ALONG THE FLOOR Placing both hands on the sideboard of the dray, Bunny vaulted lightly to the ground. From where Bonfire stood, the thin eddy of smoke could be seen looping over the tree tops at the corner. "It's Peterson's house!" Bonfire shook his head. "The smoke shows too far north for that. It's either Crawford's or some shed near there." For a long moment Bunny watched the white wreath tail up above the highest leaves; then, abruptly, he raced after the jogging dray. "Stop that team!" he shouted. Mr. Langer pulled up deliberately, hastened a little in the process, perhaps, by Roundy, who seemed on the point of taking the reins into his own hands. "Everybody out! We can't leave a fire like that with nobody in town." "Oh, rats!" snapped Sheffield. "We'll turn in an alarm at the station. What's the fire department for? Let it burn!" Mr. Langer seemed in doubt. "Wal, I dunno." He scratched his head thoughtfully. "I dunno. Mebbe, now—" "You're hired to get us down to the station," Sheffield reminded him. "The best thing for you to do is to hurry up and make that train." Bunny hesitated. The welfare of the baseball team which he captained demanded that no time be lost. On the other hand, if a serious fire had started, it was more important to check it than to play any game. "If there is a real blaze—" he began. "It doesn't matter whether it's a real blaze or not," Sheffield interrupted. "We are on our way to play for the high-school championship of the State. That's more important than anything else." "No, Sheff," disagreed Bunny; "no, it isn't. Winning a baseball championship wouldn't be as important as saving Lakeville from a bad fire. Now, would it?" "Oh, it's probably only a smudge," urged Sheffield. "How about it, Langer? Didn't you see a bonfire over there?" Mr. Langer scratched his head again. "I dunno if I did and I dunno if I didn't. But—" Bunny made up his mind. "Drive ahead, Langer. Sheffield, you see that the stuff gets to the station on time and tell Professor Leland that we will catch the 11:30 train. That will bring us to the Belden field by just three o'clock. Scouts over here!" Almost before Mr. Langer could get under way, his dray was lightened of its load of Black Eagles, who scrambled to the ground, following Bunny and Bonfire at a dead run. "It's not a little blaze," panted the observant Bonfire. "Look how that smoke hangs in a cloud over the trees. It's coming from the top of some building." "It's the Crawford house!" Specs urged, as he sprinted up to the two leaders. "You can tell it's the Crawfords', because—No, it isn't either. It's—" Bunny, Bonfire and Specs came to a paralyzed halt. In one voice, they finished the sentence: "—Grady's barn!" Already that building had loomed into sight. From an opening near the peak of the roof, smoke was leisurely twining into the air, as if it had a perfect right to be doing that sort of thing in that sort of a place. No one else in town seemed to have noticed the warning, and a thicker puff of smoke brought no answering cry of "Fire!" "Let her go!" said Specs spitefully. "We will turn in an alarm and keep it from burning anything else, but we might just as well let the old shack go up in smoke. Grady has it insured." "But Sheffield's automobile is in there," protested Bonfire, "and that isn't insured. I heard Roy say so." "That's what I thought," Specs agreed calmly. "But Mister Royal Sheffield thinks we haven't any business monkeying with fires this morning, and I vote Bunny frowned. "We'll go right on being Scouts and living up to the Scout law, just as we did before we ever knew Sheffield. Jump and S. S., you two pike down to the fire department and hustle Dave Hendershot up here with the hose cart. Prissler, you chase downtown and rouse people. Roundy, break into the schoolhouse and ring the bell for all you're worth. Nap, you take the school telephone and call Central and the fire department. The rest of us will do what we can right here." However much the Scouts would have preferred to stay at the scene of action, they hesitated not at all in obeying these necessarily curt orders. Three runners scurried away toward Main Street; two others made a bee line for the janitor's entrance of the high school. "Oh, all right!" grunted Specs. "Now we can go ahead and be heroes and save dear old Roy's car for him. I'd certainly like to see the blamed thing saved—that is, all except the tires and the motor and the tool box and the lights and a few other things." Whenever Specs reached this particular mood, it was best to let him talk his way out of it. Bunny ignored him completely and ran toward the burning building. Grady's barn was the usual two-story structure, its peaked roof topped by an old-fashioned cupola. At the front, two swinging doors were locked by a wooden "Locked with a big padlock," said Bunny, testing the side door while Bonfire and Specs hurried to the west side of the building. Bi returned from an excursion to the rear. "Back door's nailed fast," he reported. "There are iron bars across the inside of that back window, too." Through this latter opening, Bi had seen the smoke thickening inside, but he had failed to discover any way of breaking through to smother it. It was evident that when Mr. Grady had turned over his horseless barn to Royal Sheffield, he had made it thoroughly burglar proof. "If I had an ax," Bi muttered wistfully, "I'd smash through that door in a hurry." With a common impulse, Bunny and Bi picked up a long board, to use as a battering-ram against the sagging double door. Under the blows, the barn resounded, but the doors remained as tightly shut as before. "Got to break through pretty soon or stop trying," Bunny gasped, as they halted the attack to regain wind. "If we once get inside anywhere, we can open those double doors and roll out the car. After that, we might save the barn. But if the gasoline ever