an’ goes thumpin’ up an’ down the strings. As I tell my neighbors, the fust thing I know I’ll have a cat pianny player an’ kin start up a side show an’ git rich. Purty slick idea, hey? Hee! hee! hee!”
The Harmony Hustler gave himself a sort of vague look.
“How—aw—quaint and interesting, sir.”
“An’ that hain’t all my ol’ cat kin do—you jest watch now.”
Putting a silver thimble in the middle of the sitting-room floor, the animal’s proud owner went to the door and called: “Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty!” And pretty soon a big black and white cat bounded into the room, with an arched back and fluffy tail. It seemed instantly to get its eyes on the shiny thimble. Pouncing on the silver finger piece, it took the thimble in its mouth to the furnace register and dropped it through the iron grating.
“Meow!” it said, looking up at its beaming master as though in expectation of another toy.
“Hain’t that smart?” the lock tender cackled. “Does it every time, by gum! Thimbles an’ spools an’ buttons—they all go down the register when ol’ Spotty gits a whack at ’em. Eh, Spotty?” and he affectionately rubbed the purring cat’s arched back.
“I should imagine, sir, that you—aw—have quite a collection of articles in your furnace pipe.”
The cat fondler looked up quickly.
“Oh!… I git the stuff out ag’in,” he waggled.
The Harmony Hustler studied the iron grating.
“By removing the register, I presume.”
“Naw. I go down cellar an’ reach my arm in the air pipe.”
There was a momentary queer, smug expression on the visitor’s face as he regarded the furnace register—a sort of appraising look—then he seated himself on the wabbly stool and prepared to give the piano a tryout. In the way that he posed, with his shoulders thrown back and his chin thrust up, I could think of nothing but a conceited rooster getting ready to crow. Spreading out his long, slim fingers, he brought his hands down on the keyboard with an awful thump.
“Tra-LA-LA-LA-LA-A-A!” he boomed, hanging onto the last high “la” until the horrified pictures on the sitting-room wall bulged their glassy eyes and squirmed in agony. “You have here, as I said a moment ago, sir, a most magnificent old instrument. Tra-LA-LA-LA-LA-A-A!”
“By gum,” grinned the lock tender, amused at the performance, “you kin make more noise than the cat.”
The Harmony Hustler unloaded a dozen or more tools from his bulging pockets and briskly removed the piano’s wooden top, thus exposing the encased strings. In his work he kept going “Tra-la-lee-tra-la-lum!” but not at the peak of his voice as he had done when he was batting the keyboard. He let on that his whole heart was in his work. But he didn’t fool me. And watching him I wondered why his eyes constantly sought the furnace register. Was he thinking of the cat? It would seem so.
Well, the better part of an hour went by. The worker would tighten a string and then thump its key, seemingly tuning the string to the lilt of his booming voice. Of course he couldn’t make his voice sound the very high and the very low notes. But he covered a wide range of the keyboard, let me tell you.
Finally he straightened from his work.
“There, sir,” he beamed, posing, “the job is done—a Capricorn-Hebrides-Windbigler job, sir, than which—I say it in proper modesty—there is none better.” He jiggled his fingers around among the keys. “You will notice the vast improvement in the tone of your instrument, sir—the exquisite harmony. I strike this chord, and the colorful tones conjure up in our minds a picture of a hidden lane in a deep forest. The damp tang of the woodland lies heavy in our nostrils. Now we approach a bank of gorgeous yellow tulips. I strike these minor chords … gently … gently … and we pluck the yellow blossoms, one … by … one.”
The lock tender was laughing up his sleeve at the silly performance.
“By gum, Windbag, they ought to take you an’ make you ’quainted with the inside of a padded cell.”
Gathering up his tools, the Harmony Hustler fumbled with a small wrench, letting the tool fall through the furnace register. Watching him from above, we thought that he had dropped the wrench by accident. We were soon to learn, however, that the act was intentional.
“Dear me! I do believe, sir, that I have lost one of my prized wrenches down your register.” He got on his knees and peered anxiously through the iron grating. “I seem wholly unable to see it, sir. But I quite assure you that I heard it fall.”
The lock tender was grinning at the seemingly distressed one.
“What be you tryin’ to do?—imitate my cat?”
