  As the elevated train rattled noisily along over the low roofs of cottages and between endless rows of apartment houses, Johnny Thompson sat staring dreamily at the lattice-like covering of the floor of his car. He was allowing the events of the past few days to move before his mind’s eye. It seemed much like a moving picture. There was a scene showing the central fire station with its leaping yellow lights. A click, a flash, and there was a fire, a city school building burning, a pink-eyed man, a child in the school loft, a tall ladder, he ascended, descended, then searched for the pink-eyed man. A second flash of light, a second fire; this time the great Simons Building, and Mazie in a tenth-story window. There was the fireman’s monkey, and again the pink-eyed man, also for the first time the man of the hooked nose, the stoop and limp. Once more a flash of white film: a boat in a marsh, black birds and a mysterious rifle shot. A third fire, the Zoo. A wild chase ending at the breakwater, and after that a fight on the island and little old Ben Zook. Then again the marsh, a boat and Mazie, and after that the mysterious assailant. Then came that tragic scene, the death of poor, old Ben Zook. The den of the underworld, the dancing girl, Jensie; the attack, Pant’s life saved by the girl, the mysterious light, mystifying darkness, then the outer air. The building on Randolph Street, the mysterious load of chemicals, the fight with Knobs Whittaker. Flight. The fire that seemed hotter than the flames of a volcano. “And here we are,” he whispered to himself. “How does it all connect up? Or does it? Sometimes it seems to; at others it appears not to. How is it all to end?” Pant suddenly interrupted his reveries. “Johnny,” he said, “men don’t know much about light, do they?” “I suppose not, Pant.” “Of course they don’t. It’s all sort of relative, isn’t it? If I have a torch in a dark room it seems a brilliant light. Take it into the sunlight and it dwindles to nothing. Now if an extraordinarily bright light struck your eyes for a second and the next second vanished, the lights of a room might seem no light at all, just plain darkness?” “Possibly,” said Johnny, without really thinking much about it. Since this was the last great night of the greatest carnival ever held in the city’s most popular pleasure resort, though the hour was late, the cares were here and there given bits of color by the costumes of pleasure-seeking revelers. The journey was scarcely more than half completed when the car filled, and Pant felt compelled to give his seat to a slender girl who, like himself, was headed for the scene of gaiety. Dressed as a Gypsy, with red shoes, red stockings, a bright colored striped dress and a crimson shawl, with a mask completely covering her face, she would have been difficult to recognize even by her most intimate acquaintances. But the keen eye of this unusual boy, Pant, detected something vaguely familiar. Mayhap it was the slender, red stockinged ankles, or the constantly bobbing feet that suggested a dance, or the long, artistic fingers that constantly plaited her dress. He studied her until they left the car. As he turned to leave at Mazie’s station, he felt a sudden tickle above his collar. Turning quickly, he surprised the Gypsy girl concealing the colored end of a feathery reed beneath her cloak. “Ah there,” he breathed, “I thought I knew you. Here’s hoping I see you at Forest City.” Quick as thought the girl’s fingers went to her belt, then to the bosom of her dress. She snipped a small red rose from a bouquet at her belt and pinned it to her dress. The next instant Johnny gave Pant such a pull as drew him half down the car. Two seconds later they were on the platform and the car was speeding away. “What was holding you?” demanded Johnny. “That Gypsy girl.” “What of her?” “I recognized her.” “Oh! You did?” said Johnny. “Well, come on, we go down here. It’s late. Mazie and the little girl may not wait. Let’s hurry.” Mazie and Tillie McFadden had waited. Since the amusement park was only six blocks from Mazie’s home, they walked. In a short time they were mingling with the fun-mad throng that flowed like a many colored stream down the board walks of Forest City, a city which Johnny had once said was doomed. As he entered it now he asked himself whether this were true. The answer was: Who knows? The mingled sounds that strike one’s ears on a night like this are stunning in their variety and intensity. The dull tom-tom of some Gypsy fortune teller inviting trade by pounding a flat-headed drum; the steady challenge of men who invite you to risk your small change on the turn of a spindle wheel; the inviting shout of hawkers; the high-pitched screams descending from the roller coaster as a car pitches down through space; the minor shouts of revelers on the board walks; all this, blended with the dull rumble of wheels, the clank of machinery, the splash of boats, the murmur of ten thousand voices, produces a sound which in the aggregate blends into a mad jumble that leaves one with no conscious thought of sound. No one sound seems to register above the others. It is all just one great noise. The sights that strike your eye are scarcely less impressive. Great streamers of confetti, red, white, blue, yellow and green tissue ribbons hanging from wires, from plaster-of-paris domes, from windows, from electric lights, from every spot where a sparrow might rest his wings; bushels of bits of paper flying through the air like a highly tinted snow storm; and the amusements—here a car rushing through space, there the whirling invitation of an airplane, and there again the slow and stately Ferris wheel. Beneath all this the colorful throng that, like some giant reptile, moves ever forward but never comes to an end. These were the sights that thrilled the four young pleasure seekers. The sensations of touch, too, added to the frenzy that appeared to enter one’s very veins and to send his blood racing. A wild group of revelers, playing a game that is little less than crack-the-whip, wrap themselves about you, to at last break up like a wave of the sea and go surging away. A single frenzied reveler seizes you sharply by the arm, to scream at you and vanish. A tickler touches your ear; a handful of fine confetti sifts down your neck; you are caught in a swelling current of the crowd to be at last deposited with a final crush into a little eddy close by some game of chance, or booth where root beer and hot dogs are sold. They had been cast aside by the throng into such an eddy as this when, finding herself without other occupation, Mazie focused her opera glasses, which hung by a strap at her side, on a wooden tower two hundred feet high. This tower, lighted as it was by ten thousand electric lamps, seemed at the distance a white hot obelisk of steel. The tower stood in the center of the place and there were six bronze eagles at the very top of it. “How plainly I can see them,” Mazie murmured to herself. “I can even see the copper wire that binds them to the pillars.” Little did she dream of the awe-inspiring and awful sights she would witness on that tower, with those glasses, on this very night. It was at this moment that Pant noticed little Tillie McFadden’s eyes, full of longing, fixed upon the roller coaster. “Ever ride on that?” he asked. The girl shook her head. “Want to?” “You bet I do.” “You’re on!” exclaimed Pant. “When shall we four meet again, and where?” “In just an hour,” said Johnny. “Meet us beneath the statue of the two fools.” This immense statue, made of cement, stood near the exit. “All right, we’ll be there,” smiled Pant. “Come on, Tillie. We’ll do the city right, roller coaster, City of Venice, ferris wheel and all.” Then they were swallowed up by the crowd. |
|
