The Cool Cavern
The Cool Cavern
© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer
T
HE M
AD S
CIENTISTS' C
LUB always has a bunch
of projects hanging fire that we hope to do something about someday. For
instance, one of Henry Mulligan's favorite ideas has always been to
build a submarine that we could use to explore the bottom of Strawberry
Lake. Henry has a theory that the lake wasn't always as big as it is
now. He figures there might be a lot of interesting Indian relics on
the lake bottom, and maybe even a whole Indian village.
The trouble is it takes a lot of know-how and a lot of expensive material
to build a submarine, and somehow or other we never quite got started
on the project, though Henry and Jeff Crocker drew a lot of interesting
plans.
But one day Freddy Muldoon came up with some information that changed
the whole picture. Sometimes we call Freddy "Little Bright Eyes" --
which is his Indian name -- and it isn't just because they're the only
part of him that isn't fat. It's because Freddy frequently notices things
that escape everyone else's attention. It was he and Dinky, for instance,
who really solved the mystery of the money hidden in the old cannon out
at Memorial Point when they noticed the strange gold key dangling from
the neck of Elmer Pridgin.
The information Freddy came up with was a news item in the
Mammoth
Falls Gazette. Nobody else had noticed it, but Freddy reads
the whole paper, line by line, every night, because his father is a
linotype operator on the
Gazette, and Freddy likes to give him
the razz-ma-tazz if he finds an error in it.
The item Freddy had noticed was an announcement of a White Elephant
Auction being held over in Claiborne for the benefit of the Ladies
Auxiliary of the Claiborne General Hospital. Among the "white elephants"
donated for the auction was a midget two-man Japanese submarine which
the Claiborne American Legion Post had brought back from the Pacific
in 1945 as a trophy of war. It had been gathering lots of rust and very
few onlookers, ever since, in front of the Legion's meeting hall.
The auction was scheduled for one o'clock Saturday afternoon, so we had to
act fast if we wanted to get the thing. Nobody could even guess whether
it could still be made to operate, but we all figured we'd just have to
gamble on that. If we could get it cheap enough, and the hull was good,
Henry claimed we could eventually fit it out with all the gear it needed
to make it run again.
"Let's go where the auction is!" quipped Mortimer Dalrymple, trying to
keep a straight face.
"Get a load of the comic," said Freddy Muldoon disdainfully, with the
closest thing to a sneer his pudgy face could manage.
Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the packing crate he uses for a podium.
"How much money have we got in the treasury, Homer?"
"Three dollars and eighty-five cents!" Homer Snodgrass reported without
hesitation.
"Are you sure?" asked Jeff, incredulously.
"Three dollars and eighty-five cents," repeated Homer.
There was a lot of discussion about this, and Homer kept insisting that
we'd all forgotten about the seven dollars we'd spent on flowers for
Constable Billy Dahr when he was in the hospital for two weeks after
stepping in a bear trap out by Turkey Ridge. Finally Mortimer moved that
we call for a count of the cashbox, and Homer pulled himself wearily
out of his chair.
"I don't know whether I've got the strength for this treasurer's job any
more," he groaned. "Excuse me, Mr. President," he said, as he climbed
up onto the packing crate in front of Jeff. We all sat there in silence
while Homer reached up and flipped a switch on the light cord dangling
just above Jeff's head. Then he climbed down off the packing crate and
walked over to the corner of the barn, where we keep our safe. He spun
the dial quickly and opened the heavy door. Then he reached inside and
brought out a little remote control box for a TV set.
"Wait a minute!" Jeff cried. "Charlie and Dinky, get the window shades."
Dinky and I pulled the shades down on all four windows, and Mortimer
put the crossbar up to barricade the door. Then Homer pointed the
remote control box at the peak of the barn roof and pressed one of the
buttons. The rope ladder, coiled at the peak of the roof, popped open
and the weighted end of it plopped to the floor. Homer walked over
and climbed slowly up it until he had reached the huge crossbeam that
buttresses the roof just over the packing crate. He flung himself over
the beam and shinnied along it to the point where it joined with one
of the roof stringers. There he flipped another switch and our cashbox,
dangling on the end of a fine steel cable, was lowered gently to the top
of the packing crate in front of Jeff. Jeff got up and walked to the safe,
drew the cashbox key from it, and held it up for everyone to see. Then
he returned to his chair, turned the key in the lock of the cashbox,
and looked up at Homer.
"OK!" he said.
Homer pointed the remote control box in his direction and pressed the
other button. The lid of the cashbox flipped open. Jeff dumped the
contents out in front of him and methodically counted the money while
the rest of us sat there with our arms and legs crossed and repeated
the count after him.
"Three dollars and eighty-seven cents," he announced. "Homer was pretty
near right."
"I am right!" came Homer's voice from the rafters. "We never count those
two Indian-head pennies. That's our reserve for bad debts."
"OK, OK!" said Jeff. "The matter is closed." He put the money back in
the cashbox and signaled Homer to raise it again to the roof.
"Can I come down now, Mr. President?" asked Homer.
"Yes!" said Jeff.
Despite our shortage of funds we all agreed that we should make the trip
to Claiborne to attend the White Elephant Auction. If we couldn't manage
to buy the Japanese submarine, at least we could find out who did get it.
"I move that we take all our money with us and let me handle the bidding,"
said Freddy Muldoon, standing up on his chair to give himself a little
better position to argue from.
"That's a great idea!" Mortimer Dalrymple cut in, with his usual sarcasm.
"You're a born loser, so we won't have to argue about how much money we
have any more."
"OK, Mr. Bigmouth," Freddy shot back. "Maybe I'm not the world's best
horse trader, but at least I know a jackass when I see one."
Mortimer came up out of his chair like a whirling dervish, and Henry
and I grabbed him just in time to prevent mayhem. Freddy stood fast,
with his hands on his hips and that sneering look on his face again,
while Jeff rapped his gavel on the crate. When the commotion had died
down, little Dinky Poore stood up, at his most truculent, and said,
"Mr. President, I second the motion, whether anybody likes it or not!"
In the Mad Scientists' Club, when anybody seconds a motion it's almost
sure to pass. The reason is that Freddy and Dinky vote in favor of almost
everything, and Jeff Crocker, the President, only votes in case of a
tie. So anybody making a motion knows that he has three votes to start
with. And if somebody is dumb enough to second his motion, he knows that
he's got it made because four votes are already in the bag. But if Freddy
or Dinky makes the motion, it's a little different of course. You might
say that they face an uphill fight.
In this case, I felt a little sorry for Freddy, so I voted in favor of
letting him handle the bidding for the submarine. After Henry and Homer
and Mortimer had all voted "no," it was up to Jeff Crocker to decide
the issue. He flipped a coin and it came down "heads" and he figured
that was a good omen. So he voted in favor of Freddy risking our three
dollars and eighty-five cents.
By ten o'clock Saturday morning we were all piled into Zeke Boniface's
wheezing old junk truck, Richard the Deep Breather, jolting along on
the seventy-five-mile drive to Claiborne. Dinky and Freddy were crouched
down behind the seat of the open cab, playing mumblety-peg on the wooden
truck bed and exchanging conspiratorial whispers. The rest of us didn't
pay too much attention to them. We were too busy figuring out how we
would load the submarine on the truck and haul it back to Mammoth Falls,
if we were lucky enough to get it. We had brought along the overhead
traveling crane rig that Zeke uses to lift engines out of cars, but we
were only guessing at how big the sub was, based on Henry's research.
Mortimer Dalrymple had insisted on rigging a hammock between the two chain
slings of the traveling crane so he could be comfortable during the trip.
Mortimer likes his sleep, and he can catnap right through a club meeting
or a dogfight; take your pick. But he didn't get too much sleep on the
way to Claiborne. We had the crane stanchion lashed down securely to the
truck bed, so he wasn't in any danger, but he took some pretty violent
lurches (Henry called them "yawing moments") when Zeke threw Richard the
Deep Breather into fast-breaking curves on the Claiborne Road. When he
pulled into Claiborne, Mortimer was pretty seasick but he'd be the last
one to admit it, and the rest of us wouldn't embarrass him by noticing
it unless there was some real fun in it. At least he'd escaped the bumps
and jolts that the rest of us had to suffer.
The White Elephant Auction was being held in front of the American Legion
Hall, because the submarine was the biggest thing on the list and the
Legion didn't want to bother moving it off its concrete pedestal unless
they were sure it was sold. When Zeke wheeled Richard the Deep Breather
into the parking lot there was already a crowd of two or three hundred
people gathered in front of the place. The auctioneer was having lunch
at a hot-dog stand and just marking time until the appointed hour for
the auction to begin. We were a little dismayed to see the size of the
crowd, but the auctioneer was licking the mustard off his lips with
double relish, knowing he had a good thing going.
After we had something to eat we mingled in the crowd and left matters
in the hands of Freddy and Dinky, who had all our money. We saw them
whispering to each other on the edge of the crowd, and then Freddy got
down on all fours and crawled through people's legs up to the front. He
ended up to the right of the auctioneer's stand, and Dinky popped up
in front of the crowd on the left. A whole bunch of worthless junk was
sold at ridiculous prices before the auctioneer got around to mentioning
the submarine. It was already three o'clock and Freddy had pulled the
last hot dog out of his pocket and eaten it, and was looking around for
something to drink, when the auctioneer climbed down off his stand and
rapped his gavel on the hull of the sub.
"Ladies and gennemun!" he cried. "Here is the
piece de resistance
of the afternoon. What am I offered for this genuwine trophy of war
brought back from the far Pacific by the valiant sons of Post 1142 of the
American Legion? This is a real conversation piece. Ladies: If you have
a real handyman around the house, he can convert this historic tub into
the most unique outdoor barbecue you have ever seen. With this symbol of
America's triumph over the forces of evil in World War II installed in
your backyard you will be the envy of your neighborhood. Other women will
pull out their hair competing for invitations to your evening soirees."
"Blah, blah, blah, blah," said Mortimer. "How about getting down to
business?"
Finally the auctioneer pounded his gavel on the rusting hull again and
rasped, "What am I offered?"
"Five dollars!" came a squeak from the
right side of the semicircle of onlookers. All eyes turned to where Freddy
Muldoon stood, looking as nonchalant as his pudgy frame would allow,
with one foot crossed over the other and his arms folded in front of him.
"Has he gone nuts?" Mortimer gulped. "That's more money than we have."
"Maybe the truck ride affected his brain," Homer offered. "We'd better
go pull him out of there."
"Leave him alone!" Jeff snapped. "We all promised to let him handle this."
The auctioneer paused in mid-sentence. "What was that, my young friend?"
"Five dollars!" Freddy repeated. The auctioneer snickered
indulgently. "Did you hear that, ladies and gennemun?" He laughed. "We
have one of the last of the big spenders with us here today -- one
of America's great natural comedians -- and he offers a paltry five
dollars for this priceless relic of the late great war." He beat a
tattoo on the steel hull of the submarine with his gavel. "Ladies and
gennemun!" he cried in a loud voice, raising his hands high in the air
and blowing all his words out through his nose. "Ladies and gennemun,
I tell you what I'm gonna do. I ordinarily would treat such an offer
with the disdain that it deserves. But I can go along with a gag as well
as the next one. And just to indulge our young friend here - whom I am
sure must be the grandson of the late great Oliver Hardy - I will open
the bidding for five dollars!" Again the gavel descended upon the rusty
hull, which was still ringing from the last blow. "Do I hear ten dollars?"
"Four fifty!" came an even squeakier voice from the left of the crowd.
The auctioneer's jaw dropped. "What was that?" he asked incredulously.
"I bid four dollars and fifty cents!" said Dinky Poore in a slightly
louder voice. There was a laugh from the crowd.
The auctioneer snickered condescendingly again. "I must apologize,
ladies and gennemun," he said, fixing a baleful glare on Dinky Poore,
"but I didn't realize that we were also honored with the presence of the
grandson of Stan Laurel. It isn't every day that you find two jokers in
the same deck!" Sweeping his hat from his head, he made an elaborate
bow in the direction of Dinky. "Are you aware, young man, that I already
have a bid of five dollars?"
"That old tub ain't worth five dollars," said Dinky. "I bid four dollars
and fifty cents."
The auctioneer clapped his hat back onto his head. "Do I hear ten
dollars?" he shouted, banging his gavel on the hull again.
