“Guess that’s enough for tonight. I’ll get that phone.” He hurried away.
It was not enough, not half enough for Johnny. He wanted to ask if the eye had helped him see what he had seen that afternoon, if the eye could have anything to do with the whispers at dawn. He wanted to ask a hundred questions. But Felix was gone.
When Johnny mounted to his room, he found the telephone in its place on a stand by his bed, but Felix was nowhere to be seen.
As a rule, Johnny was a heavy sleeper. All the strange doings of the past few days must have gotten on his nerves, for next morning, more than an hour before dawn, he found himself lying in bed wide awake, thinking.
The ceiling of his room, he noticed, had dropped again during the night. This neither surprised nor disturbed him. In fact, in this strange house had the attraction of gravity been reversed and had he found his bed resting on the ceiling instead of the floor, he would not have been greatly surprised.
He was, however, curious about many things. This room that had a way of growing small, with its strange light where there were no lamps, intrigued him.
The matter of the locked door of the previous day had been solved. Felix had been experimenting with a new type of time lock and had forgotten to throw the electrical switch that controlled it.
“But that living picture on the wall!” Johnny thought to himself. “How is one to explain that?
“And the whisper? Where does that come from? It can’t be a broadcast, and he can’t be close at hand.” Drew had told him the evening before that Grace Krowl had said she had heard the Whisperer in her room more than a mile away.
“The message was not the same,” he told himself. “Not nearly the same. She did not get my message. I did not get hers. He is a very particular person, this Whisperer.”
His thoughts went back to that day he bought the express package that had come so near causing his death.
“And I had those bonds!” he groaned aloud. How was this affair to end? Would Drew Lane and his band come up with these outlaws? Would there be a battle? Would he, Johnny Thompson, be in at the finish? He devoutly hoped so. He thought again of Madame LeClare and her fine children who had lost a father. He saw the dark, smiling eyes of Alice. “As long as God gives us breath!” he repeated. It was a pledge and a prayer.
His thoughts had returned to the mysterious Whisperer when he was given a sudden start by the loud jangle of a bell.
He sprang out of bed. The bell appeared to be in the room. “Like an alarm clock,” he told himself. “But there is no clock.”
He looked at the reflector on the wall. The moonlight was falling upon it—or was that some other form of light? He could not tell. The sound seemed to come from there.
He began pacing the room. The bell still jangled. But of a sudden he halted in amazement. As he crossed before the reflector the sound had ceased for the space of a second, then began again. He tried it again and got the same result.
“That’s strange!” he told himself.
Just then the jangling ceased and in its stead came the familiar voice of the Whisperer:
“Johnny! Johnny Thompson! Are you there? Are you awake?”
“The Whisperer?” Johnny breathed.
“Johnny,” the message went on, “I have an important message for your friends. Phone them at once. The men they want are at 1046 Blair Street. They are in a small, yellow sedan. They are in a garage, having their car repaired. Hurry!”
Johnny did hurry. He called the shack and had Drew on the wire at once.
“Yes,” Drew said, “Tom is here with me, and so are the Captain and Spider. Thanks for the tip, Johnny. We are on our way at once.”
“Well, that’s that!” Johnny sighed. He knew, though he regretted it tremendously, that he could not hope to join them in this adventure.
“Stay here and wait for any further message,” he told himself. “Wonder if Drew and the rest will really come up to Iggy and his gang? If they do, man! oh, man!” He could just hear the guns popping.
There was, however, no such luck, at least for the moment. As the happy, fighting four, Drew and his band, neared the garage at 1046 Blair Street, they saw a low, yellow sedan pop out of the garage door and go speeding north.
“That’s sure to be them. After them! Give her the gas!” the Captain shouted.
Drew sent the Captain’s powerful car speeding after.
The yellow car shot straight north for a mile. Then it whirled round a corner on two wheels.
