CHAPTER XI.
GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK.
“What a place for a ghost dance,” commented Billy, peering into the shadowy beyond, as he waited for Henri to join him in the big cellar.
Henri, letting go the last hand-hold, immediately announced that the briefer the stay here the better it would suit him. “Trot along, Billy,” he urged, “and get it over with.”
They had passed under several arches in half-seeing endeavor to locate a way to the floor above, when Billy came to a quick halt.
“I thought I heard voices!”
“You’re likely to hear anything in this catacomb,” replied Henri.
“No, it isn’t nerves, Buddy; it’s talking. Listen!”
The lads, standing mute and with ears attuned to acute pitch, were soon impressed with the fact that there was a mumbling medley of conversation somewhere about, but whether at hand or more remote they could not decide.
So in tremor and doubt they moved with less haste, and stopping at intervals to analyze every suspicious sound. But now it was only their own breathing and footfalls that disturbed the tomb-like stillness.
At the bottom steps of a broad flight of stairs, which they had finally located, to their great relief, the boys made resolve that the first opening at the top that presented itself, offering opportunity of escape from the building, would not be neglected for the space of even a half minute.
The excitement of breaking in had now no show with the desire to break out.
At the top of the stairway the climbers saw before them an immense platform, very likely the place of loading, for several trucks in advanced state of disuse were here and there in view.
But what most interested the lads was a clearly outlined path, through the heavily settled dust, stretching across and beyond the platform, and leading to a door of white pine.
“I expect the voices we heard belonged to the same parties who made this trail,” was Billy’s low-toned opinion.
“Whoever they belonged to,” softly observed Henri, “I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, and if there is a window handy, opening on the good old outside, it’s me for it.”
“I’m with you this time, Buddy,” promptly agreed the Bangor boy; “I’ve had my full of this expedition, and ready to play quits.”
If Henri had anything further to say, it did not reach utterance, for quite distinctly now the lads could hear in varying strain the muffled intonation that had at first startled them in their stumble through the lower regions beneath.
Stealthily skirting the platform, the boys took to their knees in the dust, with their eyes on a level with the raised flooring, at a point immediately to the right of the big door.
It had been their intention to make their way past the door to the first turn of the counting room enclosure, which they were sure would set them going in the direction of the street flanking the west side of Memorial Square.
Off the platform they were afforded better opportunity for quick concealment in case any of the mysterious inmates of the supposedly deserted warehouse should suddenly appear on the higher plane.
From the near point of hiding the boys got a new idea of the center plan of the working floor, as adapted to the business for which it had been designed.
The counting house was arranged like a deck cabin of a ship, open space all around, a fact not apparent to the boys when they first emerged from the cellar.
“It’s a cinch,” whispered Billy, “that we can get by on one side or the other if we haven’t forgotten how to do the Indian crawl.”
“If it wasn’t for that talk buzz,” asserted Henri, “I’d be inclined to tell the neighbors that the old plant was as empty as a last year’s bird nest.”
“Not to mention the tracks on the platform,” reminded Billy.
“No definite telling when those marks might have been made,” continued Henri, “and as I was saying, the talkfest mystery is the one absolute assurance that we are not alone in these diggings.”
“In the passing,” intimated Billy, “there may be a crack in that hut in which an eye would fit, and there is no use leaving an unsolved problem behind.”
Henri grinned. “I’ve been expecting that, Buddy,” he said.
Alongside the counting house the boys moved on all fours, and it did not take Billy long to find a place to put his eye. Just over his head was the checking window—a small aperture, masked by a curtain of green baize, from which projected a rounded shelf. There had been a warp between this projection and the window setting, and through the open seam a free view of the enclosure was presented.
When Billy had completed his look-in, he resorted to the sign language as a means of conveying the word that the room was occupied. Henri, surmising as much from the fragments of conversation sifting through the loose lines of the wooden wall, took his turn as an observer.
In the same rough garb of coal heaver that he wore on the day of delivery to the young aviators of the summons to the twin towers, Ricker was lolling on a rickety bench, and another man equally shabby in makeup was perched upon a dingy counter. On the floor at their feet, gagged and bound hand and foot, was the heavyweight policeman, who had officially invoked the services of the silversmith as an expert examiner of the battered remains of the time clock dug out of the ruins of the explosion-rent military storehouse.
Ricker had occasion to several times admonish his companion for getting too high a pitch in his rumbling voice. These vocal lifts at intervals, no doubt, were the sounds that had from the first convinced the boys of the presence of other life than theirs in the building.
“This carrion,” Ricker was saying, prodding the prostrate officer with the toe of a hobnailed boot, “is too much of a blunderhead to kill outright, and it would be a shame to deprive the rats of such a splendid spread of live meat. But, after all, seeing that the game is up here as far as I am concerned, I will let the palace of justice keep their numbskull. There’s a lout that will let them know in twenty-four hours after we are gone.”
The man on the floor spluttered in his gag and strained at his bonds.
“Heigho, Casper,” yawned Ricker, rising and stretching himself, “it’s soon farewell to Warsaw for us; we were good citizens, eh, Casper? We leave our mark, too—and we will also leave that crazy Hamar if he does not show his ugly face within the next ten minutes.”
Ricker consulted a heavy gold watch, which he produced from the folds of his woollen shirt. Two gunny-sacks, bulging at both ends and roped in the middle, might have furnished evidence that the silversmith was taking most of his stock with him.
The boys, taking turn about at the look-in point, concluded to sheer off for the time being, when Ricker bestowed a parting kick upon the trussed policeman, shouldered the gunny-sacks and started for the door of the counting house.
“I suppose Hamar will know where to find us?” questioned the man called Casper.
“Blast him for a crank, there is no telling anything about him,” fumed Ricker; “he had the hour pounded into his addled brain, and it is nobody’s fault but his own if he misses fire.”
Billy and Henri were prepared for the sport of hide and seek, until they could learn the direction that Ricker and his companion proposed to take.
Each took a corner of the counting house at the rear, and each on the alert to work the disappearing act.