"How are you going to do that unless I tell you where they are?" said Henry. "They've already figured out how to get through all your roadblocks."
"You can only go one place on a railroad, sonny. We'll be waiting for them at the end of the line."
"What if they get off before the end of the line?"
"You're full of bright ideas!" said the Chief. "Do you think they're stupid enough to take off on foot again?"
"No!" said Henry. "I think they planned their getaway better than that."
"Well, if they've got another car waiting where that track passes under the state highway, we'll catch 'em in one of our roadblocks."
"They've already passed the state highway," said Henry, "and our tracking antennas tell us they're still heading toward Hyattsville."
"Good! Then we'll get 'em at 'the end of the line."
"You're not thinking, Chief."
"See here, young Mulligan, I'll--"
"Haven't you ever dreamed about what you'd do if you were a bank robber?"
"No, I haven't!" fumed the Chief.
"Well, I have," said Henry. "And I'll bet one of our dinosaur eggs that I know just what they're planning."
"Is that so? Well, supposing you tell me."
"What about Dinky and Freddy?"
"OK, OK! We'll see they get home all right," said the Chief. "Now, tell me your brilliant idea."
"Well, if I were a bank robber I think I'd have a boat waiting at the railroad trestle over Lemon Creek. And with good luck I'd probably be out into the lakes and all the way to Canada before you figured out what happened."
There was a long silence.
"Are you still there, Chief?" asked Henry finally. "Do you want me to phone Mr. Monaghan's boathouse? You could probably nab them at the mouth of Lemon Creek if you get a couple of patrol cars down there right away."
Chief Putney was fuming and sputtering.
"You're a crazy nut, Mulligan!" he said at last. "Now, suppose you get off the radio and let me be the Chief of Police."
"I was just trying to help," Henry said.
"That's the kind of help I can do without," said the Chief. "Now get off the air and let me talk to Officer Riley."
"This is Riley, Chief," came a new voice.
"Listen, Riley, turn your volume down," whispered the Chief. "Now, is that kid still around?"
"No, Chief. He went back in the barn."
"Good! Now listen, Riley. I want you to get two cars down to Monaghan's boathouse at the river right away. Call him on the phone and tell him to get a couple of boats ready. I think those crooks might try to make a getaway down Lemon Creek."
"Good thinking, Chief! What about these kids?"
"Riley, I think we can play cops and robbers without having those kids underfoot. Leave 'em there in the barn."
"I just thought that direction finder of theirs might come in handy."
"You're not being paid to think! Just follow orders."
"Right, Chief!"
"See that these kids all get home right away," Chief Putney said to the sheriff's deputy. "Then report to the control center at the Crockers' barn. I'm heading for Monaghan's boathouse." The Chief's car showered us with gravel as the driver spun it around and headed pell-mell down the road.
The deputy helped us throw dirt over the remains of the bonfire, and then Dinky and Freddy and I clambered into his car.
"I hope the Chief's doing the right thing," he said, as he nursed the car down the road off the ridge. "It might not be so easy spotting that boat in the dark. I've been duck hunting in those bulrushes at the mouth of the creek and they spread out pretty far. There's a lot of places a boat could slip through without ever getting near Monaghan's boathouse."
"They wouldn't get away if Henry was there with our direction finder," I said.
"You got a portable set?"
"Sure! We have a battery power pack, and we can take it anywhere."
The deputy looked at his watch and rubbed his chin. Then there was a long silence. Suddenly, when he reached the hardtop of the county road, he flicked on his flashing beacon and the tires screamed as he pushed the accelerator to the floor.
"This'll be the first time in my life I didn't follow orders," he said.
We must have waked up all of Jeff Crocker's family when we skidded into the driveway beside the barn. The deputy turned the car around while I rushed in and got Henry.
"They're heading down Lemon Creek, all right -- as close as we can figure," said Henry, as we piled into the deputy's car with the battery set. "Jeff'll keep a track on them and let us know if there's any change."
"Hey! What's going on, Sergeant?" a policeman shouted from the control car parked beside the barn.
"Just call me 'Corporal'!" the deputy hollered back. "See you in court!" And we spun out of the driveway with the siren wide open.
The deputy kept glancing at his watch as we sped down the state highway toward the turnoff for the river. Henry had turned our receiver on and was holding it up to the window of the car, trying to pick up the signal of the transmitter. There was nothing coming over the police net.
"I hope we get there in time," said the deputy. "The chief had about ten minutes' start on us and he didn't have to drive as far."