When Drew and his band rounded that corner there was no car in sight—only a huge, lumbering moving-van two blocks to the east.
“Street ends two blocks west,” the Captain snapped. “Must have gone east. Drive slow and watch the north and south streets.”
This they did. They were still going slow as they passed the van. Spider, who had been sitting in the back seat with Tom Howe, was startled a moment later to find that Tom was no longer with him. He was not in the car. He was gone.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime, Johnny Thompson was in the midst of a strange discovery. Ten minutes after the first message had been delivered, the bell began its jangle once more.
“Hello!” Johnny exclaimed. “Big Ben again!”
Springing to his feet, he began walking back and forth before the round reflector. As on the other occasion, the bell ceased jangling as he passed.
A series of rapid experiments with a hat held in his hand showed him he could shut off the bell by holding the hat in certain positions. These positions, he found, must be higher and higher as he receded from the reflector toward the window.
“One thing I know,” he assured himself. “That sound is produced by some force outside my window. And the person who produces it must be very high up.
“In fact—” He caught his breath as he looked out of the window and away to the east. “There is but one place it could come from. That is the top of the six hundred foot tower of the Sky Ride on those deserted Century of Progress grounds. The Whisperer—”
He broke off short to listen with all his ears. The ringing of that bell ceased, the whispered message was beginning.
* * * * * * * *
What had happened to the slender young detective, Tom Howe? Something rather strange, I assure you.
Having slipped from the slowly moving police car, he had mounted the running board of the vast lumbering van. From this point he slid to a position beside the driver. As he did this he prodded the driver in the ribs with an automatic and whispered, “You will drive as I say and where I say, or you are a dead man!”
The driver never took his eye from the road. He drove straight on.
* * * * * * * *
The message Johnny Thompson received after the second ringing of the bell was but a repetition of the first, so his mind was soon put to rest. He was left with plenty to wonder about, for all that.
But dawn was now breaking. Like departing fairies, the Whisperer had other business that must be attended to. He was heard next in Grace Krowl’s little parlor on Maxwell Street.
“Christmas Eve will be here in three more days,” he was saying. “On Christmas Eve everyone is in a mellow mood. That is the time for confiding secrets. On that evening, my friend Grace, you are to invite Nida McFay to your room, seat her beside your table and induce her to tell her story. I shall be looking in upon you from my high tower a mile away.”
“High tower, a mile away!” she thought. “How can one see that far? And the shade is always half drawn. It is impossible!” And yet, the Whisperer had more than once convinced her that he did see her face.
“But Christmas Eve!” she exclaimed indignantly. “How can one ask another to bare her life’s secrets at such a time?”
It was a sober-faced Grace Krowl who seated herself before the table for a few moments of quiet thought. In the days just past she had tried out her plan of writing to people whose stories she had found in lost trunks. She had offered to return all their little treasures without cost. The results had been disappointing and disheartening. Their attitude she had found difficult to understand. In their letters they seemed to say, “You have all the things in my trunk. You have a right to none of them.” She had returned the pictures and letters from six trunks. She had paid the express charges out of her own meager funds. Not one of them all had made an effort to repay these charges.
“Not one returned to thank me.” She stared at the wall. “Can it be that uncle is right? That I am merely letting myself get ‘soft’?”
She thought of the priceless Bible tucked away at the bottom of the little horsehair trunk. Is it strange that a half-formed hope should enter her mind, the hope that no one would appear to claim that treasure, and that she might have it for her very own?
“A fortune! Thousands of dollars!” she whispered. “And yet—”
* * * * * * * *
When Tom Howe mounted to the seat of that lumbering van he took one look through a narrow slit of a window behind the driver. The inside of the van at that time was completely dark.
After riding with the driver for fully two miles and directing his course all this time, Tom cast another sidewise look through that window. His lips parted in an unuttered exclamation. The back of the van was now open, the gate was down, and back two blocks, just turning the corner, was a low, yellow sedan.