"I think he's right!" said Freddy Muldoon. "I bid four dollars, even."
"Wait a minute!" shouted the auctioneer, pointing his gavel at
Freddy. "You can't pull that on me. You already bid five dollars for
this item."
"I changed my mind," said Freddy.
"Do I hear seven-fifty?" shouted the auctioneer.
"Make it three and a half and I'll take it!" Dinky shouted back, cupping
his hands to his mouth to make himself heard above the laughter of
the crowd.
"Three dollars, even!" Freddy hollered.
"Two seventy-five!" countered Dinky.
"I'll go two fifty, and that's my final offer!" Freddy bellowed.
The auctioneer rapped his gavel on the submarine's hull so hard that
the head came flying off. "Sold, sold, sold!" he shouted, pointing the
broken handle at Freddy Muldoon. "Sold for two dollars and fifty cents
before you can open your big mouth again!"
"I'll take it!" said Freddy. He marched up and put two dollar bills down
on the auctioneer's table. Then he turned to Dinky Poore. "Can you lend
me fifty cents?"
"Sure!" said Dinky, pulling out a handful of small change, and the crowd
roared as he dumped the coins onto the table.
"Get this thing out of here before I change my mind!" fumed the
auctioneer.
"Right away, sir!" said Freddy and Dinky.
We needn't have worried about how we were going to load the sub on
Zeke's truck. There must have been fifty people from the crowd trying
to get a handhold on it to help us ease it onto the truck bed after we
got it suspended in the slings of the traveling crane. We threw a big
tarpaulin over it and drove right back to Mammoth Falls, where we parked
it in Zeke's junkyard. We had a lot of work to do on it before we could
take it to our hideout, because the first thing we had to do was get it
in condition to operate.
Our hideout was made to order for the job we had in mind. It's a real
cool cavern hidden from view behind the huge falls where Frenchman's Creek
plunges over a precipice about a mile northwest of Strawberry Lake. These
are the falls that gave the town its name, and they're a big tourist
attraction. But very few people know about the cavern. Almost nobody ever
visits it because you have to swim under an overhanging ledge of rock
to get to the entrance. Once you get through the narrow opening you're
in for a surprise. The cavern widens out into a high-ceilinged chamber
with a floor of fine white sand that must have been deposited there when
the creek bed was a good deal higher than it is now. The floor of the
chamber drops off suddenly after about sixty feet, and there's a deep
pool of clear green water dividing the chamber in two. It must be fed
by subterranean streams and connected with the lower level of the creek,
because the water in it is always the same level as the creek. The place
would be a real mecca for sightseers if the town would ever build a
covered walkway to the entrance, like they have at Niagara Fails, but
they've never had the money.
It's cool as a cucumber inside the cavern, and the temperature stays
pretty much the same all year round. We use the place as a summer
clubhouse sometimes, because it can get pretty hot in Jeff Crocker's barn,
and the cavern is a great place to sleep on muggy summer nights. We've
fitted it out with a lot of equipment, and we get electricity for free
from a generator driven by a waterwheel we installed under the falls. The
pool makes a great swimming hole, of course, and we have a first-class
diving board set up at one end of it. The only problem is we don't get
much of a suntan.
While we still had the sub in Zeke's junkyard we took all its running
gear apart and cleaned and lubricated all the moving parts. We went over
the hull with steel brushes and rust remover and laid on heavy coats
of white lead paint. We cut away the net cutter and torpedo guards on
the bow with a blowtorch and cut out the torpedo tubes. This gave us a
lot of room up front that would have been wasted space. Colonel March
at Westport Field helped us get the plexiglass nose section from an
old B-17 Flying Fortress in a surplus property sale, and with a little
cutting and bending we were able to fit it to the nose of the sub pretty
smoothly. When we got finished, she looked pretty sharp with her forty
feet of gleaming white hull and her clear plastic nose.
We weren't finished yet, but we decided to move her to the hideout
because too many people were snooping around the junkyard to look at
her, and we had to throw the tarpaulin over the hull so often that it
interfered with our work. Especially, we had to keep an eye peeled for
Freddy's cousin Harmon and his gang. They kept turning up at the yard,
one or two at a time, pretending to be looking for some piece of junk they
knew Zeke didn't have. And one day we saw the whole gang looking at us
through field glasses from the edge of a cliff on Turkey Hill. Actually,
they weren't any trouble to us, because they couldn't mess around the
sub while we were there during the day, and at night we just plain didn't
worry about them. Zeke Boniface has a big German shepherd dog named Kaiser
Bill who roams the junkyard all night long. He isn't mean, but he's about
one hundred and ten pounds of gleaming white teeth, and he has a way of
discouraging people who wander too close to the yard at night.
We named the sub
Lady Go Diver, which was a name Dinky had
suggested, and painted it on both sides of the bow section. On the
conning tower we painted the Mad Scientists' Club symbol, which is a
test tube crossed over a telescope superimposed on a skull. After we had
put new batteries in her and tested the electric motor, we figured we
were ready to move her into the cavern under Mammoth Fails to add the
finishing touches.
Don't ask me how we got her into the cave. That's our secret. But
after we got her in there we could take our time making the rest of the
modifications without a lot of people nosing around. Without the torpedo
tubes in her she could carry four or five of us easily. We figured on
fitting out the bow section as an observer compartment and installing
two big searchlights for underwater illumination, one in the bow and
one in the conning tower. We also were bargaining with the National
Guard Armory down on Vesey Street to get the bulletproof windows out
of an old World War II tank they had, so we could install them in the
conning tower to give us observation in all directions.
We were getting along pretty well with the work, when one morning we
discovered sandy footprints on the hull of the submarine leading to the
conning tower. There was sand down inside the controls compartment, too,
so we knew somebody had been there. We always cleaned up carefully after
finishing work, because Henry and Jeff believe in running a taut ship. We
checked her over very thoroughly, and as far as we could tell everything
was in working order and nothing was missing. Whoever had been there
had just been a curious snooper, apparently. All the same, it worried us.
"It must have been somebody in Harmon Muldoon's gang," said Dinky Poore.
"Nobody else would have feet that dirty."
"Very good thinking!" said Mortimer, with his usual sarcasm.
"I bet they're planning an act of sabotage," said Freddy darkly.
"I don't think they'd be that foolish," said Henry. "Whoever came in here
was a pretty good swimmer. We know that. And he also had to be pretty
curious. If it was somebody from Harmon's gang, I'd say they were just
green with envy and wanted to get a look inside the sub."
"Don't be too sure," warned Freddy. "I wouldn't trust that Harmon with
my pet snake."
"Let's stop worrying about
who it is, and figure out what we're
gonna do about it," said Jeff Crocker.
"Maybe Zeke would lend us Kaiser Bill and let him sleep in here every
night," Homer suggested.
"That's a good idea," Jeff agreed, "but he needs him down at the
junkyard."
"I move that Freddy and Dinky sleep here every night until we're finished
with the work," said Mortimer.
"I move that Mortimer Dalrymple take the sub down to the bottom of the
lake every night and stay there until morning," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Good thinking!" said Dinky Poore.
"I appreciate the humor, but let's use our heads," said Henry. "There's
only one entrance to this place, and it's easy enough to bug it so we
know whether anybody wanders in here."
"Now you're talking!" said Jeff. "What do you think we should do, Henry?"
"All we have to do is rig an electric eye across the mouth of the cave
and tie it in to our carrier current intercom system. We can run a line
from here down to one of the power lines on the highway, and I'll hook
a monitor into my receiver at home. If I get an alarm during the night
I'll push the panic button."
What Henry suggested doing was very simple, since we already had our
own private intercom net operating through the city power lines. This
can be done for free and it's legal, as long as you don't exceed the
maximum power limit with your transmitter. We knocked off work on the
sub and spent the rest of the day scurrying around to get the necessary
equipment together to rig up the alarm system.
It was that very night that the panic buzzer sounded in my room just
after I had gotten to sleep. It was Henry on the line, and he told us
somebody had already tripped the alarm in the cavern. We hadn't bugged
the place any too soon. Henry switched the microphones we'd hidden in the
cavern into the net, and we could hear voices of some of Harmon Muldoon's
gang. Stony Martin, who's a loudmouth, was shouting out phony orders
with a thick German accent, as though he was Count Hugo von Luckner
himself. It made me sick just to hear him.
"Let's go, Henry!" said Jeff Crocker. "Everybody out to the cavern!"
I jumped into my pants, threw a shirt on, and shinnied down the drainpipe
outside my window. It was then I remembered that my dad had locked
my bicycle in the garage. He told me I couldn't use it for two days,
because I had forgotten to mow the lawn. I stood there in the darkness by
the side of the house, not knowing what to do except swear at myself. I
called the old man a bunch of bad names too, and kicked the side of the
house a couple of times. After I'd cooled off, I thought about shinnying
back up the drainpipe and calling one of the other kids on the intercom,
but I knew they'd all be gone. I even thought about sneaking into my
dad's bedroom and swiping the key to the garage. But I figured I might
wake somebody up, and then I would be in the soup. So I kicked the house
a couple of more times and took off down the driveway heading for Dinky
Poore's house.
Dinky lives closest to me and I might just be able to catch him. He also
is the smallest guy in the club, and I wouldn't mind pumping his bike all
the way out to the falls with him riding the handlebars. I darted into
the alley behind his house and clambered up onto the fence. It was pitch
dark in his backyard and I couldn't see if his bike was still there or
not. I gave the tomcat call and waited a few seconds. There wasn't any
answer, so I gave it again a little louder and longer. This time there
was an answer. I was peering into the darkest corner of the yard, when
all of a sudden something came flying out of an upstairs window of the
house and crashed against the board fence just below my hands. I didn't
wait around to find out what it was. I just took off down the alley,
heading for Mammoth Falls on foot.
It must have taken me half an hour to get to the riverbank below the
falls. All the other kids were sitting around under the big oak tree,
where we usually hide our bikes in the bushes, holding a council of war.
"Where on earth have you been?" Henry asked me. "We've been waiting half
the night."
"Maybe his mother wouldn't let him out!" Mortimer gibed at me.
"Shut up!" I shot back, giving Mortimer a knuckle job on his right bicep.
Then I lied. "I had a flat tire on my bike. I ran all the way here."
"Let's get going!" urged Jeff. "Indian file down the bank, then one at
a time under the falls. Nobody goes into the cave until we've all made
it to the ledge. Then we'll rush 'em together."
We stripped down to our shorts and Jeff handed out stink bombs, three to
a man. "If you get a shot at one of them, try to hit him in the middle
of the back. It's hardest to wash off there."
We started down the steep path to the river bed with Mortimer leading
the way. I took my usual position at the rear of the file, right behind
Dinky and Freddy. There wasn't any moon out, and it was so dark we had
to feel our way along the path, hugging close to the rocky bank. My heart
was thumping and I could hear Dinky and Freddy breathing heavily. Suddenly
there was a loud rumbling noise, followed by an ear-splitting crash like
a clap of thunder. The ground shook violently and the whole riverbank
seemed to heave up about a foot. We grabbed for rocks and bushes and
clung to the bank to keep from falling into the water.
"Holy mackerel!" shouted Mortimer. "Half the falls has collapsed!"
"Let's get out of here before something else cuts loose," Jeff
hollered. "Get back up the path, Charlie!"
I turned and groped my way back up the path to the top of the bank,
with Freddy and Dinky panting behind me. When the rest of them got to
the top, we made our way along the bank to a point where we could get
a better look at the falls. By the light of our flashlights we could
see a huge, crescent-shaped space at the lip of the falls that hadn't
been there before. A regular torrent of water was spilling over it and
crashing onto a pile of rocks at the bottom, right where the mouth of
the cavern had been.
"The cavern's blocked off!" cried Mortimer. "If Harmon's gang is still
in there, how are they gonna get out?"
"Serves 'em right for nosing around," said Freddy Muldoon, jumping up
and down.
"Oh, you're just full of the milk of human kindness," Mortimer sneered.
"We gotta get down there and help 'em."
"Wait a minute!" Jeff cautioned. "Nobody's going down there just yet. We
can't tell what might happen. Some more of the ledge might break loose
any minute. We're lucky we weren't all in there when it fell."
"We would have been if Charlie hadn't been late getting here," said
Dinky Poore.
