"Stop here!" I shouted to Zeke, and Richard the Deep Breather shuddered to a full stall as he slammed on the brakes.
We all scrambled out of the truck, clambered through the barbed wire fence that separated the road from the pasture, and headed for a clump of big juniper bushes about twenty yards away. Two more shotgun blasts split the air, and we stuck our heads up above the juniper to see Joel Prendergast puffing and stumbling up the slope of the hill, blasting away at the Sorcerer whenever he could get within range. His wife was farther down the slope with a big stick in her hand, hoping to scare off their huge Holstein bull, who was snorting and pawing the ground, trying to find a way up to where all the excitement was. Their hired hand was floundering around somewhere to the rear of the bull, managing to keep out of the action and still look busy.
We crouched there behind the bush, wanting to dash out and save the Sorcerer, but knowing that we might get a seat full of buckshot if we did. We watched, helpless, as Joel Prendergast unloaded two more barrels and blasted a gaping hole in the side of the craft. The last of the helium escaped with a whoosh, and the once proud Sorcerer came crashing to the ground. You could hear the bamboo struts snapping loose inside her.
Just then the Holstein bull raised his nose in the air and gave out with a bellow that left no doubt of his intention. He pawed the ground twice, snorted loudly, then charged headlong up the slope toward the Sorcerer. Mrs. Prendergast scampered out of the way, and Joel barely made it to safety behind an outcropping of granite as a pair of flashing horns mounted on fourteen hundred pounds of muscle zipped past him and plowed head on into the fragile silk and bamboo hull. He went right through it, of course, and it collapsed around him. He was still bellowing and thrashing around inside the thing, trying to get his horns loose, when we crawled away from the juniper and made our way back through the pasture fence.
"What a mess!" said Mortimer Dalrymple, after we had gotten through the fence. "If that bull had any sense he'd have known that saucer might be full of little green men with death-ray guns, and all that stuff."
"That's what ignorance will do to you," said Henry. "You can't fool anybody who's really stupid."
Dinky Poore was blubbering, like he usually does when one of our projects comes a cropper; but this time it was worse, because he always felt The Flying Sorcerer had been built just for him and he had a very personal attachment to it. Homer Snodgrass tried to comfort him, but Dinky pushed him away.
"Phew! You stink!" he said.
"I do not!" Homer protested.
"Oh, yes you do," said Freddy Muldoon. "You sure don't smell like no rose."
"I must've stepped in something bad!" said Homer, trying to inspect his shoes in the darkness.
"I think you sat in it!" said Mortimer Dalrymple. "Just for that you'll have to ride on the running board. You're not getting in the back of the truck with me."
"Me, neither!" said Freddy Muldoon.
So Homer rode home standing up on the running board, while the rest of us stretched out in the back of Richard the Deep Breather and dreamed about real flying saucers and imaginary bulls.
The Great Confrontation
© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer
IT WAS WAR! Total war! Harmon Muldoon's gang had invaded practically every secret haunt of the Mad Scientists' Club.
We didn't mind so much when they started using the council ring on Indian Hill for their so-called secret meetings, because we could spy on them whenever we wanted to. And we really didn't care about them trying to rig up the old Harkness mansion with a lot of hoked-up gimmicks that were supposed to scare people. We had already gotten our laughs out of that one, and we knew that nobody in town really believed the place was haunted.
"They're just a buncha cheap copycats!" Dinky Poore had sneered, when we first heard about what they were doing.
But we began to get worried when we discovered they had taken the rusty old handcar out of the zinc mine and dumped it into the river where the big bend curves eastward about eight miles down the track. And finally, we knew they were bent on deliberate harassment when they raided our clubhouse in Jeff Crocker's barn early one Saturday morning and kidnapped Dinky and Harmon's cousin, Freddy Muldoon.
Jeff was the first one to learn of it, when he went out to the barn to do some work on a chemistry experiment he and Henry Mulligan were smelling the place up with. He didn't exactly find a ransom note, but you could call it the same thing. It was a message Harmon Muldoon had taped on one of our recorders, and then tapped into the circuit for opening our clubhouse door. The volume was turned on full blast.