His face was a mask as he turned his attention once more to the street that lay ahead. Two blocks before them a red crossing light gleamed. As the van paused for this light, he sprang from the seat and was away like a shot.
“Well! What became of you?” the Captain roared as a half hour later he entered the shack.
“You lost their trail?” Tom grinned.
“I’ll say we did!”
“So did I,” Tom said quietly. “In the end I did. But I stayed with them longer than you did.”
“You stayed?” Drew exploded.
“Sure I did. You remember that van on the street? They were in there, car and all! Pulled a swift one on us. Driver lowered the back gate and they drove up and in. Then he lifted the gate.
“I had ’em trapped like rats, I thought. I’d have made the driver take that van right into our squad-car garage. And then, would there have been fun!”
“But what happened?” Drew was staring now.
“Near as I can find out, the driver released the gate with some foot control. Iggy and his gang took the hint and backed right out while we were going. I saw them shoot round a corner. The trap was sprung, no rat in it—so I came home.
“How about a cup of coffee?” He moved toward the stove in the corner.
“Well that,” Drew said slowly, “is something!”
“There’ll be another day,” the Captain grumbled.
Late that afternoon Captain Burns’ car came to a stop before the “House of Magic.”
“Hop in,” he said to Johnny when the boy appeared. “Want to take you somewhere. Been working on clues all day. Tired. Need rest. Need good company. Come along.”
Johnny, who had spent a quiet day with Felix, being led further into the magic of the electric eye, but being told nothing at all about the mysteries that most intrigued him, was ready enough to go.
“Queer boy, that Felix,” he said to the Captain as the car sped on through the city. “Didn’t really tell me a thing I wanted to know.
“Oh, yes,” he corrected himself, “he did say that the light about the place was made by neon tubes set in the walls and that the light entered the room through a million pin-pricks in the canvas covering of the walls; also that this light came in slowly because it was filtered through bulbs very like radio tubes.”
“Interesting, but not so terribly important,” the Captain rumbled.
“Same with that business of my room getting tall and short,” Johnny went on. “Seems his father thinks there’s a lot of waste space in modern homes. Bed chambers stand empty all day, living-rooms all night, and there is never enough air space in either. So he’s experimenting on floors built like elevators. You flatten out the bedroom furniture and raise the floor; that gives you a tall living-room during the day. By lowering the same floor at night you get a tall bedroom.”
“In any case,” the Captain laughed, “you’re not likely to bump your head.”
“Seems,” Johnny concluded, “I had a room intended in the beginning for a sort of parlor. They needed the space above, so they let down the floor. Not a bad arrangement, only they ought to have let a fellow know. These inventors’ heads are so full of things, they forget.”
They were now well out of the city, speeding along a country road.
Thirty miles from the heart of the city they swung through a gateway and came to a stop before a small, low-roofed cottage.
It was now dark. The place seemed cold and deserted.
“You’ll not find any ceilings falling on you here,” Captain Burns chuckled. “This was my boyhood home.”
“Your boyhood home!” Johnny surveyed the narrow yard surrounded by ancient maples. He looked at the insignificant dwelling towered over by a giant cottonwood tree.
“And you rose from this,” he said in an awed whisper.
“No, Johnny,” the Captain replied quickly. “I didn’t rise. No one ever rises above his boyhood home. It is the grandest place on earth. Come on in.”
The place they entered was the kitchen. It had a low ceiling. In a corner stood a small wood-burning kitchen range with a top that was warped and cracked.
“That’s the very stove,” the Captain said proudly, touching a match to shavings and watching yellow flames spread. “I cut wood for it more than thirty years ago.
“I was away from this place a long, long time, Johnny. When I got some money I bought it for a sort of retreat. When I am poor again it shall be the last of my treasured possessions to go—my boyhood home!” he ended reverently.