"Hurray for good old Charlie!" said Freddy Muldoon.
All of a sudden I wasn't mad at my old man anymore for locking my bike
in the garage.
"We can't possibly move those rocks," Henry put in. "They're too big. The
first thing we better do is call the police."
"How do we know they're still in there?" said Homer. "We'd look pretty
foolish bringing the police out on a wild goose chase this time of night."
"That's easy enough to find out," said Henry. "We'll tap into the intercom
line and see if we can talk to them."
"If they did anything to our submarine I hope they all drown," said
Freddy Muldoon.
"What are we gonna do with these stink bombs?" asked Dinky Poore.
"Eat them!" said Mortimer. "You might not get any breakfast! Now, shut
up and let the brains of this outfit figure out what we're gonna do."
Henry's foresight had provided a plug-in jack in the intercom line at
the top of the riverbank. The only question was whether the line had been
broken by the rockfall. Henry and Mortimer probed through the bushes and
rocks at the edge of the falls and found the jack. Then they plugged in
Henry's handset.
"Hello! Hello!" Henry called into the speaker. "This is Henry
Mulligan. This is Henry Mulligan. If you can hear me, sing out!"
We all waited, holding our breath and straining to listen for a sound
from the receiver. There was none.
"If they're still in there you probably scared them right out of their
skins," said Homer. "Try it again."
Henry pressed his lips close to the handset. "This is Henry Mulligan
calling Harmon Muldoon. Calling Harmon Muldoon. If you can hear me,
get on the intercom. There's a speaker strapped under the diving board
by the pool and another one in the ceiling near the cave entrance. If
you're still in there, let us know, so we can get help."
We waited for what seemed a full minute. Then we heard a crackling noise.
"Hello! Hello! Is that you, Harmon?" Henry repeated several times.
"Hello, this is Harmon Muldoon," came a voice so faint that only Henry
could really hear it. "What do you want, Mulligan?"
"At least the line's still open!" Henry said excitedly. Then he cupped
his hand over the mouthpiece. "He wants to know what we want."
"How do you like that fat-lipped cousin of mine!" snorted Freddy Muldoon.
"There he is, buried a hundred feet underground, and he wants to know
what we want."
"Tell him we want to know if they're all right, and how many of them
are in there," said Jeff.
"Harmon! Harmon! Are you all right?" Henry shouted into the mouthpiece.
"Yeah, we're all right," came the faint answer. "What kind of stunt did
you guys pull on us this time?"
"Honest, Harmon, we didn't do anything," Henry answered. "Part of the
ledge at the top of the falls collapsed. There's a big pile of rocks
blocking the mouth of the cave."
"Are you telling me?" sneered Harmon. "Have you got any other old news,
Mulligan?"
"Oh, boy! Would I like to punch him right in the nose!" said Freddy.
"By the way, Mulligan," came Harmon's voice again, "how did you know we
were in here?"
"There's an electronic eye at the mouth of the cave," Henry answered. "You
guys tripped it when you went in, and it set off an alarm on our
intercom."
"Very clever!" said Harmon. "I guess we never will outsmart you guys. Now,
how do we get out?"
"How many of you are in there?" asked Henry.
"There are six of us," said Harmon. "Is that enough to qualify?"
"We'll get hold of the police right away," said Henry.
"I don't know how they're going to get through to you, but we'll figure
out some way. Sure you're all right?"
"Yeah! We're all right. It's fine in here. Just get us out in time
for breakfast."
"He doesn't sound very scared for a guy trapped in a cave," said Homer.
"He's a cool character, all right," said Mortimer Dalrymple. "Something
sounds a little fishy to me."
"It's Harmon's deep voice," said Freddy. "He's a big-mouthed bass."
Mortimer grabbed him by the collar and rubbed his knuckles in his hair
good and hard.
Since we hadn't bothered leaving anybody at the clubhouse in Jeff
Crocker's barn, we had no way of reaching the police except to ride
into town and call them from the nearest phone we could get to. Jeff and
Mortimer volunteered to make the trip, and the rest of us busied ourselves
making as complete a reconnaissance as we could of the situation around
the mouth of the cave. It would take Jeff and Mortimer at least fifteen
minutes to get into town, and we knew it would be at least half an hour
after that before Chief Putney could rouse any of his men and get them
out to the falls. From the looks of things, they wouldn't be able to do
anything without heavy equipment, so it would probably be hours before
they mustered enough help to begin a rescue operation.
Literally tons and tons of rock had crashed down in front of the cave
mouth, as far as we could tell from shining our flashlights onto the
pile. The lip of the falls had receded to the point that one of the main
plumes at the right of the torrent was spilling huge volumes of water
directly down at the mouth of the cavern. It was possible that water
was flowing into the cave.
Henry got on the intercom and roused Harmon again. "Harmon!" he
shouted. "Is water coming into the cave? Are you all right?"
"We're fine," Harmon answered. "It's dry as a bone in here. Now will you
stop bothering us? We're trying to get some sleep. Just concentrate on
getting us out of here."
"OK!" said Henry. "But keep somebody near the intercom so we can keep
in touch with you."
"Roger!" said Harmon.
"Those guys can
sleep?" said Homer in disbelief.
"What else can they do?" Henry shrugged. "They have to wait for help,
and they might as well save their strength. They might need it. You
gotta hand it to them that they didn't panic."
Soon we heard the wailing of a siren and a screech of brakes as a police
car pulled up nearby on the highway. Two officers came panting along
the path, with Jeff and Mortimer leading them.
"How do you know there's anyone in there?" asked one of the officers,
shining his flashlight into the abyss at the foot of the falls.
"We've talked to them," said Henry, and he explained about the intercom
system. "You can talk to them if you want to," he offered.
"Never mind!" said the officer. "Looks like we've really got a job on our
hands here." He whistled in surprise as he played his flashlight over
the rockfall. "Holy mackerel! There must be tons of the stuff. It'll
take real heavy construction equipment to move that stuff, and I don't
know how anybody could get it down there to do the job. Are those kids
safe in there?"
"They're all right, so far," said Henry.
The officer played his flashlight along the crest of the falls.
"Some more of that ledge could break loose any minute," he said. "If it
does, the roof of that cave might collapse."
"That's possible," Henry agreed.
"We don't have any time to waste," said the officer, turning to the
other policeman. "Al, get back to the car and tell Chief Putney he'd
better notify the Mayor. We've got a real emergency on our hands. Tell
him we recommend putting out a general alarm and a request for rescue
equipment. Better get the Civil Defense people out too."
The other policeman turned to run up the path.
"Wait a minute, Al. After you call in, see if you can bust down a section
of that fence and pull the car in here somehow. We ought to have the
radio right here."
"We'll bust down the fence!" cried Jeff. And he and Mortimer dashed up
the path after the policeman.
It's amazing how fast things can happen sometimes. Within an hour the
riverbank was swarming with people and vehicles. And more kept coming all
the time, as calls went out for special equipment that somebody thought
might help solve the problem of how to burrow through tons of rock with
tons of water spilling on it, on the other side of a dangerous whirlpool
more than a hundred feet offshore. There was a lot of confusion and
shouting and not much being accomplished, but it was exciting to watch.
The county sheriff's mobile rescue unit pulled in and flooded the area
with high-powered searchlights. Seth Emory, the Civil Defense director,
was supposed to be in charge of the operation, but Mayor Scragg did
more talking than he did. He kept shouting orders to Chief Putney
and the fire chief, Hiram Pixley, telling them to do things that they
were already doing, and he agreed with everybody's ideas about how to
get into the cave, no matter how crazy they were. Somebody suggested
bringing a long-boomed crane in with a clamshell bucket to lift some of
the rocks away from the cave mouth. But a construction foreman who had
been called out said the biggest crane they could get wouldn't reach
out to the rockfall from the riverbank, and it would take at least two
days to build a pier out into the water for the crane to operate from.
Somebody else suggested running a pontoon bridge out to the rockpile and
trying to force a hole through the rocks so a long section of corrugated
iron storm drain could be run into the cave as an escape tunnel. But
this was considered too dangerous, since more of the overhanging ledge
might come plunging down at any minute. There were other people in favor
of stringing a breeches buoy across the front of the falls so a couple
of men could try to pull some of the rocks away with grappling hooks,
but this was considered impractical. Some suggested taking a chance by
trying to dynamite the rockpile, but almost everybody was against this.
A reporter and a photographer from the
Mammoth Falls Gazette
were circulating among the crowd, interviewing officials and getting
opinions from onlookers. The reporter wanted to talk to the boys in the
cave and Mayor Scragg said, "Sure! All you have to do is figure out how
to get in there."
"But I thought there was some kind of a communication line into the cave,"
said the reporter. "One of the policemen told me -"
"I don't know about that," said the Mayor. "You'll have to ask those
young magicians over there. They're the ones that got us into this mess."
"I don't think they want to be bothered. They're all asleep," said Henry,
when the reporter asked him. "Besides, I heard there's a camera crew
coming from the TV station in White Fork. Why don't we wait until they
get here?"
The reporter howled in anguish. "I was here first!" he complained. "I
have to get my copy in for a special edition. If you make me miss it,
and the TV stations get the story first, my boss will fire me!"
"Oh!" said Henry.
"Gosh, mister, we wouldn't want you to get fired over a little thing
like six kids trapped in a cave," said Freddy Muldoon.
"I didn't mean it that way," said the reporter. "But this is a big
story, and it's happening right in our backyard. Did you see what the
TV networks did with the little girl that was trapped in a well out
in Omaha last month? They kept the whole nation glued to their TV sets
for three days. Can you imagine what they'll do when they have six kids
trapped in a cave?"
"Yeah! I can imagine!" said Mortimer.
"Well? Do I get to talk to the kids?"
Henry shrugged.
"Say, what is this?" said the reporter truculently. "Are you in charge
here?"
"No, I'm not in charge," said Henry, "but it's my intercom set."
"Oh! I get it!" The reporter reached for his wallet. "How would five
bucks do?"
"You just said the magic word," said Freddy Muldoon.
"I don't want your money, mister," said Henry, pushing his hand in
Freddy's face. "Wait until the TV crew gets here and we'll let everybody
talk to them at the same time."
The reporter threw his hands in the air and turned away. Then a thought
struck him, and he pulled the photographer to one side. In a voice loud
enough for everyone to hear he said, "What do you bet there aren't any
kids down in that cave at all? You know, it's just possible these kids
framed the whole thing."
"Hey, that's right!" said the photographer.
"We don't
know there's anybody down there. Say! That'd make a
pretty good story too."
Jeff stepped over to Henry. "I think maybe we'd better let 'em talk
to Harmon."
"OK!" said Henry. "I guess we'd better."
He managed to get Harmon to answer on the intercom after some trouble,
and the reporter talked with him. Harmon said he was fine and gave him the
names of the other five members of his gang that were with him. He woke
up Stony Martin and had him talk to the reporter too. The photographer
held the microphone of a tape recorder to the speaker while they were
talking and taped the whole conversation.
"Are you worried about getting out?" asked the reporter.
"Naw! We're not worried," said Harmon.
"I'm sure they'll have you out in fine shape very soon," said the
reporter cheerfully.
"Tell 'em to take their time," said Harmon, yawning. "As long as we get
home in time for breakfast, it's OK."
"Boy! Have we got a story!" crowed the reporter, as he stuffed his notes
into his pocket. "'Tell 'em to take their time,' the kid says. Can you
imagine it? Boy! The wires'll eat this up!"
"Hey! I bet we could peddle this tape to all the networks!" said the
photographer as they hustled up the path to the highway.
"Aren't you going to stick around to see if they get out?" Mortimer
shouted after them.
"Sorry!" the reporter shouted back. "We got a deadline to meet."
And they were gone.
"What a creep!" said Dinky Poore.
By the time the TV crew arrived from White Fork, things had reached an
impasse. Some men had been sent out in small boats to reconnoiter the
ledge below the falls to see if it were possible to anchor cables there so
fire ladders could be run out from the shore. But they came back reporting
no success. Mayor Scragg had called a conference under the big oak tree
to get opinions on what would be the best way to proceed. It appeared
that the most feasible plan would be to build some kind of footing in
the creek bed for the big construction crane to work from. The Mayor
was asking for estimates on how long it would take to truck in enough
rock and heavy fill to do this and whether it was possible to get the
big crane down the steep bank with a block-and-tackle rig. Seth Emory
had proposed that the city requisition every truck in the area and set
up a high-speed shuttle with police escorts from the gravel pits out
on White Fork Road. The estimates ran from half a day to a full day,
before real rescue operations could start.
