The Safety First Club

Groche, stumbling forward, pitched in a heap on the floor. Lon, staggering to the wall, clung to it for support.

“You—you fellows—here—all of you!” he gasped.

“All of us—safe and sound,” cried Sam, and tried to lead him toward the fire. Lon resisted.

“No, no! Take—take it easy. I—I’m better off here for a while. But—but what you doin’—doin’——” his voice trailed weakly.

In a dozen sentences Sam told him. Lon’s eyes opened wide.

“Wal, wal! And the storm catched you! And such a whopper of a howler of a storm, gee whillikens!”

“We know about it. But where did you come from?”

Lon pulled off his cap, and bending down, scooped up a handful of snow from the drift under the window.

“Wait a minute—fust aid treatment fust!” said he; and began to rub his face and ears. “No; lemme be! You—you can’t help me. I’m like—like an old cat—got to lick my own scratches.”

Perforce Sam desisted. Lon, working deliberately and carefully, winced now and then.

“Got through the hide in places,” he admitted. “This ain’t no night for a polar bear to be out. Wow! but that wind did sting and cut!”

Sam laid finger on a clean gash in Lon’s coat. “Wind didn’t do that, did it?”

“No,” said Lon; but he limped to Groche and studied the prostrate figure for a moment before he went on:

“No; knife done it—’twas his only good jab at me.”

Lon drew a little nearer the fire, but kept a wary eye on Groche. His voice was gaining strength, though he still spoke huskily.

“Wal, three of us started from the camp, you know. Stub picked up the trail. It led north. That meant the critter was steerin’ for the Canady line. But the storm turned him back—that’s how I got him.”

“You alone?” asked Sam eagerly.

“I’m comin’ to that. One time it seemed ’sif the blow was goin’ to spoil our chances, for it drifted the trail over; but it headed Groche off, too. He knew he couldn’t buck a blizzard. So, finally, he give up and made a ’bout face. We three’d separated—spread out, you know—lookin’ for his tracks. So there wa’n’t nobody with me when, all of a sudden, I clumb over a little rise, and there was Mr. Peter leggin’ it before the wind for all he was wuth. And I was right atop of him, ’most. And then I got this.” And Lon touched the cut in his coat.

“But you had a pistol, hadn’t you?”

Lon’s smile was grim. “Kane had seen that I was heeled proper, but I’d sot my heart on roundin’ up my man without makin’ a sieve of him. Why, I’d even took a rope along to hog-tie him. So I didn’t shoot. I jest clubbed the revolver and patted him over the head with it till the butt broke off. By that time, though, he was ready to quit.”

“Great Scott, but what a fight it must have been!”

“Wal, ’twas quite some. What with him tryin’ to carve me up, and me doin’ a bass drum solo on his head—oh, wal, you can figger out as well as I can what happened. I was too busy to be takin’ picters. But I’ll say this for him: he fit like a wildcat.”

“How about your end of it?”

Lon shook his head. “Sam, I’m a man o’ peace. And I got enough of the other thing to-day to last me till I’m ninety-eight and come into my second wind. But that’s all I know about the scrap.”

For a space nobody spoke. Every one of the boys was picturing for himself that desperate grapple of two strong men, struggling for mastery in the midst of the raging storm.

“But afterward—after you’d downed him—what happened?” queried Sam at last.

“Mighty little—for a while. I was hopin’ the lumberjacks, missin’ me, would scout back and pick us up, but they didn’t come. Reckon they were havin’ troubles o’ their own. Finally, seein’ as how keepin’ still meant freezin’, I tried to work toward the camp. But bless you, boys! it wa’n’t no use; I couldn’t find my own tracks. And I’d got all tangled on direction. So I reasoned with Groche for a spell—he knows them woods better’n he knows any book. I roped him the way he’s fixed now, and told him, ‘Giddap! Le’s go somewhere.’”

“And then——?” Sam urged.

“Yes; tell us!” chimed in two or three of the others.

Thus encouraged, Lon told his story, and a strange story it was of captive forced to guide captor; of slow and painful plodding through growing drifts; of halts in the lee of wood or hill, while the storm increased, and the wind blew more fiercely, and the cold deepened. After a time he felt sure that Groche, while avoiding the camp, had some other refuge in mind.

“He’s brute enough,” Lon explained, “to have the brute’s instinct for makin’ for a burrow. So I give him his head, and let him go it.”