“When I think—” There was a rumble in the Captain’s throat as he began to speak after some moments of silence. “When I think of the good, simple, happy times we had here, I wonder—” He did not finish, but sat smiling and looking at the glowing hearth of the little, old, cracked kitchen stove.
“I was raised in this one small room,” he began once more. “Oh, yes, we slept upstairs. No fire up there, not a spark. Cold!” He chuckled. “Twenty below sometimes.
“But this room, it was home to us. Home.” He said it softly. “I can see it now. The table there and the yellow glow of a kerosene lamp. Father dozing by the fire. Brother Tom reading. He was a scholar, Tom was. Made a fine man, he would, if—” Once more he did not finish.
“Father was a pious man,” he rumbled on after a time. “Wonder how many sons of truly pious men make their mark in the world? Many of them, I believe.
“We always had prayers on our knees before we went upstairs. Father’s prayer was always much the same. One sentence I remember well: ‘We thank Thee, our Father, that it is well with us as it is.’ It wasn’t very well with us all the time. But we had peace. The doors were never locked. Precious little to steal, and no one to steal it.
“Peace!” he mused. “Sometimes I wonder whether this eternal struggle is worth the cost. When I got older and went out with my father to help with the work, when we came rattling home in the dark in our old lumber wagon, we had peace. No one wanted to kill us. But now—”
Once again he did not finish. There was no need. Full well Johnny knew that there were those who wished this faithful officer beneath the sod.
“But when the city gets you—” The Captain’s tone had changed. “When it gets you, there’s no turning back. The noise, the rush, the excitement of life that flows on and on like a torrent—it gets you, and you never, never turn back.
“Remember the story of poor old Lot?”
“Yes, I remember.” Johnny knew that great old book.
“I’ve always felt sorry for Lot.” The Captain chuckled. “Country chap come to the city to live. Got his wife turned to salt, he did. Lost about all he had. But he couldn’t help it. City got him. Sodom got him. Chicago’s got you and me, Johnny. And Chicago won’t let us go until they bring us out to some spot like the one we passed a mile from here, and put us away where the hemlocks sing and sigh over the marble that is white in the moonlight.
“So we’ll fight on, Johnny.” He prodded the fire. “We won’t accomplish much. No one ever does. But we’ll do our bit—do it like men.
“But, Johnny—” He rose and stretched himself. “It helps to come out here now and then where I have known so much peace. Just to sit by this old, cracked stove, to listen to the whisper of the wind, the song of the tree toads and the whoo-whooting of some owl, and dream I am a boy again, just a boy. Ah, son, that’s good.
“We’ll go back to the city in a little while,” he went on after a time. “Get a good bed somewhere in town.
“And that reminds me, Johnny. I want you out here on Christmas Eve. We’ll make up a party and stay all night. Hang up our stockings just as we boys used to do. We’ll bring out Drew and Tom, Joyce Mills, Mrs. LeClare and Alice; yes, and Spider—only we’ll have a whole turkey for Spider,” he chuckled. “We—we’ll have a grand time Christmas Eve and all day Christmas. And such a dinner! I’ve bought a turkey, twenty-five pounds, Johnny.
“Come in here.” He took up a kerosene lamp and led the way into a second small room.
“This was our parlor. Only lit the fire on Sundays. Such Sundays as those were! Happy days, Johnny! Happy days!”
“But what’s this?” Johnny asked suddenly. “Surely this does not belong to those days.”
“No.” There was a queer look on the Captain’s face. “Fellow I know, man I would trust with my life, asked permission to put that in here.” They were looking at a two-foot wide reflector such as was to be found in Johnny’s room in the “House of Magic.”
“He said,” the Captain went on, “that if the time came when I was badly needed in the city, a message would come to me through that thing. How? I can’t say. Up until now it hasn’t uttered a squawk. It—”
Suddenly Johnny held up a hand. There was no need. The Captain was listening with all his ears, for, into that room there on the lonely prairie, had stolen a whisper.