To get into our clubhouse you have to know the diabolical system Henry Mulligan devised for springing the lock. First, you have to know where the photoelectric beam is located, and then you have to trigger it by intercepting the beam with your hand in the proper code sequence. Henry could set it up for any combination of Morse code signals, but this particular week we were using the SOS signal (... --- ...). For a dash, you held your hand in the beam for almost a full second. For a dot, you just flicked it through the beam as fast as you could. After you had given the proper code signal, you could hear the lock snap, and then you could push the door open.
But instead of the lock snapping open when Jeff triggered the beam, all he heard was the loud raspberry that Harmon Muldoon opened his message with:
PFFFFFFFFRRRRRMMMMPPPPH! IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHERE DINKY AND FREDDY ARE, YOU'LL HAVE TO GIVE US THE MIDGET SUBMARINE AND THE RIGHT TO USE THE COOL CAVERN. MAKE UP YOUR MINDS, CHUMS, CAUSE FREDDY WON'T HAVE NOTHING TO EAT WHERE HE'S GOING. LEAVE YOUR ANSWER UNDER A ROCK BEHIND THE CANNON AT MEMORIAL POINT.
Jeff kicked the door open, which wasn't locked at all, and hooked up the tape recorder properly again, so he could rerun the tape. There were two things Harmon Muldoon didn't understand, he figured. One was that the Cool Cavern had been blocked off ever since a big piece of the ledge had broken off Mammoth Falls, and the only way to get in there was through the underwater passage. The other thing was that Freddy Muldoon never went anywhere without two bologna sandwiches hidden somewhere in his clothing. He'd even been known to keep one in his shoe. This made a pretty flat sandwich, but with Freddy it was the calories that counted.
Jeff sat for a long while on Henry Mulligan's old piano stool, with one hand propped under his chin, just thinking. Every time he shifted position and spun the seat of the stool around, he made a mental note to tell Henry to oil the thing. It squeaked like the lid of a used coffin.
Finally, Jeff got up off the stool and threw the switch that activates the panic buzzer in the house of every member of the Mad Scientists' Club. As president, Jeff Crocker has authority to call an emergency meeting without pushing the panic button like the rest of us have to; but this time he felt it was important to get us all together as fast as possible.
While the members of the Mad Scientists' Club were scrambling to their bicycles to head for Jeff Crocker's barn, Dinky and Freddy were standing on the shore of a small island way out in Strawberry Lake, shouting insults at a retreating rowboat. Harmon Muldoon and Stony Martin were waving farewell to the two figures on the shore from the rear seat of the boat, while Buzzy McCauliffe pulled a steady oar toward a cove in the northwest corner of the lake. Dinky and Freddy were still hurling abuses into the wind when the rowboat disappeared around a rocky point a good mile away.
"Whatta we do now?" Dinky wailed, as the tail end of the rowboat went out of sight.
"Wait'll I get my hands on that Harmon," Freddy muttered, shaking his pudgy fist in the direction of the shoreline. "Just let me get my hands around his neck just once, and I'll sure make his ears pop!"
"Seems to me like you had plenty of chance just now," Dinky observed.
"Yeah? Well, I just wasn't ready," Freddy grunted, as he took a sidewise swipe at a small rock and kicked it thirty feet into the water. "Oh boy!" he chortled, "When I get through with him, even Daphne won't recognize him."
> Daphne is Harmon Muldoon's sister, and she's pretty sleek. She's even prettier than Stony Martin's girl friend, Melissa Plunkett. And her teeth don't stick out in front, like Melissa's do.
"Oh boy! Oh boy!" Freddy muttered again through tightly pressed lips, as he ran up the narrow beach and took another vicious swipe at a larger rock. The rock didn't move, and Freddy hopped around in the sand holding his right foot in one hand and bellowing like a mad bull.