"Don't worry," said Henry. "Jeff is telephoning Mr. Monaghan. He'll have another boat ready for us."
"How'm I gonna explain this to Chief Putney?" moaned the deputy, clapping one hand to his forehead.
"Maybe you won't have to," cried Henry. "I think I've got something! Pull over! Pull over to the side of the road!"
The deputy braked the car down sharply, and we ground to a halt on the apron. "What's the matter? What's up?" he asked, twisting round in his seat. Henry turned his loop antenna a hair to the right and turned the volume up on the speaker. Then he took his earphones off. The steady beep-beep-beep of Dinky's little transmitter was clearly audible.
"Have you got a map?" Henry asked the deputy.
"Sure!" He reached in the glove compartment, pulled out a road map, and spread it on the seat beside him.
"Where are we right now?" asked Henry, shining his flashlight on the map.
"I'd say we were right about here." The deputy pointed to a jog in the red line marking the state highway. Henry pulled his compass from his pocket and took a reading in the direction the antenna was pointing. Then he marked an X on the map where Lemon Creek took a sharp turn toward the river.
"I figure they're just about there now. They've got at least three miles to go before they reach the river."
"That ought to take them twenty or twentyfive minutes," said the deputy. "I'm sure they're using a rowboat or a canoe."
"They must be," I said. "A motorboat would make too much noise."
"Let's get going!" Henry urged. "We won't go to Monaghan's boathouse. Turn right, down the Old Mill Road."
"The Old Mill Road? Are you nuts?"
"Please, Officer!" Henry pleaded. "We've only got about ten minutes."
"Oh, boy!" said the deputy. "You're going to get me in real trouble!"
"You're in trouble already," said Henry. "How would you like a chance to be a hero?"
"A live hero or a dead hero?"
"How would you like to capture those bank bandits singlehanded?" Henry persisted.
"Sonny, I hear you talking, but I've got a wife and kids to think about."
"They'll be proud of you after tonight," said Henry. "Let's get going!"
"Oh, boy! I should have taken you kids home, like the Chief told me," mumbled the deputy, as he put the car in gear and pulled it onto the highway.
As we turned down the road leading to the old abandoned mill on Lemon Creek, Henry outlined his plan.
"It's simple," he said. "They ought to reach the millpond in about ten minutes. The only way to get out of it is to go through the sluice way. That's a natural trap. If we can close the downstream gate before they get there, we'll have them blocked. And if we close the upstream gate after they'r
e in the sluice, they can't possibly get out. The walls are about fifteen feet high and covered with green slime. They'll be helpless! All we have to do is sit there and wait for the Chief to come." Even the deputy was smiling now, and he pushed the patrol car down the winding road even faster than before.
"Great idea, Mulligan! Great!" he exclaimed. Then he frowned. "But what about those gates? Will they work?"
"Sure they will," I said. "The sluice is still used as a lock to let boats out of the millpond. The winches are in good shape. We've closed the gates lots of times to trap fish."
"Remind me to tell the game warden about that," said the deputy.
"Forget it," said Freddy Muldoon. "That's just one of Charlie's fish stories."
"Do you have any tear gas?" Henry asked.
"Yeah!" said the deputy. "That's a good idea. There's two grenades in the glove compartment there. Get 'em out."
"Put your lights out before we get to the creek," Henry warned. "We don't want to tip them off."
"OK, Chief!" said the deputy. "Any other orders?"
The deputy pulled the car off the road about a hundred yards short of the creek, and we ran the rest of the way to the millhouse. With a half moon rising in the east there was just enough light to see by. The old millhouse is a pretty sneaky place to be messing around in when it's dark, but we knew every nook and cranny of it by heart. Dinky and Freddy clambered across the catwalk to the other side of the sluice and lay flat on their bellies on top of the wall. Henry and I took the deputy into the winch house, and the three of us lowered the downstream gate. It creaked and groaned a lot, but we figured the bank bandits were still far enough away so that they couldn't hear it.
"Don't close it all the way," Henry advised. "We don't want the water level to rise too high in the sluice. After we've shut the upstream gate, we can let it down the rest of the way."
We crawled out onto the mill dam and lay there behind the railing holding our breath. The only sound came from the water gurgling under the downstream sluice gate, and we hoped the men we were waiting for weren't smart enough to recognize the sound and realize the gate was closed. Henry had the directional receiver tuned again and was rotating the antenna, trying to get a fix on the transmitter signal. He had just picked up the beep when I could see the dim outline of a small boat ease out of the shadows about two hundred yards upstream and move into a patch of moonlight. I grabbed Henry by the elbow and he shut off the receiver. We crawled back to the winch house, leaving the deputy lying flat on his stomach near the upstream gate.