How long they toiled on, or how many miles they covered, Lon had no notion. The feeble light of afternoon faded into the gloom of night. Yet Groche seemed to be sure of his course. Lon even fancied that there was a slight increase in the pace. And then, of a sudden, he saw the flicker of the fire through a window of the old house.

“Then you’ve no more idea than we where we are?” said Sam.

“No more idea than——” Lon began, but broke off abruptly, as his glance, ranging the room, fell upon something which caught his attention. He stepped close to one of the walls, peered at it sharply, and gave an odd laugh.

“Wal, I’ll be jiggered! Who’d ’a’ thought it? Lookee here, boys! Stone work part way up, then wood! Say, but it beats cat fightin’!”

“What do you mean?”

Lon turned to the group by the fire. He was grinning in spite of his weariness.

“I mean this is the house old Calleck built up in the woods, the house where old Wallowby fit the bear. So that’s proof of the story—see?”

“Proof!” cried the Shark skeptically.

“Why not? Said there was such a house, didn’t I? Sure I did, and now I go and produce it. Rest follows as a matter of course.”

“Rats!” snapped the Shark in disgust.

“Rats nothing!” jeered Step. “All you’ve got to do, Shark, is to—to visualize it—yes, that’s the scheme. Take a dose of your own medicine for keeping the brain clear, can’t you?”

“Bosh!” growled the Shark; and in high dudgeon turned his back on the company. It happened that, as a result of the movement, he faced Groche, upon whom unwittingly he trained his gaze, while he meditated darkly upon the extreme unreason of his clubmates.

Groche had been lying like a log on the floor, but now he stirred restlessly. He raised himself on an elbow. For a moment he tried, as he had tried once before, to stare down the unblinking Shark; and failed as completely as he had failed on the former occasion. He struggled to a sitting position. He raised an arm, as if to ward off the hypnotic influence of the steady eyes behind the big glasses. And he broke into speech, incoherent, savage, and terror-stricken.

Lon limped forward, but Sam was before him, catching Groche’s arm. At this the ruffian turned upon him.

“You—you, I’ll get ye, if I hang for it!” he shouted. “You’re at the bottom of it all! You lied about me, and you set that old bloodhound, Bates, on me!”

“But you’re mistaken; I didn’t,” Sam said earnestly.

“You done it, you done it!”

Sam glanced at Lon. “I guess you reasoned out the truth of it,” said he.

Groche swore viciously, tried to rise; groaned, and sank back to the floor.

“You lied about me, and threw that job o’ yourn on me!” he snarled. “I’ll get even with ye, I’ll get even with ye yet, if I die for’t!”

Lon wagged his head sagaciously. “Jesso, Sam, jesso! Them’s the undoubted sentiments o’ Peter Groche, Esq. Once—twice, comin’ along, I tried to talk with him, but all I could make out was that he’d got it in for you for keeps. And as for the why of it—wal, I dunno’s you’re ready to have that talked over in open meetin’.” And Lon winked meaningly.

“Oh!” Because Sam understood, his tone was startled. “Oh! That?”

“Exactly! The beginnin’ o’ the trouble,” said Lon, and winked again.

“The be—the beginning——” Sam repeated doubtfully.

Perhaps Lon felt himself justified in dwelling on his own shrewdness.

“Fact is, Sam,” said he, “you’re kind o’ bothered, because you’re still half calculatin’ on what a reasonable bein’ would ’a’ done. But Groche, as I’ve told you, ain’t reasonable—not our kind o’ reasonable. Jest bear that in mind. Allow that he got it into his crooked brain that he hated you—hatin’s his long suit, I reckon. Now, you’re thinkin’—bein’ what you are, you can’t help thinkin’ it—that when nothin’ much happened to Peter, and they let him go, he ought to have realized he’d been mistaken, somehow, in draggin’ you in. But that ain’t Peter Groche’s method. He’d got you in his bad books, and there you stayed. It’s all plain as print to me, son. It’s one idee at a time for Peter, and he ain’t the sort o’ feller to go seekin’ further light, or askin’ the questions a decent man would ask. What if he was let out? He’s been put in, and that was all he thought about. So he ’tended to all the sculduggery about our place—which was bad enough. But he hated a mite too hard, and went a mile too far, when he played firebug; and now we’ve got him for something that’ll spell state’s prison for him. And that’s why I was so dead sot on bringin’ him in alive.”

“I see,” said Sam gravely.

