CHAPTER X.
HUNTING FOR TROUBLE.
The sun was ten o’clock high when Billy hoisted himself with his elbows and realized that Henri and himself had been singularly favored by the usually exacting aviation chief, who tolerated no lazybones around quarters.
“Hi there, sleepy head,” he called to his chum, who was still drawing long breath through a wide-open mouth.
“Hold your peace,” growled Henri, turning for another snooze.
But Billy, now wide awake, and in frolicsome mood, had his comrade out of bed by the heels, and it was not until they had knocked over about everything in the room that they desisted from their riotous wrestling.
“Blame your gaiety,” panted Henri; “why couldn’t you let a fellow rest?”
“You’d be a Rip Van Winkle if you had half a show,” guyed Billy.
In more serious turn the boys went out to look at the picture above the stair landing, to see if any telltale strap of the concealed belt was showing. Nothing, however, to betray their secret to the curious eye was in evidence.
“A good job for a dark night,” observed Billy, going down the stairway, two steps at a time.
“All the grub gone?” he inquired of Corporal Romeroff, on mess duty.
The latter grinned, and showed the boys two well-filled platters on a near-by table.
“The chief is a first-rate boss,” was the enthusiastic expression of Henri, between attacks on the provisions.
“None better,” admitted Billy, sitting back from the table, with a sigh of repletion.
“What’s the program for to-day?” queried Henri, “seeing that we are freelances for a while?”
“I’ve just been thinking that I’d like to know for sure whether or not Ricker got out of town.”
“Say, Buddy,” broke in Henri, “I don’t believe we had better toy with that buzz-saw again.”
“Only a bit of scouting, old pal,” wheedled Billy, “a sort of look over and not in. I confess that my bump of curiosity is not growing less as I grow older.”
“Oh, well, let it go at that,” agreed Henri, with an air of resignation. “Maybe it wasn’t intended that we should live long enough to wear carpet-slippers.”
The boys strolled to the square of the memorial column, and halted at a point directly opposite the shop of the silversmith. The front of the establishment was sealed by closed shutters.
“Evidently nobody at home,” said Billy; “and, really,” he added, “I didn’t expect there would be.”
“How do you know but what the old fox is still in his den and not using the front entrance?”
“If I were guessing,” replied Billy, “it would be that Ricker has long since crossed the river. Yet I wouldn’t mind finding out for certain.”
“There it is,” commented Henri; “I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied to let well enough alone. Come on, then; let’s look in the alligator’s throat to see if he has teeth.”
“Easy now, pard,” chided Billy; “there is nothing rash in my mind at this moment. If a little closer view doesn’t serve the purpose we will just be ladies and ask a policeman.”
Crossing the street, the lads tried the shop door. It stood as tight as wax.
A passerby tried to tell the boys something, but gave it up in despair when they looked as blank as a person stone deaf.
“Why didn’t you add the Slavonic to your language list, young man?”
Billy shook his finger at Henri in mock severity.
“You’ve no room to call me down in that regard,” retorted the French boy.
“True enough, pal,” apologized Billy; “it’s only a case of two babes in the woods in Russia instead of one.”
Between the silversmith’s shop and the next adjoining building, a warehouse, apparently deserted, was a narrow, covered walk, running back and the full apparent length of both structures.
Billy, evidently forgetting his original determination not to cross the line of discretion, started to explore this cul-de-sac, this passage open only at one end.
His chum accepted the inevitable and doubled up with the leader.
“It’s an even bet that we will be yanked up for attempted burglary,” he gloomily predicted.
“Here’s about the point, I think,” mused Billy, “where we lay behind that revolving door; that is, providing we were now inside.”
“Well, what of it?” impatiently demanded Henri. “We certainly don’t intend to break in to prove your deduction.”
Billy had no response for this. He was curiously examining a postern, or door, in the wall cutting off the vaulted passage.
“Wonder if there is a combination to this thing?” He put the question to the test, closely inspecting every panel in the door from top to bottom.
“Old thumbs up surely had a way of getting through from this side,” continued the Bangor boy, “and it was not by key, either—no sign of a keyhole anywhere.”
The mechanician in Henri was aroused. The door puzzle was something in his particular line. With no less interest now than that displayed by his comrade, the expert began tapping up and down the solid surface with the haft of his pocket-knife.
Directly he turned a bright eye and a complacent smile upon the interested Billy.
“Nothing to it at all, Buddy,” he advised, putting his hand on one of the little iron plates that studded the doorway in two rows from jamb to hinges. “The hollow is behind this one. See?” Henri illustrated by thumb pressure on the edge of the metal disc, which turned upward, exposing to view a steel ring slightly more than finger size.
Without waiting for further demonstration, Billy promptly tried a pull on the hoop in the hole. It was lost motion, for the ring had no forward give to it. An experimental push, also, was without result.
“Turn it,” was Henri’s rather impatient suggestion.
That was the trick that drew the bolt. The boys heard the click of the hidden spring, and so sudden was the giving of the barrier that Billy, using an arm prop against it, went in like a diver. The recoil was equally speedy, and Henri saved himself a shutout by using his foot as a preventing wedge.
With both boys inside, the postern closed behind them without a sound. The passage here was so narrow that it enforced single file proceedings. At the right was the wall of the silversmith’s shop, to the left the barred windows of the warehouse. The structures might have been houses of the dead for all the signs of occupancy then shown.
Billy was uncertain in his mind as to the first tackle of the mystery that he had conjured to while away an idle hour. He was not particularly anxious to run afoul of Ricker and his hairy retainer. Indeed, had he glimpsed the heads of either of them in window or doorway it would have been back to the square for him, and if there was any talking to be done, that conversation would have to be exchanged in the open.
But it was just that bump of curiosity, of which Henri had more than once jokingly said “could only be reduced by a smash with a sandbag.”
Billy’s conclusion favored further exploration of the vaulted walk, which no doubt had been originally designed simply as an air shaft, and later converted to some other use. It was the latter supposition that appealed to the would-be explorer.
With continued progress between the walls, the boys marked gradual descent, becoming more pronounced at every step. Then the path curved abruptly and ended at the base of a tower-like brick chimney, built outside of the warehouse wall and making the first opening in the hitherto overlapping cornices of the buildings running parallel.
“The silversmith’s shop is considerable of a bluff when you come to compare the known front with the unknown rear,” remarked Billy, who had been mentally figuring the distance from street to postern, and from postern to this chimney obstruction.
“It has just occurred to me that Ricker must have been in charge of the whole block. The way it looks, all the rest around here have marched off to war.”
Henri had no proof up to the minute that the warehouse was or ever had been a hive of industry.
“Come here, pal,” called Billy, who had stepped from the front to the side of the chimney base; “I believe there’s a way to get to the basement of this old shack.”
His discovery was a rusty grating set in the floor close to the foot of the chimney, and it was surprising how easily it could be moved.
“For our special convenience,” chuckled the Bangor boy, when he noted a number of iron spikes protruding from the masonry in order for descent.
“The same sort of fire escape arrangement runs up the chimney; didn’t you notice?” asked Henri.
“But that’s for the lookout, pard; I tell you this is a bully plant in which to prowl. But let’s go below now and aloft later.”
Billy was already legging it, spike to spike, into the depths of the old warehouse.