“Captain Burns!” The words were very distinct. “I wish to inform you that a packet of stolen bonds you are seeking have been sold to Joseph Gregg of 3200 South Kemp Street. Gregg is an honest man. But back of him—” The whisper faded.
“That,” exclaimed the Captain, “is all I need to know!”
Racing for his coat and hat, he led the way to his car. A moment more and they were speeding back to the city.
“Johnny,” said the Captain, “do you believe that whisper came all the way from the city?”
“I am sure of it.”
“A broadcast?”
“No, not a broadcast. I feel sure no one in the world, save us, heard it.”
“Wonderful, if true—a revolutionary idea!” the Captain exclaimed.
“I think,” said Johnny, “that I could name the very spot from which that message came—the top of the Sky Ride tower.” He told the Captain of his discovery regarding the whisper he had heard that morning.
“We’ll have to look into that,” was the Captain’s only comment.
That very night Johnny attempted to “look into that,” with such results as you shall see.
Having secured Spider as his special bodyguard and obtained permission to enter the deserted grounds of the Century of Progress, Johnny set out on his mission of discovery. He was determined to learn what he could about the mysterious Whisperer.
It was a dark night. Clouds hid the moon. One of those cold, gusty nights it was, when fine siftings of snow creep and tremble about your feet, when sharp gusts of wind shooting out from unexpected angles blow fine particles of ice upon your cheek, and you say with a start, “Some devil of the north has been let loose to blow his breath upon me.”
“Boo!” Spider shuddered. “How cold it is!”
“Yes, and ghostly!” Johnny added. They were on the old Fair grounds. “When you think what this place has been, so full of light and sunshine, so hilarious with the screams and shouts of jolly revelers, every corner seems to hide a ghost.”
“Yes.” Spider quickened his pace. “There’s the place where they had all those freaks—tall, skinny men, short, crooked ones, two headed, one legged—all sorts of funny and distorted humans. Gee! Johnny, what a joy to have two legs and two arms, eyes, ears and all that!”
“Yes, and what poor use some of us make of them!” Johnny grumbled.
“Look.” Spider was full of recollections. “There’s where they kept that huge snake. Suppose he’s in there now, all coiled up, torpid for his winter’s sleep?” The thought caused him to veer sharply to the left.
“Ghosts, all right,” Johnny said quietly. “Ghosts of those who stood in these places hour by hour, patiently doing their duty, roasting hot dogs, guarding jewels, changing money, selling tickets. Ghosts too of performers on this hilarious Midway.”
“And ghosts of those who came to see,” Spider chuckled genially.
“But look!” Johnny’s voice rose. He gripped Spider’s arm. “Do I see a light up there, or don’t I?”
“Up where?”
“Tower of the Sky Ride.”
A gaunt skeleton of steel, the towers of the Sky Ride where, in the days of wild joy at the Century of Progress three million thrill seekers had shot upward to go gliding and bumping across the sky! And, yes, there at the very top of the left-hand tower a pale yellow light shone.
“The Whisperer!” Johnny’s voice was husky with emotion. “We’ve found him.”
“But that place—” There was doubt in Spider’s tone. “That place has been locked for months. Electric current is probably turned off. How’d he get up there? Six hundred feet and more!” There was awe in his tone. He was a climber, was Spider—none better, so he had supposed. Had he come upon the tracks of one more skillful than he?
“I could do it,” he muttered beneath his breath. “I could climb that tower. Six hundred feet. Bah! What’s the diff? Two hundred, three hundred, or six, it’s all the same.
“But that man?” He turned to Johnny. “He can’t just pucker up his lips and whisper a mile, can he? Takes machines, instruments, whatever you may call it, don’t it?”
“Yes, I’m sure it does,” Johnny agreed. “I don’t know a lot about it myself. It’s all like magic to me. But it must take a lot of mechanisms and a strong electric current.