Now, to this conversation there had been a group of eager, if puzzled, listeners. Save for Groche’s reference to Major Bates as a “bloodhound,” and the discussion of his brief confinement, no clue to the mystery had been given to the boys; and these matters carried a suggestion so unexpected and so surprising that none of them readily grasped it. When Sam said, “I see,” two or three of the others moved uneasily.

“Jiminy! I don’t!” cried Poke explosively. “I don’t want to seem prying or inquisitive, but you’ve got me guessing. It’s worse than Greek; for that I can dig out, if I have to. But there’s no vocabulary to help here.”

Sam’s glance went from one to another of his friends. He read in the face of each something very like the thought Poke had put into words. He drew a long breath.

“Fellows! I’ll tell you. I meant to keep it a secret, but I guess you’re entitled to know. What Lon referred to as the beginning of the trouble was—well, it was the—er—er—the accident to Major Bates. I shot at what I thought was a deer in Marlow woods, and I hit the Major!”

“Whew!”

“You did that, Sam!”

“Shot the Major!”

“Jupiter crickets, but I wouldn’t have been in your shoes for a farm!”

So the club voiced its astonishment. Sam waited for the hubbub to subside. Then said he:

“I intended to say nothing to anybody, but when Groche was arrested—why, there was only one square thing to do. The old Major was bully; so was my father. Groche was turned loose, and I supposed that was the end of the story. But then things began to happen—you know well enough what they were, and how we explained ’em.”

Two or three nodded; as many more stole repentant glances at Tom Orkney.

“We made a bad mistake,” Sam went on. “I won’t dwell on all the mistake led to; but I will say that it seems to me a clear case of one blunder brought about by another. If I hadn’t shot the Major, there wouldn’t have been any raids on our barn—and we’re certain Groche was the raider: so far Lon’s theory is backed by facts. I blundered by believing somebody else did the tricks, and that led to the third blunder in jumping to the conclusion that the somebody smashed the club window that night. Wait a minute, though!” He turned to Orkney. “You’re following this, aren’t you? You get the combination all right?”

“Yes,” said Orkney simply.

“There was a complication that night. Remember the cap of yours that Step threw over Mrs. Benton’s fence?”

“I remember it—but I never saw it again.”

“Well, we found it outside the club. What we thought about it was another of the mistakes. Not till a good while later did we learn that Mrs. Benton had put it in her rubbish can, and somebody prowling through the alley had carried it off.”

“Groche—sure’s you’re a foot high!” commented Lon. “He’s always skulkin’ through the back-streets. Pinched it, didn’t you, Peter?”

But Groche, though stirred by Lon’s toe to make answer, merely growled inarticulately.

“Well, I think we can safely assume Groche did take it,” Sam continued. “Even at first the Shark raised a doubt——”

“Doubt!” broke in the Shark. “Huh! Don’t you fellows know an absolute demonstration when you see one? What I proved was that that stone was thrown by a grown man, and a strong man, to boot!”

“Well, it’s all part of the chain,” said Sam. “One thing is linked with the next. If I hadn’t shot the Major, Groche wouldn’t have had a grudge against me, you fellows wouldn’t have been mixed up in the trouble, we wouldn’t have had reason to make a trip to the camp, we wouldn’t be here storm bound. And—and”—he glanced at Orkney—“and things that have happened wouldn’t have happened.”

A readier fellow, a more tactful fellow, might have found in Sam’s words something very like an overture for full reconciliation. More or less clearly everybody understood the situation. All eyes were upon Orkney, some openly, some covertly; but even in the flickering light of the fire Tom’s face bore a curiously set and stolid expression.

Poke relieved the tension.

“Ha, ha!” he laughed. “Jiminy! but I can’t get over it, Sam! Think of you going out and potting Major Bates, of all men! And then think of you keeping it a secret from the crowd! That’s funnier yet. But the funniest thing of all is that we didn’t dope it out. Why, there hasn’t been one of us that didn’t feel you were acting as if you had something on your mind. Yet with all the Shark’s calculations and with all my good common sense, we were as unsuspecting as babes in the woods!”

“Common sense! Poke’s common sense!” roared Step. “Say, that’s the richest joke sprung in a hundred years!”

Peter Groche, aroused by the shout which met this sally, lifted his head. He stared evilly at Sam, and his features were contorted as grotesquely as a gargoyle’s.

“He tried to plant the job on me, I tell ye!” he growled hoarsely. “Boy, I’ll get ye for that—I’ll get ye if I swing for’t!”

“Wal, I guess you’ll have to wait and do a little time fust in a cell,” quoth Lon.

Peter Groche made no reply. His head had sunk to the floor.