Meanwhile, the director of the TV crew had been pacing up and down at
the edge of the group, running his fingers through his hair and looking
at his watch every thirty seconds. He stepped over to Mayor Scragg and
tapped him on the shoulder.
"Does that mean there won't be anything happening until noontime... or
maybe even later?"
"If you mean when will we be getting the boys out, I guess that's it,"
said the Mayor.
"We might as well pack up and go back and get some sleep, boys," said
the director to the other members of his crew.
"Suit yourself," said Mayor Scragg. "I expect we'll be here a long time."
"As long as we're here, why don't we get some local color?" one of the
cameramen suggested.
"Yeah! Maybe we could," said the director, rubbing his chin. "Say! That
gives me an idea." He turned back to the Mayor. "Is there any possible
way to lower a camera into that cave?" he asked.
Mayor Scragg looked at him goggle-eyed. "If I could figure that out,
I could get those kids out," he said testily. "Now go away and stop
bothering me!"
The director stepped back, a little abashed, and felt somebody plucking
at his sleeve. It was Jeff Crocker.
"Excuse me, mister," he said. "There is a way to get a camera into
the cave. But it would take a lot of cable, and it would have to he
waterproof."
The director looked at Jeff, not knowing whether to believe him or
not. "How much cable?" he asked.
Jeff shrugged. "Maybe three or four hundred feet. I don't know for sure."
"I hope you're not kidding me," said the director. "We don't have that
much cable, but we could send and get it. Are you sure you could get it
in there?"
"Yeah, I'm sure we could get it in there," said Jeff. "There is another
way into the cavern, but you have to..." Then Jeff started rubbing
his chin. "Wait a minute!" he said excitedly, and came running
over to where the rest of us were. "Henry!" he said, grabbing him by
the shoulder. "I'll bet we could get those kids out the same way we took
the sub in, if we had enough diving gear!"
"Not so loud!" Mortimer cautioned, looking back to where the TV director
was standing.
"Yeah!" said Freddy. "You'll give away our whole secret, blabbermouth!"
"Shut up, Freddy!" said Jeff, pushing him in the face. "The first thing
we have to think about is getting Harmon and his gang out of there."
"We could go back and get our scuba gear," Mortimer suggested, "and Jeff
and I could swim in there and bring 'em out one at a time."
"You could bring 'em out faster if you used the submarine," said Dinky.
"That's a good idea," Henry observed. "At least it's worth a try. We'd
better talk it over with Mayor Scragg."
"You guys are gonna blow the whole thing!" screamed Freddy. "The whole
town's gonna find out about our secret passage, and Harmon too!"
"What's all the argument about?" asked the TV director, walking over to
where we stood. "Can you get a camera down there or not?"
"Forget your camera, mister," said Jeff, as we moved off to see the
Mayor under the oak tree. "We've got something important to think about."
"What was that you said about a secret passage?" the director asked,
grabbing Freddy by the arm.
"What secret passage?"
"A secret passage into that cave, you ninny!"
"Oh,
that secret passage! That's none of your business," said
Freddy, pulling his arm loose and running after us.
"Yes, Mulligan. What is it now?" said Mayor Scragg wearily, when Henry
tapped him on the shoulder.
"We know of a way to get those kids out of there," Henry said simply,
and he went on to explain how we had gotten the submarine into the cavern
through a subterranean channel that ran under the cliff beside the falls
and connected with the pool in the cavern.
"It's only about two hundred feet long," Jeff explained. "We discovered
it one day when we were skin diving. The entrance is about ten feet
underwater, and it's right where you want to dump all that rock to make a
pier for the shovel. If you dump a lot of rock in there you'll probably
block it up."
Mayor Scragg looked at them quizzically. "Every time I listen to you
kids I get into more trouble!" he moaned, holding his hand to his
forehead. "Isn't it enough that you've got half the town out here in
the middle of the night?"
"Don't listen to a word they say, Mr. Mayor," said Freddy tersely,
as he elbowed his way into the group. "It's all a big fat lie!"
"I told you to keep out of this!" said Jeff, pushing him in the face
again. Freddy bounced right back and kicked Jeff in the shins. Mortimer
grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off to the side.
"Cool it, Freddy!" he said, dumping him like a sack of potatoes. "Jeff
knows what he's doing."
"He's a big blabbermouth!" Freddy blubbered. "He's giving away all
our secrets."
"Secrets, huh?" said Mayor Scragg. "You mean you really do have a
submarine down in that cave?"
"Yes, we do!" said Jeff. "You can ask Zeke Boniface. We brought it here
in his truck."
"And you got it in there through an underground channel?"
"We didn't carry it in!" said Jeff.
The Mayor thought this over for a while. Then he turned to talk with
Seth Emory. Chief Putney and Chief Pixley joined them, and the four held
a whispered consultation near the head of the path leading down to the
water's edge. Finally the Mayor beckoned to Henry and Jeff.
"We've got to do something and do it soon," he said. "You think you
can swim in there and bring those boys out through that channel. Is
that right?"
"Right!" said Jeff. "If they know how to use scuba gear, we'll get them
to swim out. If they can't we'll try the submarine."
"It's worth a try," said the Mayor, "but I'm going to send two men from
the sheriff's rescue unit with you. We don't want any accidents."
"That's a good idea," said Jeff. "We can show them the way. But we'll have
to go back to town and get our tanks. We keep all that stuff in my barn."
"No need for that," said Chief Pixley. "The rescue unit has plenty of
diving gear and everything else you'll need."
"Good deal," said Jeff. "That'll save time." And he and Mortimer started
stripping down to their shorts. We didn't know it at the time, but if
Jeff and Mortimer had gone to the clubhouse for their scuba outfits it
would have saved us a lot of trouble.
Now that some definite action was being taken, the atmosphere along the
creek bank changed abruptly. You could feel the excitement generated in
the rescue workers and onlookers as word spread among them that two kids
had volunteered to swim into the blocked cavern through an underground
waterway that nobody knew existed. Everybody crowded around the mobile
rescue unit to watch the preparations.
The two sheriff's deputies fitted tanks and face masks on Jeff and
Mortimer, and then the four of them linked themselves together with a
piece of nylon line. It was decided that Jeff would lead the way and
Mortimer would bring up the rear and feed out communication wire from
a reel, so they would have direct communication with the mobile rescue
unit as well as a guideline for finding their way back out through
the channel. The two deputies each carried an extra set of scuba gear,
and all four were equipped with a flashlight and a knife.
The TV director was in a better humor now, and kept getting in the
way and delaying things as he tried to get as much of the action as he
could on film. He started giving directions as to just how each man was
to go down the path and get into the water, until Chief Putney pulled
him gently aside and assigned two officers to keep him company for the
duration of the operation.
Jeff waded into the water first. "Keep a tight line," he told the
deputy behind him. "There are a lot of sharp rocks jutting out from the
walls. We'll stay right on the bottom as much as possible. There's good
white sand on the floor of the passage, and it's easier to see." Then
he fitted his mask to his face, blew out a lungful of air, and opened
the valve of his air tank. One by one the others followed him as he let
himself out into deeper water and dove for the bottom. Soon there was
nothing to be seen but a trail of air bubbles on the surface of the
creek and the communication wire flapping up and down as it unreeled
itself from the spool Mortimer was carrying.
For the watchers on the shore there was nothing to do but wait, now, while
the four divers probed the darkness of the underground channel. Everybody
except the men in the mobile rescue van had crowded along the bank,
pushing and shoving each other in an effort to get a better vantage
point from which to watch the dark patch under the cliff where the
trail of bubbles had disappeared. Two people slipped and tumbled down
the bank into the waters of the creek. Except for shining flashlights
in their eyes, nobody paid much attention to them. The TV director was
moaning about not being able to send a TV camera into the cavern with
the divers. But Chief Pixley solved his problem by offering him a set
of diving apparatus so he could take the camera in himself. The director
decided that it wasn't that important.
Henry and the rest of us stayed glued to the side of the mobile rescue
van, alongside Mayor Scragg. We knew that the first word from the four
divers had to come in there through the communication line they had taken
with them. It seemed like hours, but it was really only ten minutes later
that the deputy monitoring the phone line waved frantically for silence.
|
"Hello! Hello!" he said. "Is that you, Foster?" He listened for a moment.
"Roger! We'll stand by. We're all ready up here."
"They've gotten through to the cave, and they're looking for the boys
now," he told the Mayor.
"Just ask them if there's a submarine in there," said Mayor Scragg,
looking suspiciously at Henry.
The deputy whistled down the phone line again. "Hello, Foster! The Mayor
wants to know if there's a submarine in there."
"Yeah, there's a submarine here all right," came the answer, "but there's
no sign of any kids. We've looked all over the place. There's just nobody
in here."
"Say that again."
"I say there's no sign of any kids in here. I think there's something
fishy about this whole thing."
"Did you hear that, Mr. Mayor?" said the deputy. "Foster says there's
nobody in that cave!"
"Nobody in there!" exclaimed the Mayor.
"Nobody in there!" echoed Henry.
The Mayor turned and looked at Henry. "Mulligan," he said.
"But there's got to be somebody in there!" Henry protested. "We talked
to them on the intercom."
"Mulligan!" said the Mayor.
Henry turned and ran. He headed for the intercom jack at the base of
the cliff, with the rest of us hightailing it after him. The Mayor and
Chief Putney came puffing up the path behind us.
"Jeff! Jeff!" Henry hollered into the handset. "Can you hear me in there?"
"We hear you loud and clear!" came Jeff's voice in reply.
"What about Harmon and his gang? Where are they?"
"I don't know where they are, but they're sure not in here! We've searched
the whole place."
"Scout's honor, Jeff?"
"Scout's honor, Henry!"
"I just don't understand it," said Henry helplessly. "We were talking
to them not more'n half an hour ago."
Henry was still standing there, scratching his head and looking
crestfallen when the Mayor and Chief Putney broke through the bushes.
"Well, Mulligan, what's this all about?" puffed the Mayor, all out
of breath.
"They're just not in there, Mr. Mayor," said Henry dejectedly. "I don't
understand it. They were there just half an hour ago."
"Why don't you tell 'em the truth, Mulligan?" came Harmon Muldoon's
voice from somewhere in the darkness above us. "You knew we weren't in
that cave." A chorus of raucous laughter almost drowned out the last
words. Henry's jaw dropped open as he stared upward through the darkness
toward the lip of the cliff that towered above us.
"Who's that up there?" Chief Putney demanded, as he flashed his powerful
light along the edge of the cliff.
"Pretty good show, Mulligan!" came the strident voice of Stony
Martin. "Whatta ya do for an encore?" And another wave of raucous
laughter followed.
It was obvious that Harmon's whole gang was sitting up on the cliff
above our heads, watching the proceedings with great relish. The glare
from the floodlights on the rescue van was too bright for us to see into
the darkness, but finally Chief Putney's flashlight picked out the white
T-shirt of Stony Martin, perched in a tree. Stony scrambled back into
the shadow with a burst of mocking laughter. A lot of raspberries and
other uncouth sounds split the darkness.
"How did you get up there?" Henry shrilled, rather weakly.
"We walked up!" Harmon shouted back.
"I mean, how did you get out of the cavern?"
"That was simple! We weren't in the cavern."
"Aw, c'mon, Harmon. Somebody was in there."
"Yeah, we sent one man in to trip your alarm so we could raid your
clubhouse. We've been up in Crocker's barn all night."
"You mean you were in our clubhouse all the time when we were talking
on the intercom?"
"Yeah! After we tripped your alarm system all kinds of things began
to happen. It was rich!"
Henry just stood there, speechless. He didn't even hear Mayor Scragg
and Chief Putney arguing about whether they could arrest anybody, as
they beat their way back through the bushes to the rescue van.
"By the way, Henry," Stony Martin shouted. "How do you get that cashbox
of yours down off that rafter? We spent most of the night trying to
figure it out."
Henry didn't answer. He just threw the intercom set he was holding against
the side of the cliff and then kicked it into the bushes. It broke into
a dozen pieces. I had never seen Henry lose his temper before.