“Of course,” he added thoughtfully, as they walked slowly forward, “the Sky Ride’s in somebody’s care. Bound to be. The managers of next year’s Fair are going to operate it. And if someone had some sort of a pull he could get permission to turn on the current and set an elevator running. He could get up and down that way. And what a place he’d have for whispering! Whisper all over the world, I’d say. I’d like to have a picture of that man—if it is a man.”
“If it is?” Spider laughed. “You don’t think he’s an ape, or something?”
“Might be a woman,” said Johnny seriously.
“Yeah, a woman! Fine chance!” Spider scoffed.
“Tell you what!” he exclaimed suddenly. “I’ll take that dare!”
“What dare?” Johnny stopped short in his tracks.
“I’ll get you his picture, and if it’s a lady, I’ll take two pictures.”
“You mean you’ll climb that tower? Six hundred feet! You—you’ve not been drinking, Spider?”
“Drinking, Johnny?” There was a deep note of reproach in Spider’s voice. “Whatever else I am, Johnny, I’m not a fool. Only a fool drinks. And a fellow who climbs is a double fool if he drinks. Drink, Johnny, makes you feel as if you could fly. And that’s a fatal feeling when you’re up in the air.
“No, Johnny, I’m sober. You want to know what that man looks like, what he’s doing up there. So do I. The elevator may be working. Who knows? If not—up I go.”
“All right,” Johnny agreed reluctantly. Full well he knew how futile it is to argue with a person of Spider’s nature. “You’ll know when you’ve had enough, won’t you? You’ll give it up if it’s sort of getting the best of you?”
The Spider’s reply was a guttural mutter.
“All the same, you promise!” Johnny insisted.
“Have it your way,” Spider mumbled. “But just you watch this flashlight. I’ll fasten it to my belt, behind. It will be shining straight down. Guess you’ll be able to see it all the way up. It’s pretty bright. When you see it up there at the top you’ll know I’m there.
“And—when you see a white flash you’ll know I’ve got the picture. Always carry a flash-bulb and a little camera, I do. Get some great pictures in all sorts of places.”
“Yes,” Johnny grumbled, “and some time you’ll get your head blown off in the bargain!”
“Oh, yeah?” Spider laughed a crackly sort of laugh.
The elevator to the Sky Ride tower might or might not have been working. The two boys had no way to tell. The door to the place was locked and bolted, apparently from within.
“Just as well pleased,” Spider chuckled. “Always have wanted to climb that thing since I saw the first two sections sticking up out of the snow in 1933—so here goes!” He was away up the steel frame, like a monkey.
It was with a feeling akin to awe that Johnny saw that small, wavering spot of yellow light mount up, up, up toward the spot where some bright star lay hidden behind a cloud.
“He’ll never climb so high,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t have let him try. And yet—” There was a mystery to be solved, and mysteries at times are to be solved only by deeds of daring. So he watched the light at Spider’s back mount and mount until it was but a tiny speck of yellow light that, winking and blinking, rose ever higher and higher.
As for Spider, he was not disturbed. A climber from the age of six, he had within him supreme self-confidence. What is distance anyway? If you fall at fifty feet you will die. Can six hundred be worse? Thus he reasoned and, mounting higher and higher, thought only of his goal. He would have a look into that room of mystery. He’d surprise someone at his work and, be he man, woman or devil—flash! There would be a picture.
He was right in part—at least, the flash was not lacking; for, having at last scaled the height, he stood upon a steel cross-beam to draw his chin above a steel window frame. And there he hung, drinking in with his eyes the scene that lay before him.
The right-hand corner of a broad, glass-enclosed space had been roughly partitioned off into a small room. At the center of this narrow space, bending over some curious instrument, was a tall, thin man.
That he was not conscious of prying eyes was at once apparent, for, after a moment, partially straightening up, he switched on a powerful lamp, thus sending a sharp pencil of illumination through the clouds that hung over the city.
This accomplished, he turned half about.