“Dear me! What shall I do?”
“Windbubbler, you’re dumb, if I must say so.”
“I beg pardon?…”
“D-u-m-b,” the lock tender spelt. “I mean you don’t know much, outside of a few pianny tricks.”
“My dear sir!…”
The householder waggled in disgust that the other shouldn’t have remembered what he had said about being able to get into the register pipe from the cellar.
“Wal, I suppose we’ve got to have all kinds of people in this world, simple an’ otherwise.… I’ll git your wrench fur you.”
At the disappearance of the householder into the cellar, the Harmony Hustler got quickly on his knees and began sounding the piano’s big wooden legs with his knuckles. Working quickly, he passed to the third leg, the one in back on the right-hand side. Here he seemed to find what he was searching for. We heard him excitedly catch his breath. And his hands trembled as he locked them around the big leg, giving it a sharp twist to the left. We saw the leg turn. He was unscrewing it!
Following a tinny rattle of furnace pipes in the cellar, heavy steps sounded on the stairs. Jumping nimbly to his feet, the queer acting one was dreamily running his snaky fingers up and down the keyboard when the other man came into the room with the recovered thimble and wrench.
As I have said, it was my earlier belief that the warty-nosed thief’s visit to the house had been occasioned by our presence there as prisoners. But now I was made to realize, from what I had just witnessed, that he was more interested in the marked piano leg than he was in us. It was to get a chance to secretly inspect the piano’s legs that he had tricked the instrument’s owner into the cellar.
Here was a new mystery. What was there in connection with the marked piano leg to attract the thief to the house? In what way did the marked leg differ from the other legs? Was it in the sound? And now that the thief had made some kind of a discovery, what step was he planning to take next?
Intensely interested in what had taken place in the sitting room, I had given no attention to my companions, and therefore hadn’t missed Peg at the stovepipe hole.
But in the disappearance of our jailer into the cellar, our big chum had jumped to his feet, extracting from the bureau several folded bed sheets. Tearing the sheets into strips, he had twisted the strips into a rope, one end of which now dangled out of the window.
“Come on, fellows,” the worker panted, calling our attention to the way that he had opened to probable freedom.
We weren’t blind to the risk that we would run in escaping down the bed-sheet rope. If we were detected in our descent by our jailer we probably would get a charge of bird shot in our legs. But in our crazy eagerness to get away from our hated prison we were willing to run any kind of a risk.
Before going through the window Red grabbed his pants and shirt, for, as I have said, we were all more or less undressed. I was slow in finding my pants, so Peg, the next one dressed, went out through the window and down the rope, scooting, with the freckled one, in the direction of the underbrush on the canal bank.
I still hadn’t been able, in my excitement, to find my misplaced pants. So Scoop prepared to make his escape from the room ahead of me.
Below us the Harmony Hustler was chasing his fingers up and down the keyboard. We were thankful for the music for it enabled us to go quickly about the room without the danger of attracting attention to our movements.
Our jailer, seemingly charmed by the piano’s music, was contentedly rocking back and forth in a big chair in the middle of the room. I sort of laughed to myself as I squinted at him through the stovepipe hole. We were putting it over on him! I could imagine his later bellowing rage at the discovery of our clever flight.
Bang!
I almost jumped out of my skin at the crashing sound.
“Hey!” our jailer roared from below, leaping to his feet. “What in Sam Hill be you kids doin’ up thar?”
In preparing to climb over the sill, Scoop clumsily had let the window fall. Frantic, he was now trying to raise it, so that we could make our escape down the rope before our jailer got into the room. But the window had stuck tightly in its sharp fall. He couldn’t budge it.
I saw in a flash that we were trapped. Our predicament filled me with shivers. We would suffer double, Scoop and I, for our luckier companions’ escape. In his rage, our jailer might even turn his shotgun on us.
I didn’t want to be shot. It was an awful thought. And in a panic I darted my horrified eyes around the room for a possible barricade. The bed! My eyes came to it and stopped. I had hid under beds more than once in my lifetime! And here was an especially good bed to hide under, for its white fringed spread hung low on the sides.
The jailer turned the key in the door’s lock. But in the time that the door was being thrown open, I vanished, pantless, Scoop after me, under the bed.