Last updated 8 Apr 98 by max
The Cool Cavern
The Cool Cavern
© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer
T
HE M
AD S
CIENTISTS' C
LUB always has a bunch
of projects hanging fire that we hope to do something about someday. For
instance, one of Henry Mulligan's favorite ideas has always been to
build a submarine that we could use to explore the bottom of Strawberry
Lake. Henry has a theory that the lake wasn't always as big as it is
now. He figures there might be a lot of interesting Indian relics on
the lake bottom, and maybe even a whole Indian village.
The trouble is it takes a lot of know-how and a lot of expensive material
to build a submarine, and somehow or other we never quite got started
on the project, though Henry and Jeff Crocker drew a lot of interesting
plans.
But one day Freddy Muldoon came up with some information that changed
the whole picture. Sometimes we call Freddy "Little Bright Eyes" --
which is his Indian name -- and it isn't just because they're the only
part of him that isn't fat. It's because Freddy frequently notices things
that escape everyone else's attention. It was he and Dinky, for instance,
who really solved the mystery of the money hidden in the old cannon out
at Memorial Point when they noticed the strange gold key dangling from
the neck of Elmer Pridgin.
The information Freddy came up with was a news item in the
Mammoth
Falls Gazette. Nobody else had noticed it, but Freddy reads
the whole paper, line by line, every night, because his father is a
linotype operator on the
Gazette, and Freddy likes to give him
the razz-ma-tazz if he finds an error in it.
The item Freddy had noticed was an announcement of a White Elephant
Auction being held over in Claiborne for the benefit of the Ladies
Auxiliary of the Claiborne General Hospital. Among the "white elephants"
donated for the auction was a midget two-man Japanese submarine which
the Claiborne American Legion Post had brought back from the Pacific
in 1945 as a trophy of war. It had been gathering lots of rust and very
few onlookers, ever since, in front of the Legion's meeting hall.
The auction was scheduled for one o'clock Saturday afternoon, so we had to
act fast if we wanted to get the thing. Nobody could even guess whether
it could still be made to operate, but we all figured we'd just have to
gamble on that. If we could get it cheap enough, and the hull was good,
Henry claimed we could eventually fit it out with all the gear it needed
to make it run again.
"Let's go where the auction is!" quipped Mortimer Dalrymple, trying to
keep a straight face.
"Get a load of the comic," said Freddy Muldoon disdainfully, with the
closest thing to a sneer his pudgy face could manage.
Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the packing crate he uses for a podium.
"How much money have we got in the treasury, Homer?"
"Three dollars and eighty-five cents!" Homer Snodgrass reported without
hesitation.
"Are you sure?" asked Jeff, incredulously.
"Three dollars and eighty-five cents," repeated Homer.
There was a lot of discussion about this, and Homer kept insisting that
we'd all forgotten about the seven dollars we'd spent on flowers for
Constable Billy Dahr when he was in the hospital for two weeks after
stepping in a bear trap out by Turkey Ridge. Finally Mortimer moved that
we call for a count of the cashbox, and Homer pulled himself wearily
out of his chair.
"I don't know whether I've got the strength for this treasurer's job any
more," he groaned. "Excuse me, Mr. President," he said, as he climbed
up onto the packing crate in front of Jeff. We all sat there in silence
while Homer reached up and flipped a switch on the light cord dangling
just above Jeff's head. Then he climbed down off the packing crate and
walked over to the corner of the barn, where we keep our safe. He spun
the dial quickly and opened the heavy door. Then he reached inside and
brought out a little remote control box for a TV set.
"Wait a minute!" Jeff cried. "Charlie and Dinky, get the window shades."
Dinky and I pulled the shades down on all four windows, and Mortimer
put the crossbar up to barricade the door. Then Homer pointed the
remote control box at the peak of the barn roof and pressed one of the
buttons. The rope ladder, coiled at the peak of the roof, popped open
and the weighted end of it plopped to the floor. Homer walked over
and climbed slowly up it until he had reached the huge crossbeam that
buttresses the roof just over the packing crate. He flung himself over
the beam and shinnied along it to the point where it joined with one
of the roof stringers. There he flipped another switch and our cashbox,
dangling on the end of a fine steel cable, was lowered gently to the top
of the packing crate in front of Jeff. Jeff got up and walked to the safe,
drew the cashbox key from it, and held it up for everyone to see. Then
he returned to his chair, turned the key in the lock of the cashbox,
and looked up at Homer.
"OK!" he said.
Homer pointed the remote control box in his direction and pressed the
other button. The lid of the cashbox flipped open. Jeff dumped the
contents out in front of him and methodically counted the money while
the rest of us sat there with our arms and legs crossed and repeated
the count after him.
"Three dollars and eighty-seven cents," he announced. "Homer was pretty
near right."
"I am right!" came Homer's voice from the rafters. "We never count those
two Indian-head pennies. That's our reserve for bad debts."
"OK, OK!" said Jeff. "The matter is closed." He put the money back in
the cashbox and signaled Homer to raise it again to the roof.
"Can I come down now, Mr. President?" asked Homer.
"Yes!" said Jeff.
Despite our shortage of funds we all agreed that we should make the trip
to Claiborne to attend the White Elephant Auction. If we couldn't manage
to buy the Japanese submarine, at least we could find out who did get it.
"I move that we take all our money with us and let me handle the bidding,"
said Freddy Muldoon, standing up on his chair to give himself a little
better position to argue from.
"That's a great idea!" Mortimer Dalrymple cut in, with his usual sarcasm.
"You're a born loser, so we won't have to argue about how much money we
have any more."
"OK, Mr. Bigmouth," Freddy shot back. "Maybe I'm not the world's best
horse trader, but at least I know a jackass when I see one."
Mortimer came up out of his chair like a whirling dervish, and Henry
and I grabbed him just in time to prevent mayhem. Freddy stood fast,
with his hands on his hips and that sneering look on his face again,
while Jeff rapped his gavel on the crate. When the commotion had died
down, little Dinky Poore stood up, at his most truculent, and said,
"Mr. President, I second the motion, whether anybody likes it or not!"
In the Mad Scientists' Club, when anybody seconds a motion it's almost
sure to pass. The reason is that Freddy and Dinky vote in favor of almost
everything, and Jeff Crocker, the President, only votes in case of a
tie. So anybody making a motion knows that he has three votes to start
with. And if somebody is dumb enough to second his motion, he knows that
he's got it made because four votes are already in the bag. But if Freddy
or Dinky makes the motion, it's a little different of course. You might
say that they face an uphill fight.
In this case, I felt a little sorry for Freddy, so I voted in favor of
letting him handle the bidding for the submarine. After Henry and Homer
and Mortimer had all voted "no," it was up to Jeff Crocker to decide
the issue. He flipped a coin and it came down "heads" and he figured
that was a good omen. So he voted in favor of Freddy risking our three
dollars and eighty-five cents.
By ten o'clock Saturday morning we were all piled into Zeke Boniface's
wheezing old junk truck, Richard the Deep Breather, jolting along on
the seventy-five-mile drive to Claiborne. Dinky and Freddy were crouched
down behind the seat of the open cab, playing mumblety-peg on the wooden
truck bed and exchanging conspiratorial whispers. The rest of us didn't
pay too much attention to them. We were too busy figuring out how we
would load the submarine on the truck and haul it back to Mammoth Falls,
if we were lucky enough to get it. We had brought along the overhead
traveling crane rig that Zeke uses to lift engines out of cars, but we
were only guessing at how big the sub was, based on Henry's research.
Mortimer Dalrymple had insisted on rigging a hammock between the two chain
slings of the traveling crane so he could be comfortable during the trip.
Mortimer likes his sleep, and he can catnap right through a club meeting
or a dogfight; take your pick. But he didn't get too much sleep on the
way to Claiborne. We had the crane stanchion lashed down securely to the
truck bed, so he wasn't in any danger, but he took some pretty violent
lurches (Henry called them "yawing moments") when Zeke threw Richard the
Deep Breather into fast-breaking curves on the Claiborne Road. When he
pulled into Claiborne, Mortimer was pretty seasick but he'd be the last
one to admit it, and the rest of us wouldn't embarrass him by noticing
it unless there was some real fun in it. At least he'd escaped the bumps
and jolts that the rest of us had to suffer.
The White Elephant Auction was being held in front of the American Legion
Hall, because the submarine was the biggest thing on the list and the
Legion didn't want to bother moving it off its concrete pedestal unless
they were sure it was sold. When Zeke wheeled Richard the Deep Breather
into the parking lot there was already a crowd of two or three hundred
people gathered in front of the place. The auctioneer was having lunch
at a hot-dog stand and just marking time until the appointed hour for
the auction to begin. We were a little dismayed to see the size of the
crowd, but the auctioneer was licking the mustard off his lips with
double relish, knowing he had a good thing going.
After we had something to eat we mingled in the crowd and left matters
in the hands of Freddy and Dinky, who had all our money. We saw them
whispering to each other on the edge of the crowd, and then Freddy got
down on all fours and crawled through people's legs up to the front. He
ended up to the right of the auctioneer's stand, and Dinky popped up
in front of the crowd on the left. A whole bunch of worthless junk was
sold at ridiculous prices before the auctioneer got around to mentioning
the submarine. It was already three o'clock and Freddy had pulled the
last hot dog out of his pocket and eaten it, and was looking around for
something to drink, when the auctioneer climbed down off his stand and
rapped his gavel on the hull of the sub.
"Ladies and gennemun!" he cried. "Here is the
piece de resistance
of the afternoon. What am I offered for this genuwine trophy of war
brought back from the far Pacific by the valiant sons of Post 1142 of the
American Legion? This is a real conversation piece. Ladies: If you have
a real handyman around the house, he can convert this historic tub into
the most unique outdoor barbecue you have ever seen. With this symbol of
America's triumph over the forces of evil in World War II installed in
your backyard you will be the envy of your neighborhood. Other women will
pull out their hair competing for invitations to your evening soirees."
"Blah, blah, blah, blah," said Mortimer. "How about getting down to
business?"
Finally the auctioneer pounded his gavel on the rusting hull again and
rasped, "What am I offered?"
"Five dollars!" came a squeak from the
right side of the semicircle of onlookers. All eyes turned to where Freddy
Muldoon stood, looking as nonchalant as his pudgy frame would allow,
with one foot crossed over the other and his arms folded in front of him.
"Has he gone nuts?" Mortimer gulped. "That's more money than we have."
"Maybe the truck ride affected his brain," Homer offered. "We'd better
go pull him out of there."
"Leave him alone!" Jeff snapped. "We all promised to let him handle this."
The auctioneer paused in mid-sentence. "What was that, my young friend?"
"Five dollars!" Freddy repeated. The auctioneer snickered
indulgently. "Did you hear that, ladies and gennemun?" He laughed. "We
have one of the last of the big spenders with us here today -- one
of America's great natural comedians -- and he offers a paltry five
dollars for this priceless relic of the late great war." He beat a
tattoo on the steel hull of the submarine with his gavel. "Ladies and
gennemun!" he cried in a loud voice, raising his hands high in the air
and blowing all his words out through his nose. "Ladies and gennemun,
I tell you what I'm gonna do. I ordinarily would treat such an offer
with the disdain that it deserves. But I can go along with a gag as well
as the next one. And just to indulge our young friend here - whom I am
sure must be the grandson of the late great Oliver Hardy - I will open
the bidding for five dollars!" Again the gavel descended upon the rusty
hull, which was still ringing from the last blow. "Do I hear ten dollars?"
"Four fifty!" came an even squeakier voice from the left of the crowd.
The auctioneer's jaw dropped. "What was that?" he asked incredulously.
"I bid four dollars and fifty cents!" said Dinky Poore in a slightly
louder voice. There was a laugh from the crowd.
The auctioneer snickered condescendingly again. "I must apologize,
ladies and gennemun," he said, fixing a baleful glare on Dinky Poore,
"but I didn't realize that we were also honored with the presence of the
grandson of Stan Laurel. It isn't every day that you find two jokers in
the same deck!" Sweeping his hat from his head, he made an elaborate
bow in the direction of Dinky. "Are you aware, young man, that I already
have a bid of five dollars?"
"That old tub ain't worth five dollars," said Dinky. "I bid four dollars
and fifty cents."
The auctioneer clapped his hat back onto his head. "Do I hear ten
dollars?" he shouted, banging his gavel on the hull again.