Spider dropped low, he might be seen.
When next he dared bring his eyes above the edge of the window frame he found the man facing a peculiar square of metal attached to a low pedestal.
“A microphone! He’s talking into it. The Whisperer!” Spider breathed.
Then with the force of a blow it came to him that here was his chance.
“The picture,” he muttered low.
Twisting an arm about a steel beam, with no thought of the dizzy depths below, with fingers that trembled ever so slightly, he adjusted an electric light bulb, half filled with a sort of tinfoil, to his flashlight. Then adjusting his small camera, he shifted his position, held camera and flashlight high, then pressed a button.
The result was most astonishing. A bright flash was to be expected. The tinfoil filled bulb was such as newspaper photographers use for taking flashlight pictures. Yes, that first bright flash was to be expected. The second, following closely upon the first and accompanied by a sharp report, had not been anticipated. A bullet burned Spider’s ear. With a cry of consternation, he released his grip, dropped a short way toward the black depths below, struck a steel beam, threw out his hands, clutched something cold and substantial, then hung there between heaven and earth.
The first indication that all had not gone well came to Johnny when some object falling from the sky crashed upon a square of wind-blown pavement not twenty feet from where he stood.
Springing forward, he cast the light of his electric torch upon some black fragments scattered over the spot where the thing had struck.
“The—the camera!” he whispered. “Spider’s camera. There’ll be no picture. But Spider. What of him?”
The wind that whistled about the foot of the Sky Ride tower brought him no answer.
He had been watching the top of that tower for a full five minutes when some object, gliding along a cluster of four cables closely set together and running at a broad angle from the top of the tower to the ground, suddenly caught his attention.
“Can that be a man?” he asked himself, staring with all his eyes as the thing moved downward.
“If it’s a man, is it Spider or the Whisperer?” he asked himself a moment later.
Determined to know, he went racing away toward the end of the cable, some three blocks away.
He arrived just in time to see the slider drop to earth. It was Spider.
“Quite a sky-slider, I am!” he chuckled.
“Well done!” exclaimed Johnny. “Did you see him?”
“Not very clearly. He’s a man, all right. And he’s a tiger. Nearly got me. Never again!”
Spider led the way off the grounds.
And so for the time the mystery of the Whisperer remained unsolved. Only this was known with a fair degree of certainty: his place of retreat was one high tower of the Sky Ride.
The dawn of the day before Christmas arrived and with it, in Grace Krowl’s tiny parlor, came the hoarse whisper of the mysterious one:
“Tonight,” it insisted, “you will not fail me. It is for the good of all. You owe us more than you know. It is we who beautified your living quarters. Your coming disturbed our plans. But if you do this thing for us you shall be forgiven.”
“Plans.” It was her turn to whisper. “What plans?” She wanted to know.
A half hour later, when she descended to the street she found Drew Lane standing by the store door.
“Saw a small leather bag through the window,” he explained. “Think I’d like it.”
With some irrelevance Grace said quickly:
“Drew Lane, how could anyone see you a mile away?”
“Powerful telescope, perhaps.” He gave her a strange look.
“But in your room, with the shade half drawn?”
“No, not possible. Television, possibly that.” His voice dropped to a near whisper. “They do strange things with that, I’m told.
“What is it?” He looked her squarely in the eye. “That Whisperer again?”
“Yes.”
“And does he claim to see you as well as talk to you?”
“He does see me. I’m sure of it.”
“That’s strange!” Drew Lane did not appear to be shamming.
“Can it be,” she asked herself, “that this young man is not the Whisperer, and that he knows nothing about it?”
As for Drew, he stood there considering the advisability of inviting this girl to the Captain’s Christmas party. He left without having arrived at a definite decision. Some hours later he was to be devoutly thankful that he had not given the invitation.
Christmas Eve came. By nine o’clock the tracks of two large automobiles might have been seen winding through the freshly fallen snow before the Captain’s boyhood home, and from there away to the shed serving as a garage at the right of the house.