explodes—well, that will finish everything." "Let's try it again!" Bi lunged against the door with fierce energy. "Maybe the big wooden bar that "All together, Bi! Once more! I think I felt it move." They hammered the wood home, but in spite of the whirlwind of blows the door did nothing but sag a little and stick fast. "Thank goodness!" ejaculated Bunny, as they halted after this assault. "Roundy's found the bell, anyhow." "Dang! Bang! Dang! Bang!" The clapper of the high-school bell was swinging wilder and harder against the metal sides than ever before in its short life. "Now, if that brings help, and if Nap gets a little action over the telephone, and if Jump and S. S. bring up the hose cart, we have a chance even yet. Where's Bonfire? And where's Specs?" As if in answer to his name, Bonfire appeared, red-faced and breathless, holding a short two-by-four in his hand. "Looked all over Peterson's woodshed for an ax, but couldn't find a thing except this. You can see the fire through the little stall window. It's just beginning to wake up. Didn't Specs find anything?" "Specs! Isn't he with you?" "With me? No!" Bonfire's eyes opened wide. "He started with me. He was going to the Crawfords' and—let's see—he turned and—" The "Come on!" he shouted, attacking the barn in a wild burst of frenzy. "We've got to break in! We've got to! Specs is inside!" Bunny caught him by the arm. "We can't break through here. It's solid. How do you know Specs is inside?" The other Scout was quivering with excitement. "I know it. I looked through the stall window. There was a board loose in the floor, near the fire. I pointed it out to him. For a joke, I told him a thin fellow might crawl underneath the barn, pry it loose, and come up inside. And he's done it! We've got to get him out!" The school bell still clanged at top speed. Far down the street, Bunny could see two men running. He fancied he could hear galloping hoofs and the rumble of the hose cart. But if Specs was wallowing in that smother of smoke, all this help would come too late. He pounded on the side of the barn with his futile fist. "Specs! Specs!" he shouted. Bi ground his fingers into his palms. "If he can only get to the door, he can open it, but—" There was no answering sound from within. Bonfire, who had disappeared, darted suddenly from one side of the barn. "He's in there," he said. His face was white, and he spoke jerkily. "You can see his tracks. I crawled under. The board has been lifted up, but the blaze is all over the hole and I couldn't get through." Something cried to be done. Something must be done. As Bunny tried to collect his thoughts, his eye glimpsed a tiny gap between the base of the door on the right and the top of the ramp. It stretched near the hinge side, high enough to take the end of a plank. With a shout of relief, he slapped the end of the board into the crevice. Using the two-by-four as a fulcrum, he began levering the door upward and outward. "All together now! Smash that hinge!" he gulped, choking from a whiff of smoke that puffed into his face from the crack. This command was unnecessary. Already the other two were throwing all their weight and strength on the long end of the lever. "Hard! Everybody, hard!" Came a creaking, groaning, splintering of the wood. It was the signal of the break to come. The Scouts were bracing for a last effort when, quite without warning or effort on their part, the bar stretched across the inside of the double door swung upward, the sides flew open, and out stumbled Specs. Himself, he had unloosed the holding bar and opened the doors. "I'm all right!" he gagged. "Not burned! Get the car out quick! Leave me alone! I'll be O. K. in a minute, I tell you!" He staggered over to a plot of grass. While Specs lay flung on the ground, blinking his smoke-reddened eyes and breathing heavily, the other three wheeled the car into the open just as the hose cart, carrying S. S. and Jump and a crew of four others, drew up at the hydrant. "Prissler ran down the street and yelled 'Fire!' at the top of his voice," explained S. S. "That's how these men happened to know about it and run to the fire house. He—There he comes now, with another bunch he's roused." Fortunately, except for a little scorched paint, the car was undamaged. As for the fire itself, within ten minutes the volunteer workers gathered by bell and telephone and little Prissler's Paul Revere race through the village had the flames changing into a welter of thick, white smoke. The barn had suffered, but it was not beyond repair. "I got in all right," Specs explained to the boys, "and I had a wet handkerchief tied over my face, and I crawled along the floor as if I was looking for a needle, and I generally acted the way a fireman ought to act. I'd been all right, too, if I hadn't bumped my elbow and then stuck my head up to see what did it. I must have swallowed some smoke or something, because I had to lie quiet till I could get enough "But I thought you didn't care about saving Sheffield's car," teased Roundy, who had come back from his bell ringing. "I don't!" Specs flared indignantly. "But if I hadn't tried to help, I'd have been breaking about half the Scout laws. Just the same," he added a little viciously, "I'm going to tell Royal Sheffield that I wish it had been somebody else's car." At this characteristic fling, the Black Eagles rolled merrily on the grass, winding up in an informal pyramid, of which Specs was the bottom layer. "Look here!" said Bunny, suddenly piling off. "We had better find out about that later train." It was Nap, arriving on the scene from his telephoning, who capped this remark. "I called up the station," he said. "That's what kept me. The team was gone. The second train—the one we thought we were going on—was taken off this week. There isn't another on the schedule that will get us to Belden in time for the baseball game!" |