"I think he's right!" said Freddy Muldoon. "I bid four dollars, even."
"Wait a minute!" shouted the auctioneer, pointing his gavel at
Freddy. "You can't pull that on me. You already bid five dollars for
this item."
"I changed my mind," said Freddy.
"Do I hear seven-fifty?" shouted the auctioneer.
"Make it three and a half and I'll take it!" Dinky shouted back, cupping
his hands to his mouth to make himself heard above the laughter of
the crowd.
"Three dollars, even!" Freddy hollered.
"Two seventy-five!" countered Dinky.
"I'll go two fifty, and that's my final offer!" Freddy bellowed.
The auctioneer rapped his gavel on the submarine's hull so hard that
the head came flying off. "Sold, sold, sold!" he shouted, pointing the
broken handle at Freddy Muldoon. "Sold for two dollars and fifty cents
before you can open your big mouth again!"
"I'll take it!" said Freddy. He marched up and put two dollar bills down
on the auctioneer's table. Then he turned to Dinky Poore. "Can you lend
me fifty cents?"
"Sure!" said Dinky, pulling out a handful of small change, and the crowd
roared as he dumped the coins onto the table.
"Get this thing out of here before I change my mind!" fumed the
auctioneer.
"Right away, sir!" said Freddy and Dinky.
We needn't have worried about how we were going to load the sub on
Zeke's truck. There must have been fifty people from the crowd trying
to get a handhold on it to help us ease it onto the truck bed after we
got it suspended in the slings of the traveling crane. We threw a big
tarpaulin over it and drove right back to Mammoth Falls, where we parked
it in Zeke's junkyard. We had a lot of work to do on it before we could
take it to our hideout, because the first thing we had to do was get it
in condition to operate.
Our hideout was made to order for the job we had in mind. It's a real
cool cavern hidden from view behind the huge falls where Frenchman's Creek
plunges over a precipice about a mile northwest of Strawberry Lake. These
are the falls that gave the town its name, and they're a big tourist
attraction. But very few people know about the cavern. Almost nobody ever
visits it because you have to swim under an overhanging ledge of rock
to get to the entrance. Once you get through the narrow opening you're
in for a surprise. The cavern widens out into a high-ceilinged chamber
with a floor of fine white sand that must have been deposited there when
the creek bed was a good deal higher than it is now. The floor of the
chamber drops off suddenly after about sixty feet, and there's a deep
pool of clear green water dividing the chamber in two. It must be fed
by subterranean streams and connected with the lower level of the creek,
because the water in it is always the same level as the creek. The place
would be a real mecca for sightseers if the town would ever build a
covered walkway to the entrance, like they have at Niagara Fails, but
they've never had the money.
It's cool as a cucumber inside the cavern, and the temperature stays
pretty much the same all year round. We use the place as a summer
clubhouse sometimes, because it can get pretty hot in Jeff Crocker's barn,
and the cavern is a great place to sleep on muggy summer nights. We've
fitted it out with a lot of equipment, and we get electricity for free
from a generator driven by a waterwheel we installed under the falls. The
pool makes a great swimming hole, of course, and we have a first-class
diving board set up at one end of it. The only problem is we don't get
much of a suntan.
While we still had the sub in Zeke's junkyard we took all its running
gear apart and cleaned and lubricated all the moving parts. We went over
the hull with steel brushes and rust remover and laid on heavy coats
of white lead paint. We cut away the net cutter and torpedo guards on
the bow with a blowtorch and cut out the torpedo tubes. This gave us a
lot of room up front that would have been wasted space. Colonel March
at Westport Field helped us get the plexiglass nose section from an
old B-17 Flying Fortress in a surplus property sale, and with a little
cutting and bending we were able to fit it to the nose of the sub pretty
smoothly. When we got finished, she looked pretty sharp with her forty
feet of gleaming white hull and her clear plastic nose.
We weren't finished yet, but we decided to move her to the hideout
because too many people were snooping around the junkyard to look at
her, and we had to throw the tarpaulin over the hull so often that it
interfered with our work. Especially, we had to keep an eye peeled for
Freddy's cousin Harmon and his gang. They kept turning up at the yard,
one or two at a time, pretending to be looking for some piece of junk they
knew Zeke didn't have. And one day we saw the whole gang looking at us
through field glasses from the edge of a cliff on Turkey Hill. Actually,
they weren't any trouble to us, because they couldn't mess around the
sub while we were there during the day, and at night we just plain didn't
worry about them. Zeke Boniface has a big German shepherd dog named Kaiser
Bill who roams the junkyard all night long. He isn't mean, but he's about
one hundred and ten pounds of gleaming white teeth, and he has a way of
discouraging people who wander too close to the yard at night.
We named the sub
Lady Go Diver, which was a name Dinky had
suggested, and painted it on both sides of the bow section. On the
conning tower we painted the Mad Scientists' Club symbol, which is a
test tube crossed over a telescope superimposed on a skull. After we had
put new batteries in her and tested the electric motor, we figured we
were ready to move her into the cavern under Mammoth Fails to add the
finishing touches.
Don't ask me how we got her into the cave. That's our secret. But
after we got her in there we could take our time making the rest of the
modifications without a lot of people nosing around. Without the torpedo
tubes in her she could carry four or five of us easily. We figured on
fitting out the bow section as an observer compartment and installing
two big searchlights for underwater illumination, one in the bow and
one in the conning tower. We also were bargaining with the National
Guard Armory down on Vesey Street to get the bulletproof windows out
of an old World War II tank they had, so we could install them in the
conning tower to give us observation in all directions.
We were getting along pretty well with the work, when one morning we
discovered sandy footprints on the hull of the submarine leading to the
conning tower. There was sand down inside the controls compartment, too,
so we knew somebody had been there. We always cleaned up carefully after
finishing work, because Henry and Jeff believe in running a taut ship. We
checked her over very thoroughly, and as far as we could tell everything
was in working order and nothing was missing. Whoever had been there
had just been a curious snooper, apparently. All the same, it worried us.
"It must have been somebody in Harmon Muldoon's gang," said Dinky Poore.
"Nobody else would have feet that dirty."
"Very good thinking!" said Mortimer, with his usual sarcasm.
"I bet they're planning an act of sabotage," said Freddy darkly.
"I don't think they'd be that foolish," said Henry. "Whoever came in here
was a pretty good swimmer. We know that. And he also had to be pretty
curious. If it was somebody from Harmon's gang, I'd say they were just
green with envy and wanted to get a look inside the sub."
"Don't be too sure," warned Freddy. "I wouldn't trust that Harmon with
my pet snake."
"Let's stop worrying about
who it is, and figure out what we're
gonna do about it," said Jeff Crocker.
"Maybe Zeke would lend us Kaiser Bill and let him sleep in here every
night," Homer suggested.
"That's a good idea," Jeff agreed, "but he needs him down at the
junkyard."
"I move that Freddy and Dinky sleep here every night until we're finished
with the work," said Mortimer.
"I move that Mortimer Dalrymple take the sub down to the bottom of the
lake every night and stay there until morning," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Good thinking!" said Dinky Poore.
"I appreciate the humor, but let's use our heads," said Henry. "There's
only one entrance to this place, and it's easy enough to bug it so we
know whether anybody wanders in here."
"Now you're talking!" said Jeff. "What do you think we should do, Henry?"
"All we have to do is rig an electric eye across the mouth of the cave
and tie it in to our carrier current intercom system. We can run a line
from here down to one of the power lines on the highway, and I'll hook
a monitor into my receiver at home. If I get an alarm during the night
I'll push the panic button."
What Henry suggested doing was very simple, since we already had our
own private intercom net operating through the city power lines. This
can be done for free and it's legal, as long as you don't exceed the
maximum power limit with your transmitter. We knocked off work on the
sub and spent the rest of the day scurrying around to get the necessary
equipment together to rig up the alarm system.
It was that very night that the panic buzzer sounded in my room just
after I had gotten to sleep. It was Henry on the line, and he told us
somebody had already tripped the alarm in the cavern. We hadn't bugged
the place any too soon. Henry switched the microphones we'd hidden in the
cavern into the net, and we could hear voices of some of Harmon Muldoon's
gang. Stony Martin, who's a loudmouth, was shouting out phony orders
with a thick German accent, as though he was Count Hugo von Luckner
himself. It made me sick just to hear him.
"Let's go, Henry!" said Jeff Crocker. "Everybody out to the cavern!"
I jumped into my pants, threw a shirt on, and shinnied down the drainpipe
outside my window. It was then I remembered that my dad had locked
my bicycle in the garage. He told me I couldn't use it for two days,
because I had forgotten to mow the lawn. I stood there in the darkness by
the side of the house, not knowing what to do except swear at myself. I
called the old man a bunch of bad names too, and kicked the side of the
house a couple of times. After I'd cooled off, I thought about shinnying
back up the drainpipe and calling one of the other kids on the intercom,
but I knew they'd all be gone. I even thought about sneaking into my
dad's bedroom and swiping the key to the garage. But I figured I might
wake somebody up, and then I would be in the soup. So I kicked the house
a couple of more times and took off down the driveway heading for Dinky
Poore's house.
Dinky lives closest to me and I might just be able to catch him. He also
is the smallest guy in the club, and I wouldn't mind pumping his bike all
the way out to the falls with him riding the handlebars. I darted into
the alley behind his house and clambered up onto the fence. It was pitch
dark in his backyard and I couldn't see if his bike was still there or
not. I gave the tomcat call and waited a few seconds. There wasn't any
answer, so I gave it again a little louder and longer. This time there
was an answer. I was peering into the darkest corner of the yard, when
all of a sudden something came flying out of an upstairs window of the
house and crashed against the board fence just below my hands. I didn't
wait around to find out what it was. I just took off down the alley,
heading for Mammoth Falls on foot.
It must have taken me half an hour to get to the riverbank below the
falls. All the other kids were sitting around under the big oak tree,
where we usually hide our bikes in the bushes, holding a council of war.
"Where on earth have you been?" Henry asked me. "We've been waiting half
the night."
"Maybe his mother wouldn't let him out!" Mortimer gibed at me.
"Shut up!" I shot back, giving Mortimer a knuckle job on his right bicep.
Then I lied. "I had a flat tire on my bike. I ran all the way here."
"Let's get going!" urged Jeff. "Indian file down the bank, then one at
a time under the falls. Nobody goes into the cave until we've all made
it to the ledge. Then we'll rush 'em together."
We stripped down to our shorts and Jeff handed out stink bombs, three to
a man. "If you get a shot at one of them, try to hit him in the middle
of the back. It's hardest to wash off there."
We started down the steep path to the river bed with Mortimer leading
the way. I took my usual position at the rear of the file, right behind
Dinky and Freddy. There wasn't any moon out, and it was so dark we had
to feel our way along the path, hugging close to the rocky bank. My heart
was thumping and I could hear Dinky and Freddy breathing heavily. Suddenly
there was a loud rumbling noise, followed by an ear-splitting crash like
a clap of thunder. The ground shook violently and the whole riverbank
seemed to heave up about a foot. We grabbed for rocks and bushes and
clung to the bank to keep from falling into the water.
"Holy mackerel!" shouted Mortimer. "Half the falls has collapsed!"
"Let's get out of here before something else cuts loose," Jeff
hollered. "Get back up the path, Charlie!"
I turned and groped my way back up the path to the top of the bank,
with Freddy and Dinky panting behind me. When the rest of them got to
the top, we made our way along the bank to a point where we could get
a better look at the falls. By the light of our flashlights we could
see a huge, crescent-shaped space at the lip of the falls that hadn't
been there before. A regular torrent of water was spilling over it and
crashing onto a pile of rocks at the bottom, right where the mouth of
the cavern had been.
"The cavern's blocked off!" cried Mortimer. "If Harmon's gang is still
in there, how are they gonna get out?"
"Serves 'em right for nosing around," said Freddy Muldoon, jumping up
and down.
"Oh, you're just full of the milk of human kindness," Mortimer sneered.
"We gotta get down there and help 'em."
"Wait a minute!" Jeff cautioned. "Nobody's going down there just yet. We
can't tell what might happen. Some more of the ledge might break loose
any minute. We're lucky we weren't all in there when it fell."
"We would have been if Charlie hadn't been late getting here," said
Dinky Poore.