From the windows there stole a mellow light. Caught and flung high, curls of blue wood smoke rose from the chimneys.
The guests were seated in the tiny parlor of their beloved Captain’s old home. There were two young detectives, Drew Lane and Tom Howe, with their youthful understudies, Johnny Thompson and Spider. Madame LeClare was there too with Alice, her daughter, and Joyce Mills. Quite a jolly party they were on this Christmas Eve. Only one thought marred their pleasure—the Captain was not with them.
“It’s tough,” he had said to them at the last moment. “Something big just broke. I’ve got to get on the trail while it’s hot. But you folks go right along out. Hang your stockings up behind the old stove like good little children, and maybe you’ll catch me filling them when you get up in the morning. And if you don’t—may that Christmas turkey be tender!”
Those had been his words. Now, as Johnny sat dreaming beside the cracked stove that, despite its age, sent forth a cheering glow, he imagined the Captain skulking down some dark alley in quest of those who would disturb the tranquillity of Christmas Eve.
“Almost wish I were with him,” he thought. “And yet—”
There was a sharp wind blowing. The snow was drifting. Outside, close to the road, a windmill stood on its tall, steel tower. From time to time the wind, giving this mill a twist, caused it to send forth a sharp, grating scream that seemed a human cry of pain.
“Boo!” Johnny whispered. “There’s something spooky about a lonely country place at night.”
A moment more and his thoughts were back with the Captain. “The wind,” he thought, “will be whistling about the corners of skyscrapers tonight. The snow will go scooting and whirling away and away just as it does among the crags of the Rockies. Cities are like that. Wonder where the Captain is now?”
Then again he seemed to hear the Captain’s rumbling voice as in this very room he told of his boyhood days.
“That is the very stove—” He spoke aloud now. Pretty Alice LeClare turned her shining black eyes upon him. “It’s the very stove that burned here many years ago when the Captain was a boy. He found it in the barn loft.
“And these chairs,” he went on, “are the very chairs on which he hung his stockings so long ago. He found them in the attic, bottoms gone, some broken. He had them restored. Seems—” His voice went husky. “Seems almost a sacred place.”
“It is sacred,” Alice whispered back. “The boyhood home of a good man, the things he loved, are always sacred.”
Johnny could have loved the little French Canadian for that speech.
“And what a privilege,” Alice murmured low, “just for one night to live as he lived, so simple, so plain, so true. To hang up our stockings, feeling that they will be filled, not by lavish hands, but by loving ones, with the simple things that only real love can find.”
“But listen!” Johnny touched her arm. “How that windmill screams! It seems a—a sort of warning. Perhaps our night will not be so serene after all. Per—”
He broke short off. From the wall where the broad reflector stood facing the open window there had come a sound.
“Like a whisper,” Johnny thought. Whisper or not, it made no sense. So again the room fell into silence. Only the crackle of the fire, the racing tick-tock, tick-tock of the little clock on the mantel told that this little gray house was still the habitation of man.
* * * * * * * *
That night, over a cup of tea in Grace Krowl’s parlor, with the Whisperer looking on “from his tower a mile away” Nida McFay told her story. It was a strange story filled with smiles and tears.
For three glorious years she had worked in the book department of one of America’s most beautiful stores. Surrounded by books, with congenial fellow workers and cultured customers, she had learned what it meant to truly live.
“And then—” The little book seller looked away. “Then a man, a very little, wistful old man who lived in my rooming house, brought me some books from his library; anyway, he said they were from his library. He asked me to sell them for him at a second-hand store.
“They were valuable books. I—I sold them.”
She paused to sit for a time staring into her tea cup. It was as if she sensed the fact that someone was looking in upon them from afar, and that she dreaded to go on.
From the reflector in the corner came a strange sound. “Like someone stifling a cough,” Grace thought with a shudder.