Inside the winch house we waited, crouched in the darkness, for the signal that would tell us when to close the upstream gate. It seemed like it was forever, and I could hear Henry's breathing just as clear as the blower on our hot air furnace at home. I was sweating all over and shaking with chills at the same time. I figured this must be how an eel would feel in a Turkish bath.
Suddenly a flash of light flicked at the window of the winch house. It was the signal from the deputy that the boat had entered the sluice. Henry and I sprang into action and threw our weight against the trunnion of the winch. My feet slipped from under me and I tripped Henry, and we both fell to the floor, but we managed to spin the winch fast enough to close the. upstream gate before the men in the boat knew what was happening. Then we dashed to the other winch and lowered the downstream gate the rest of the way.
When we scrambled out to our places along the guard rail at the edge of the sluice, the boat had already rammed against the downstream gate. There were sounds of confusion and violent cursing coming up from the bottom of the dark chamber in which the bandits were trapped. The bright beam of the deputy's flashlight stabbed into the depths of the sluiceway and came to rest on the figures of four men huddled in a small rowboat. The deputy's voice rang out in a booming command that resounded back and forth between the walls of the sluice.
"Throw your guns in the water! You're surrounded!"
Four more beams of light hit the bandits in the face as Dinky, Freddy, Henry, and I flicked on our flashlights from opposite sides of the sluice. The men in the boat threw their hands up, and one of them shouted, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! We're just going fishing."
"You can't fish with a rod like that!" the deputy shouted back. "Throw it in the water!"
There was a splash as the pistol dropped from the hand of the man standing in the stern of the boat.
"Get the rest of them overboard before we load your boat with tear gas!"
Three more weapons splashed in the water. The man in the bow of the boat reached under the seat and tried to slip a canvas sack over the side, but the deputy's pistol cracked like a whip and a bullet nicked the gunwale beside him.
"Leave the money where it is!" barked the deputy. "Put your hands on top of your head and lie down in the boat!"
It isn't easy for one man to lie down in a rowboat, let alone four. But when your have to, you find a way to do it, and the four bank bandits were smart enough to figure it out.
"OK, Mulligan. Get on the radio and tell 'em it's all over," said the deputy calmly. And Henry made tracks for the patrol car.
"You characters ought to know you can't fish in this county before daybreak," said the deputy, as he lighted a cigarette. "Now, just as soon as we can truck a ladder in here, we'll get you out of there."
It only took about ten minutes for two more patrol cars to show up at the old mill. And we didn't need a ladder to get the captives out of the sluice. We just opened the upper gate long enough to float the boat up to the top of the wall, and the bank robbers climbed out meek as lambs. I don't think they ever knew there was only one policeman on the scene when they threw their guns in the water.
Freddy Muldoon ran up and kicked the biggest man right in the shins. "That's for calling me 'Fatso'!" he shouted, and then he retreated to a safe distance. One of the policemen grabbed him by the collar and half carried him off the dam. The big man stood there with his mouth open, rubbing one leg against the other.
"There ought to be a law against kids," he said. "I knew there'd be trouble when I found them two in the alley."
"What about my transmitter?" Dinky asked. "It's in one of those canvas bags."
"We'll have to hold it for evidence, sonny," said one of the policemen. "You'll get it back later on."
Chief Putney didn't get in on the capture. He and three other policemen were blockading the mouth of Lemon Creek with two motorboats, and they didn't have a radio. It wasn't until daybreak that they saw Mr. Monaghan standing at the end of his dock waving a pair of red flannel drawers at them. When they got back to the police station we were all sitting around sipping hot chocolate and talking to a reporter from the Mammoth Falls Gazette. Henry asked Chief Putney if he could send a patrol car out to Indian Hill to pick up Homer and Mortimer.
"You've just given me a great idea," grumbled the Chief. "We don't need a police department around here anymore. What we need is a good all-night taxi service. Have you got fifty cents for the fare?"
"No!" said Henry.
"Oh, that's really too bad!" said the Chief, sarcastically. Then he turned to Billy Dahr and told him to send a car out to Indian Hill.
The Cool Cavern
© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer
THE MAD SCIENTISTS' CLUB 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 chan
ged 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.
New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club Page 3