"Let's knock off the comedy and figure out what we're gonna do," Dinky said impatiently, as he plunked himself down in the sand and adopted the pose of The Thinker. "We're marooned, and nobody knows where we are," he added dramatically.
Both Freddy and Dinky can swim, but not very far; and the closest point of the shoreline was more than a half mile away. Of course, Freddy can float forever, but he doesn't make much progress unless somebody pushes him.
"Maybe we could built a raft," Dinky mused.
"With what?" Freddy sneered. "We ain't even got an axe, and no nails or nothin'."
"We could build one if we had enough ingenuity," said Dinky.
"Injun what?"
"In-gen-oo-it-tee, stupid!"
"I never heard a' that stuff. Will it float real good?"
"You fat dummy!" Dinky snorted, as he threw a handful of sand at Freddy's head. Freddy threw a handful right back and caught Dinky with his mouth open.
"Well, you're always such a big Indian expert, I thought maybe you had something real good in your noodle -- like a birch bark canoe or somethin'."
"How we gonna make a canoe, when we can't even make a raft?" Dinky sputtered, as he tried to get the sand out of his teeth. "Sometimes you make me sick!"
"Well, we can't stay here forever," said Freddy. "Pretty soon it'll be lunch time, and I gotta eat."
"Whew!" said Dinky. "Is that all you ever think about? I can see you risin' up in your coffin and askin' for a sandwich before they bury you."
"At least I ain't skinny as you!" Freddy replied.
"C'mon. Let's take a walk around the island," said Dinky. "Maybe we can find an old log that'll float, and we can drag it out into the water."
Half an hour later they flopped down on the sand again on the same stretch of beach where the rowboat had left them. There just wasn't anything loose on that island that would float.
Freddy took his shoes off and worked his bare toes into the sand.
"Boy, that feels good. Hey! Why don't we build a fire and send up smoke signals. Somebody'll see 'em and come out and rescue us."
"Nuts!" said Dinky.
"Why not? I've seen you start a fire with nothin' at all. And you know all them Indian smoke signals too."
"Nobody'll pay any attention to any smoke signals," said Dinky. "People are building campfires on these islands all the time, for picnics. We'd have to set the whole island on fire before it would attract attention."
"Maybe somebody would notice it if we built a big fire at night."
"I don't figure on spending the night here," said Dinky, as he jumped to his feet. "I just had an idea!"
From his pocket Dinky pulled a scuffed-up leather marble pouch, pulled the thong loose, and spilled the contents on the ground. Three beautiful agates, two steelies, and a small red-eye rolled into a crevice in the sand. A little shaking brought out two fish hooks, a ball of line, a GI can opener, and a bright metal object with a hole in it that looked like it might be some kind of whistle.
"What's that?" asked Freddy.
"That's a dog whistle."
"Whatta ya gonna do with it?"
"I'm gonna blow on it," said Dinky. And he did.
Freddy Muldoon squinted his eyes up into narrow slits. "I don't hear nothin'. Nothin' at all."
"You're not supposed to," said Dinky. "But a dog can hear it. Dogs have real good ears."
"Oh, you're. real smart," said Freddy. "But there's just one thing wrong. I don't see no dogs around here."
"Wait and see!" said Dinky. And he kept blowing on the whistle until Freddy thought he had gone daft.
Back at Zeke Boniface's junkyard, on the edge of town, there was the usual assortment of Saturday morning lookers and scavengers trying to find whatever it was they were looking for. Zeke was lying flat on his back in a hammock, under the shade of a corrugated tin roof, puffing on the stub of a cigar. His battered black bowler hat was tilted over his eyes just far enough so it would keep the glare out and still let him see Kaiser Bill, his German shepherd dog. Zeke didn't have to watch the customers. Kaiser Bill took care of that, and Zeke just watched Kaiser Bill.