"Hurray for good old Charlie!" said Freddy Muldoon.
All of a sudden I wasn't mad at my old man anymore for locking my bike
in the garage.
"We can't possibly move those rocks," Henry put in. "They're too big. The
first thing we better do is call the police."
"How do we know they're still in there?" said Homer. "We'd look pretty
foolish bringing the police out on a wild goose chase this time of night."
"That's easy enough to find out," said Henry. "We'll tap into the intercom
line and see if we can talk to them."
"If they did anything to our submarine I hope they all drown," said
Freddy Muldoon.
"What are we gonna do with these stink bombs?" asked Dinky Poore.
"Eat them!" said Mortimer. "You might not get any breakfast! Now, shut
up and let the brains of this outfit figure out what we're gonna do."
Henry's foresight had provided a plug-in jack in the intercom line at
the top of the riverbank. The only question was whether the line had been
broken by the rockfall. Henry and Mortimer probed through the bushes and
rocks at the edge of the falls and found the jack. Then they plugged in
Henry's handset.
"Hello! Hello!" Henry called into the speaker. "This is Henry
Mulligan. This is Henry Mulligan. If you can hear me, sing out!"
We all waited, holding our breath and straining to listen for a sound
from the receiver. There was none.
"If they're still in there you probably scared them right out of their
skins," said Homer. "Try it again."
Henry pressed his lips close to the handset. "This is Henry Mulligan
calling Harmon Muldoon. Calling Harmon Muldoon. If you can hear me,
get on the intercom. There's a speaker strapped under the diving board
by the pool and another one in the ceiling near the cave entrance. If
you're still in there, let us know, so we can get help."
We waited for what seemed a full minute. Then we heard a crackling noise.
"Hello! Hello! Is that you, Harmon?" Henry repeated several times.
"Hello, this is Harmon Muldoon," came a voice so faint that only Henry
could really hear it. "What do you want, Mulligan?"
"At least the line's still open!" Henry said excitedly. Then he cupped
his hand over the mouthpiece. "He wants to know what we want."
"How do you like that fat-lipped cousin of mine!" snorted Freddy Muldoon.
"There he is, buried a hundred feet underground, and he wants to know
what we want."
"Tell him we want to know if they're all right, and how many of them
are in there," said Jeff.
"Harmon! Harmon! Are you all right?" Henry shouted into the mouthpiece.
"Yeah, we're all right," came the faint answer. "What kind of stunt did
you guys pull on us this time?"
"Honest, Harmon, we didn't do anything," Henry answered. "Part of the
ledge at the top of the falls collapsed. There's a big pile of rocks
blocking the mouth of the cave."
"Are you telling me?" sneered Harmon. "Have you got any other old news,
Mulligan?"
"Oh, boy! Would I like to punch him right in the nose!" said Freddy.
"By the way, Mulligan," came Harmon's voice again, "how did you know we
were in here?"
"There's an electronic eye at the mouth of the cave," Henry answered. "You
guys tripped it when you went in, and it set off an alarm on our
intercom."
"Very clever!" said Harmon. "I guess we never will outsmart you guys. Now,
how do we get out?"
"How many of you are in there?" asked Henry.
"There are six of us," said Harmon. "Is that enough to qualify?"
"We'll get hold of the police right away," said Henry.
"I don't know how they're going to get through to you, but we'll figure
out some way. Sure you're all right?"
"Yeah! We're all right. It's fine in here. Just get us out in time
for breakfast."
"He doesn't sound very scared for a guy trapped in a cave," said Homer.
"He's a cool character, all right," said Mortimer Dalrymple. "Something
sounds a little fishy to me."
"It's Harmon's deep voice," said Freddy. "He's a big-mouthed bass."
Mortimer grabbed him by the collar and rubbed his knuckles in his hair
good and hard.
Since we hadn't bothered leaving anybody at the clubhouse in Jeff
Crocker's barn, we had no way of reaching the police except to ride
into town and call them from the nearest phone we could get to. Jeff and
Mortimer volunteered to make the trip, and the rest of us busied ourselves
making as complete a reconnaissance as we could of the situation around
the mouth of the cave. It would take Jeff and Mortimer at least fifteen
minutes to get into town, and we knew it would be at least half an hour
after that before Chief Putney could rouse any of his men and get them
out to the falls. From the looks of things, they wouldn't be able to do
anything without heavy equipment, so it would probably be hours before
they mustered enough help to begin a rescue operation.
Literally tons and tons of rock had crashed down in front of the cave
mouth, as far as we could tell from shining our flashlights onto the
pile. The lip of the falls had receded to the point that one of the main
plumes at the right of the torrent was spilling huge volumes of water
directly down at the mouth of the cavern. It was possible that water
was flowing into the cave.
Henry got on the intercom and roused Harmon again. "Harmon!" he
shouted. "Is water coming into the cave? Are you all right?"
"We're fine," Harmon answered. "It's dry as a bone in here. Now will you
stop bothering us? We're trying to get some sleep. Just concentrate on
getting us out of here."
"OK!" said Henry. "But keep somebody near the intercom so we can keep
in touch with you."
"Roger!" said Harmon.
"Those guys can
sleep?" said Homer in disbelief.
"What else can they do?" Henry shrugged. "They have to wait for help,
and they might as well save their strength. They might need it. You
gotta hand it to them that they didn't panic."
Soon we heard the wailing of a siren and a screech of brakes as a police
car pulled up nearby on the highway. Two officers came panting along
the path, with Jeff and Mortimer leading them.
"How do you know there's anyone in there?" asked one of the officers,
shining his flashlight into the abyss at the foot of the falls.
"We've talked to them," said Henry, and he explained about the intercom
system. "You can talk to them if you want to," he offered.
"Never mind!" said the officer. "Looks like we've really got a job on our
hands here." He whistled in surprise as he played his flashlight over
the rockfall. "Holy mackerel! There must be tons of the stuff. It'll
take real heavy construction equipment to move that stuff, and I don't
know how anybody could get it down there to do the job. Are those kids
safe in there?"
"They're all right, so far," said Henry.
The officer played his flashlight along the crest of the falls.
"Some more of that ledge could break loose any minute," he said. "If it
does, the roof of that cave might collapse."
"That's possible," Henry agreed.
"We don't have any time to waste," said the officer, turning to the
other policeman. "Al, get back to the car and tell Chief Putney he'd
better notify the Mayor. We've got a real emergency on our hands. Tell
him we recommend putting out a general alarm and a request for rescue
equipment. Better get the Civil Defense people out too."
The other policeman turned to run up the path.
"Wait a minute, Al. After you call in, see if you can bust down a section
of that fence and pull the car in here somehow. We ought to have the
radio right here."
"We'll bust down the fence!" cried Jeff. And he and Mortimer dashed up
the path after the policeman.
It's amazing how fast things can happen sometimes. Within an hour the
riverbank was swarming with people and vehicles. And more kept coming all
the time, as calls went out for special equipment that somebody thought
might help solve the problem of how to burrow through tons of rock with
tons of water spilling on it, on the other side of a dangerous whirlpool
more than a hundred feet offshore. There was a lot of confusion and
shouting and not much being accomplished, but it was exciting to watch.
The county sheriff's mobile rescue unit pulled in and flooded the area
with high-powered searchlights. Seth Emory, the Civil Defense director,
was supposed to be in charge of the operation, but Mayor Scragg did
more talking than he did. He kept shouting orders to Chief Putney
and the fire chief, Hiram Pixley, telling them to do things that they
were already doing, and he agreed with everybody's ideas about how to
get into the cave, no matter how crazy they were. Somebody suggested
bringing a long-boomed crane in with a clamshell bucket to lift some of
the rocks away from the cave mouth. But a construction foreman who had
been called out said the biggest crane they could get wouldn't reach
out to the rockfall from the riverbank, and it would take at least two
days to build a pier out into the water for the crane to operate from.
Somebody else suggested running a pontoon bridge out to the rockpile and
trying to force a hole through the rocks so a long section of corrugated
iron storm drain could be run into the cave as an escape tunnel. But
this was considered too dangerous, since more of the overhanging ledge
might come plunging down at any minute. There were other people in favor
of stringing a breeches buoy across the front of the falls so a couple
of men could try to pull some of the rocks away with grappling hooks,
but this was considered impractical. Some suggested taking a chance by
trying to dynamite the rockpile, but almost everybody was against this.
A reporter and a photographer from the
Mammoth Falls Gazette
were circulating among the crowd, interviewing officials and getting
opinions from onlookers. The reporter wanted to talk to the boys in the
cave and Mayor Scragg said, "Sure! All you have to do is figure out how
to get in there."
"But I thought there was some kind of a communication line into the cave,"
said the reporter. "One of the policemen told me -"
"I don't know about that," said the Mayor. "You'll have to ask those
young magicians over there. They're the ones that got us into this mess."
"I don't think they want to be bothered. They're all asleep," said Henry,
when the reporter asked him. "Besides, I heard there's a camera crew
coming from the TV station in White Fork. Why don't we wait until they
get here?"
The reporter howled in anguish. "I was here first!" he complained. "I
have to get my copy in for a special edition. If you make me miss it,
and the TV stations get the story first, my boss will fire me!"
"Oh!" said Henry.
"Gosh, mister, we wouldn't want you to get fired over a little thing
like six kids trapped in a cave," said Freddy Muldoon.
"I didn't mean it that way," said the reporter. "But this is a big
story, and it's happening right in our backyard. Did you see what the
TV networks did with the little girl that was trapped in a well out
in Omaha last month? They kept the whole nation glued to their TV sets
for three days. Can you imagine what they'll do when they have six kids
trapped in a cave?"
"Yeah! I can imagine!" said Mortimer.
"Well? Do I get to talk to the kids?"
Henry shrugged.
"Say, what is this?" said the reporter truculently. "Are you in charge
here?"
"No, I'm not in charge," said Henry, "but it's my intercom set."
"Oh! I get it!" The reporter reached for his wallet. "How would five
bucks do?"
"You just said the magic word," said Freddy Muldoon.
"I don't want your money, mister," said Henry, pushing his hand in
Freddy's face. "Wait until the TV crew gets here and we'll let everybody
talk to them at the same time."
The reporter threw his hands in the air and turned away. Then a thought
struck him, and he pulled the photographer to one side. In a voice loud
enough for everyone to hear he said, "What do you bet there aren't any
kids down in that cave at all? You know, it's just possible these kids
framed the whole thing."
"Hey, that's right!" said the photographer.
"We don't
know there's anybody down there. Say! That'd make a
pretty good story too."
Jeff stepped over to Henry. "I think maybe we'd better let 'em talk
to Harmon."
"OK!" said Henry. "I guess we'd better."
He managed to get Harmon to answer on the intercom after some trouble,
and the reporter talked with him. Harmon said he was fine and gave him the
names of the other five members of his gang that were with him. He woke
up Stony Martin and had him talk to the reporter too. The photographer
held the microphone of a tape recorder to the speaker while they were
talking and taped the whole conversation.
"Are you worried about getting out?" asked the reporter.
"Naw! We're not worried," said Harmon.
"I'm sure they'll have you out in fine shape very soon," said the
reporter cheerfully.
"Tell 'em to take their time," said Harmon, yawning. "As long as we get
home in time for breakfast, it's OK."
"Boy! Have we got a story!" crowed the reporter, as he stuffed his notes
into his pocket. "'Tell 'em to take their time,' the kid says. Can you
imagine it? Boy! The wires'll eat this up!"
"Hey! I bet we could peddle this tape to all the networks!" said the
photographer as they hustled up the path to the highway.
"Aren't you going to stick around to see if they get out?" Mortimer
shouted after them.
"Sorry!" the reporter shouted back. "We got a deadline to meet."
And they were gone.
"What a creep!" said Dinky Poore.
By the time the TV crew arrived from White Fork, things had reached an
impasse. Some men had been sent out in small boats to reconnoiter the
ledge below the falls to see if it were possible to anchor cables there so
fire ladders could be run out from the shore. But they came back reporting
no success. Mayor Scragg had called a conference under the big oak tree
to get opinions on what would be the best way to proceed. It appeared
that the most feasible plan would be to build some kind of footing in
the creek bed for the big construction crane to work from. The Mayor
was asking for estimates on how long it would take to truck in enough
rock and heavy fill to do this and whether it was possible to get the
big crane down the steep bank with a block-and-tackle rig. Seth Emory
had proposed that the city requisition every truck in the area and set
up a high-speed shuttle with police escorts from the gravel pits out
on White Fork Road. The estimates ran from half a day to a full day,
before real rescue operations could start.
