Chapter XII: Johnny Gets a “jimmy”

That day Johnny Thompson, in quite an accidental manner, came into possession of certain facts that, while increasing his perplexity at the time, were destined in the end to go far toward solving a great mystery.

These facts were discovered as he went about the business of purchasing a large bouquet of chrysanthemums. No, Johnny had not gone soft. He was not buying flowers for a cigar clerk nor a telephone operator. Far from that. There was a school for crippled children just around the corner from his lodging. He had come to know many of these children. They loved flowers, as all right-minded children do. He was sending them a bouquet. Drew Lane and Tom Howe had gone about the business of conducting a raid which, they assured him, would be quite a tame affair.

“They’ll be expecting us,” Drew grinned. “There’s never a big bank robbery pulled but next day all the successful bank robbers are called on by the police. It’s the same with kidnapers.”

“If you know they’re bank robbers or kidnapers, why don’t you just send them down to State’s Prison and have it over with?” Johnny asked.

“That would be neat and quite simple.” Drew smiled a broad smile. “But the Constitution grants every man a trial. You’ve got to prove what down deep in your heart you know, so you have to go out and get the facts.”

“And we’ll get some facts to-day, whether they realize it or not,” Tom Howe put in. “Drew’s going to collect a gallon of pocket knives. That’s something.”

“It may be a lot,” said Drew soberly.

So Johnny went to the shop at the foot of the river bridge to buy flowers. He liked this shop and its dark-skinned proprietor. The man’s name was Angelo Piccalo.

“Hello, Johnny!” Piccalo welcomed him. “Some flowers to-day?”

“Yes. Big yellow ones for the kids—crippled kids.”

“Crippled keeds.” The flower merchant grinned a broad grin. “The biggest, the ver’ best!”

The flowers had been boxed and paid for, the proprietor stood in his doorway bidding Johnny good-bye, when a motor horn sounded close at hand. Johnny started. He believed it a car. To his surprise, though he looked up and down the street, there was no car near enough to have produced that sound.

“Speed boat.” Angelo Piccalo grinned once more. “My boy. Name Angelo. See! Fine boy, that one. No cripple heem!”

The boy who grinned up at them from the river was surely no cripple. Some eighteen years of age, he was the picture of perfect youth.

“Go to college next year,” Piccalo confided. “Beeg gentleman some time, my boy!”

Johnny will never know why he went down the iron steps that led to the landing place where the speed boat rested. There were times when he almost regretted having done so.

“Hello, Angelo!” he greeted. “That’s a fine boat.”

“Not so bad.” The younger Angelo’s eyes took him in at a glance. “Not much speed. Trade it in for a better one soon.”

“This flower business must pay very well,” Johnny told himself. “Bet he’s got a car, a fast one. Going to college, too.”

Angelo had bent over to lift up the rear seat of his boat. He was looking for something. Plainly it was not there. Another object was there that apparently annoyed him.

“Who’s been making my boat into a junk wagon?” He lifted out a bent iron bar and was about to drop it in the river, when Johnny stopped him.

“Hey! Don’t do that!”

“Why not? You want it? All right. Here it is.” The boy tossed the bar to Johnny’s feet. It fell with a noisy jangle.

Thinking he had caught some sound from above, Johnny looked up in time to surprise a black look on the older Piccalo’s usually smiling face. One moment it was there. The next it was gone.

“Strange!” Johnny thought. “I must have been mistaken.” Yet he knew he had not been, and found himself disturbed by that insistent question, “Why?”

“That’s a curious band you have for your wrist watch,” he said to the boy in the speed boat. “All green.”

“Made of green stones,” Angelo explained. “Got ’em on Isle Royale last summer. Fine place, Isle Royale. Plenty big fish, wild moose. Plenty pretty girls.” He grinned broadly. “Found these stones on the beach up there.”

Johnny picked up the iron bar, climbed the stairs and walked away. This bar might at one time have been used by a merchant for opening boxes and at another by some gentleman of evil intentions in opening the window of some other person’s home. It is, I believe, known in some circles as a “jimmy.”

Feeling a little foolish walking down the street, he wondered why he had saved the bar at all.

“Hate to see the work of some man’s hands wasted,” he told himself. “Many a poor shopkeeper on Maxwell Street would be glad to own it.”