Meanwhile, the director of the TV crew had been pacing up and down at
the edge of the group, running his fingers through his hair and looking
at his watch every thirty seconds. He stepped over to Mayor Scragg and
tapped him on the shoulder.
"Does that mean there won't be anything happening until noontime... or
maybe even later?"
"If you mean when will we be getting the boys out, I guess that's it,"
said the Mayor.
"We might as well pack up and go back and get some sleep, boys," said
the director to the other members of his crew.
"Suit yourself," said Mayor Scragg. "I expect we'll be here a long time."
"As long as we're here, why don't we get some local color?" one of the
cameramen suggested.
"Yeah! Maybe we could," said the director, rubbing his chin. "Say! That
gives me an idea." He turned back to the Mayor. "Is there any possible
way to lower a camera into that cave?" he asked.
Mayor Scragg looked at him goggle-eyed. "If I could figure that out,
I could get those kids out," he said testily. "Now go away and stop
bothering me!"
The director stepped back, a little abashed, and felt somebody plucking
at his sleeve. It was Jeff Crocker.
"Excuse me, mister," he said. "There is a way to get a camera into
the cave. But it would take a lot of cable, and it would have to he
waterproof."
The director looked at Jeff, not knowing whether to believe him or
not. "How much cable?" he asked.
Jeff shrugged. "Maybe three or four hundred feet. I don't know for sure."
"I hope you're not kidding me," said the director. "We don't have that
much cable, but we could send and get it. Are you sure you could get it
in there?"
"Yeah, I'm sure we could get it in there," said Jeff. "There is another
way into the cavern, but you have to..." Then Jeff started rubbing
his chin. "Wait a minute!" he said excitedly, and came running
over to where the rest of us were. "Henry!" he said, grabbing him by
the shoulder. "I'll bet we could get those kids out the same way we took
the sub in, if we had enough diving gear!"
"Not so loud!" Mortimer cautioned, looking back to where the TV director
was standing.
"Yeah!" said Freddy. "You'll give away our whole secret, blabbermouth!"
"Shut up, Freddy!" said Jeff, pushing him in the face. "The first thing
we have to think about is getting Harmon and his gang out of there."
"We could go back and get our scuba gear," Mortimer suggested, "and Jeff
and I could swim in there and bring 'em out one at a time."
"You could bring 'em out faster if you used the submarine," said Dinky.
"That's a good idea," Henry observed. "At least it's worth a try. We'd
better talk it over with Mayor Scragg."
"You guys are gonna blow the whole thing!" screamed Freddy. "The whole
town's gonna find out about our secret passage, and Harmon too!"
"What's all the argument about?" asked the TV director, walking over to
where we stood. "Can you get a camera down there or not?"
"Forget your camera, mister," said Jeff, as we moved off to see the
Mayor under the oak tree. "We've got something important to think about."
"What was that you said about a secret passage?" the director asked,
grabbing Freddy by the arm.
"What secret passage?"
"A secret passage into that cave, you ninny!"
"Oh,
that secret passage! That's none of your business," said
Freddy, pulling his arm loose and running after us.
"Yes, Mulligan. What is it now?" said Mayor Scragg wearily, when Henry
tapped him on the shoulder.
"We know of a way to get those kids out of there," Henry said simply,
and he went on to explain how we had gotten the submarine into the cavern
through a subterranean channel that ran under the cliff beside the falls
and connected with the pool in the cavern.
"It's only about two hundred feet long," Jeff explained. "We discovered
it one day when we were skin diving. The entrance is about ten feet
underwater, and it's right where you want to dump all that rock to make a
pier for the shovel. If you dump a lot of rock in there you'll probably
block it up."
Mayor Scragg looked at them quizzically. "Every time I listen to you
kids I get into more trouble!" he moaned, holding his hand to his
forehead. "Isn't it enough that you've got half the town out here in
the middle of the night?"
"Don't listen to a word they say, Mr. Mayor," said Freddy tersely,
as he elbowed his way into the group. "It's all a big fat lie!"
"I told you to keep out of this!" said Jeff, pushing him in the face
again. Freddy bounced right back and kicked Jeff in the shins. Mortimer
grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off to the side.
"Cool it, Freddy!" he said, dumping him like a sack of potatoes. "Jeff
knows what he's doing."
"He's a big blabbermouth!" Freddy blubbered. "He's giving away all
our secrets."
"Secrets, huh?" said Mayor Scragg. "You mean you really do have a
submarine down in that cave?"
"Yes, we do!" said Jeff. "You can ask Zeke Boniface. We brought it here
in his truck."
"And you got it in there through an underground channel?"
"We didn't carry it in!" said Jeff.
The Mayor thought this over for a while. Then he turned to talk with
Seth Emory. Chief Putney and Chief Pixley joined them, and the four held
a whispered consultation near the head of the path leading down to the
water's edge. Finally the Mayor beckoned to Henry and Jeff.
"We've got to do something and do it soon," he said. "You think you
can swim in there and bring those boys out through that channel. Is
that right?"
"Right!" said Jeff. "If they know how to use scuba gear, we'll get them
to swim out. If they can't we'll try the submarine."
"It's worth a try," said the Mayor, "but I'm going to send two men from
the sheriff's rescue unit with you. We don't want any accidents."
"That's a good idea," said Jeff. "We can show them the way. But we'll have
to go back to town and get our tanks. We keep all that stuff in my barn."
"No need for that," said Chief Pixley. "The rescue unit has plenty of
diving gear and everything else you'll need."
"Good deal," said Jeff. "That'll save time." And he and Mortimer started
stripping down to their shorts. We didn't know it at the time, but if
Jeff and Mortimer had gone to the clubhouse for their scuba outfits it
would have saved us a lot of trouble.
Now that some definite action was being taken, the atmosphere along the
creek bank changed abruptly. You could feel the excitement generated in
the rescue workers and onlookers as word spread among them that two kids
had volunteered to swim into the blocked cavern through an underground
waterway that nobody knew existed. Everybody crowded around the mobile
rescue unit to watch the preparations.
The two sheriff's deputies fitted tanks and face masks on Jeff and
Mortimer, and then the four of them linked themselves together with a
piece of nylon line. It was decided that Jeff would lead the way and
Mortimer would bring up the rear and feed out communication wire from
a reel, so they would have direct communication with the mobile rescue
unit as well as a guideline for finding their way back out through
the channel. The two deputies each carried an extra set of scuba gear,
and all four were equipped with a flashlight and a knife.
The TV director was in a better humor now, and kept getting in the
way and delaying things as he tried to get as much of the action as he
could on film. He started giving directions as to just how each man was
to go down the path and get into the water, until Chief Putney pulled
him gently aside and assigned two officers to keep him company for the
duration of the operation.
Jeff waded into the water first. "Keep a tight line," he told the
deputy behind him. "There are a lot of sharp rocks jutting out from the
walls. We'll stay right on the bottom as much as possible. There's good
white sand on the floor of the passage, and it's easier to see." Then
he fitted his mask to his face, blew out a lungful of air, and opened
the valve of his air tank. One by one the others followed him as he let
himself out into deeper water and dove for the bottom. Soon there was
nothing to be seen but a trail of air bubbles on the surface of the
creek and the communication wire flapping up and down as it unreeled
itself from the spool Mortimer was carrying.
For the watchers on the shore there was nothing to do but wait, now, while
the four divers probed the darkness of the underground channel. Everybody
except the men in the mobile rescue van had crowded along the bank,
pushing and shoving each other in an effort to get a better vantage
point from which to watch the dark patch under the cliff where the
trail of bubbles had disappeared. Two people slipped and tumbled down
the bank into the waters of the creek. Except for shining flashlights
in their eyes, nobody paid much attention to them. The TV director was
moaning about not being able to send a TV camera into the cavern with
the divers. But Chief Pixley solved his problem by offering him a set
of diving apparatus so he could take the camera in himself. The director
decided that it wasn't that important.
Henry and the rest of us stayed glued to the side of the mobile rescue
van, alongside Mayor Scragg. We knew that the first word from the four
divers had to come in there through the communication line they had taken
with them. It seemed like hours, but it was really only ten minutes later
that the deputy monitoring the phone line waved frantically for silence.
|
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"Hello! Hello!" he said. "Is that you, Foster?" He listened for a moment.
"Roger! We'll stand by. We're all ready up here."
"They've gotten through to the cave, and they're looking for the boys
now," he told the Mayor.
"Just ask them if there's a submarine in there," said Mayor Scragg,
looking suspiciously at Henry.
The deputy whistled down the phone line again. "Hello, Foster! The Mayor
wants to know if there's a submarine in there."
"Yeah, there's a submarine here all right," came the answer, "but there's
no sign of any kids. We've looked all over the place. There's just nobody
in here."
"Say that again."
"I say there's no sign of any kids in here. I think there's something
fishy about this whole thing."
"Did you hear that, Mr. Mayor?" said the deputy. "Foster says there's
nobody in that cave!"
"Nobody in there!" exclaimed the Mayor.
"Nobody in there!" echoed Henry.
The Mayor turned and looked at Henry. "Mulligan," he said.
"But there's got to be somebody in there!" Henry protested. "We talked
to them on the intercom."
"Mulligan!" said the Mayor.
Henry turned and ran. He headed for the intercom jack at the base of
the cliff, with the rest of us hightailing it after him. The Mayor and
Chief Putney came puffing up the path behind us.
"Jeff! Jeff!" Henry hollered into the handset. "Can you hear me in there?"
"We hear you loud and clear!" came Jeff's voice in reply.
"What about Harmon and his gang? Where are they?"
"I don't know where they are, but they're sure not in here! We've searched
the whole place."
"Scout's honor, Jeff?"
"Scout's honor, Henry!"
"I just don't understand it," said Henry helplessly. "We were talking
to them not more'n half an hour ago."
Henry was still standing there, scratching his head and looking
crestfallen when the Mayor and Chief Putney broke through the bushes.
"Well, Mulligan, what's this all about?" puffed the Mayor, all out
of breath.
"They're just not in there, Mr. Mayor," said Henry dejectedly. "I don't
understand it. They were there just half an hour ago."
"Why don't you tell 'em the truth, Mulligan?" came Harmon Muldoon's
voice from somewhere in the darkness above us. "You knew we weren't in
that cave." A chorus of raucous laughter almost drowned out the last
words. Henry's jaw dropped open as he stared upward through the darkness
toward the lip of the cliff that towered above us.
"Who's that up there?" Chief Putney demanded, as he flashed his powerful
light along the edge of the cliff.
"Pretty good show, Mulligan!" came the strident voice of Stony
Martin. "Whatta ya do for an encore?" And another wave of raucous
laughter followed.
It was obvious that Harmon's whole gang was sitting up on the cliff
above our heads, watching the proceedings with great relish. The glare
from the floodlights on the rescue van was too bright for us to see into
the darkness, but finally Chief Putney's flashlight picked out the white
T-shirt of Stony Martin, perched in a tree. Stony scrambled back into
the shadow with a burst of mocking laughter. A lot of raspberries and
other uncouth sounds split the darkness.
"How did you get up there?" Henry shrilled, rather weakly.
"We walked up!" Harmon shouted back.
"I mean, how did you get out of the cavern?"
"That was simple! We weren't in the cavern."
"Aw, c'mon, Harmon. Somebody was in there."
"Yeah, we sent one man in to trip your alarm so we could raid your
clubhouse. We've been up in Crocker's barn all night."
"You mean you were in our clubhouse all the time when we were talking
on the intercom?"
"Yeah! After we tripped your alarm system all kinds of things began
to happen. It was rich!"
Henry just stood there, speechless. He didn't even hear Mayor Scragg
and Chief Putney arguing about whether they could arrest anybody, as
they beat their way back through the bushes to the rescue van.
"By the way, Henry," Stony Martin shouted. "How do you get that cashbox
of yours down off that rafter? We spent most of the night trying to
figure it out."
Henry didn't answer. He just threw the intercom set he was holding against
the side of the cliff and then kicked it into the bushes. It broke into
a dozen pieces. I had never seen Henry lose his temper before.
Last updated 8 Apr 98 by max