At that he wrapped it in his morning paper and at last deposited it in back of a small desk in Drew Lane’s room. There it was to remain until the time appointed. Then it was to offer its bit of evidence regarding certain dark deeds committed on a night in November of that same year.

* * * * * * * *

The snow that had fallen steadily since the hour before dawn upon that tiny island in Tobin’s Harbor of Isle Royale ceased at ten o’clock.

Standing before the window, Red Rodgers watched a scene of matchless beauty unfold before him. Dark, unruffled waters widened moment by moment until at last trees, great dark giant spruce and slender ghosts of birches, began appearing.

When at last the snow fog had vanished altogether he saw on the not-too-distant shore spruce and balsam standing like rows of tall tents of the Indians.

And even as he stood there some dark object moved amongst the birch trees.

“A moose!” he exclaimed under his breath. Then again he wondered that the girl had shown no fear at their encounter with an antlered monarch back there on the trail.

“Life,” he told himself, as he watched the great sleek creature on the opposite shore step out to stand ankle deep in water, head high, antlers gleaming, “Life is strange! Here I have lived all my life in a city. Never would have known of this other world but for the work of these outlaws who carried me away. And now—”

He paused. Well, what of now? He could form no answer.

He turned about to look long and steadily at the sleeping girl.

Yes, life surely was strange. Nothing like this had come to him before. As he looked at the perfect repose of that face, something welled up within him.

“She trusts me,” he whispered. Until this moment he had not known that such perfect trust existed in the world. “She trusts me. She believes in me. Her father may be rich. That does not matter. I will neither desert nor betray her. We shall fight it out together, to the bitter end.”

To this serious-minded boy who until this moment had known little of life as it is lived save on the gridiron and in the steel mills, this was a solemn covenant never to be broken.

“But now,” he asked himself, “what is to be done now?”

This problem he thought through with care. “They’re likely to be looking for us,” he told himself. “Yes, their search will be rather a wild one, when they know.” He put a hand to his pocket. Then his face sobered. Had he made a mistake?

“If only we can make a clean get-away they are sunk!” he muttered, clenching his fists. “I am not sorry I took the chance.”

Once again his thoughts returned to the problem at hand. “A step in the snow will betray us,” he told himself. “Now the unmarked snow says we are not here. Better to wait for darkness.”

Having come to this conclusion, he sank deep in his chair and fell fast asleep.

He awoke some hours later to be greeted by the faint aroma of tea brewing and biscuits baking on the hearth.

“It’s dark now,” a voice whispered in his ear. “We must be moving soon. But first we must eat.”

Red ate that meal in silence. He was thinking hard. “The game for to-day is over,” he told himself. “We have won. No radio must tell me that. They didn’t need me to-day. Probably the Grand Old Man would not have put me in to-day at all; save me for Saturday’s game. He said I was getting slow on my feet. Well, probably I was. Tired, that’s what I was. Football takes it out of a fellow.

“Saving me.” He grinned in spite of himself. “I was saved all right; put away for the winter, like as not; pickled like a cucumber in a jar.”

Without really thinking what he was doing, he rose and began pacing the floor.

“Worried?” The girl smiled up at him.

“Yep, quite a little. About Saturday’s game.” He dropped into a chair. “You see, our coach, the Grand Old Man, we call him, is getting along in years. This may be his last season. Who knows? It’s almost sure to be his last winning team. Five of our best men graduate this year. Breaks up the line. And, well, you know, the coach is such a square shooter, he’s so human and kind, seems to love his boys so, that you just naturally want to do things for him.”

“Yes, I know,” said the girl quietly. “And I know the success of the team depends on you, Red Rover. Read all about it in the papers. You’re going to play on Saturday. And I’ll be cheering on the side lines.”

Red flashed her a grateful smile. “That’s right, keep on kidding me. It all helps.”

“I’m not kidding. We will get away.”

“But tell me more about this island. Well, no, perhaps we had better be on our way.”

Rising, they went to the window. A large silver moon was tipping every wave with a point of light.

“We can’t go to the lighthouse to-night.” There was a note of finality in the girl’s voice. “The waves out there are as high as a house.

“And we’d better not venture out just now, either. The moon’s too bright. In an hour or two there may be clouds. See, they are coming in from the north.”

“And where shall we go when the clouds are here?”

“Home.” The girl whispered the word softly. “To my island home.”