Kaiser Bill was stretched out flat on his belly in the hot sun, with his jet black muzzle resting on his paws. The golden brown fur above his eyes was wrinkled into a soft frown, and his keen brown eyes shifted tirelessly back and forth, tracking the movements of every two-legged creature on the lot. Nobody ever left Zeke's junkyard without checking in at the hammock to haggle over the price of what he wanted to take with him, or at least to say good-bye.
It was a normal Saturday morning. Or, so it seemed -- until Zeke noticed a peculiar change in Kaiser Bill's behavior. The dog hadn't moved a muscle for fifteen minutes; but suddenly the coarse whiskers on his jowls fanned outwards and stood erect, pointing slightly forward. Then the magnificent ears perked up and rotated to the front. The wrinkles on his brow deepened into a frown of real concern, and he lifted his head from his paws and arched his neck. Then, like a shot, he was off across the junkyard; and with one great scrambling leap he was over the seven foot fence and off into the woods.
Zeke sat bolt upright and the hammock flipped violently, plopping him face-down into the dust. He picked himself up, beating the dust off his trousers with his black derby and spitting out the fragments of the cigar stub he had almost swallowed.
"What in tarnation got into him?" he sputtered, while a chorus of raucous laughter fell on his ears.
"Maybe he just remembered an important date!" one of the customers cried.
"Maybe he just heard Lassie was in town!"
"I'll bet he just wanted to get a manicure before the barber shop closed!" said another wiseacre.
Zeke got a lot of screamingly funny comments, but no offers of help to find out where Kaiser Bill went. He flopped his huge bulk into the hammock again, and lighted up a fresh cigar stub.
It was only fifteen minutes later that Dinky saw the dog plunge into the water from a point on the lake shore opposite the island. "C'mon, Kaiser! C'mon!" he shouted, clapping his hands as loudly as he could.
"Hey! That looks like Kaiser Bill!" said Freddy, jumping up and down.
"As usual, you take the cake," said Dinky. "What did you think I was blowing that whistle for?"
Soon Kaiser Bill galloped ashore on the tiny beach, spread his four feet far apart, and shook a spray of water twenty feet in both directions. Then he bounded toward Dinky, rose up on his rear legs and thumped his forepaws on Dinky's chest. Dinky ruffled his ears and kissed him on his black snout.
"Boy, am I glad to see you!" he said.
Kaiser Bill spun around twice, then flopped on his belly in the sand and lay there panting heavily, with his tongue hanging out of the left side of his mouth.
"I gotta admit you pulled a good one with that whistle," said Freddy, "but what do we do now? Now we got three of us marooned on this island."
"I didn't call him out here just for nothin'," said Dinky.
"Well, whatta we gonna do? Get on his back and ride him to shore?"
"Nope! He's gonna carry a message for us."
"Good idea! I suppose you got a pencil and a piece of paper?"
Dinky looked flustered for a moment. "No, I don't have a pencil," he admitted. "But if you'll lend me your knife I can carve out a message on a piece of bark."
"You flunked out again," said Freddy. "I don't have a knife."
"You mean you came all the way out here without your knife?"
"I didn't know I was coming!" Freddy retorted. "Besides, where is your knife?"
/> "None of your business!" said Dinky. And he kicked a few stones into the water.
Freddy perched himself on a flat rock in the shade of a young maple and pulled a bologna sandwich out of his shirt. He was just unwrapping the wax paper from it when Dinky spun around at the sound and pointed a finger right at him.
"That's just what we need!" he cried.
"Whadda ya mean? This here hunk of paper?"
"No! I mean the whole sandwich. Paper and all."
"Nothin' doin'. If you want some lunch, you gotta bring your own."
"I don't want any lunch," said Dinky, "but we can use that sandwich to send a message."
"You must be nuts!"
"Listen! We could send that sandwich with Kaiser Bill, and Zeke would know it was one of your sandwiches and come looking for us."
"Now I know you're nuts!" said Freddy, biting a corner off the sandwich. "That big ball of fur would swallow it in one gulp before he got across the lake."
"He can't eat it if we tie it around his neck," Dinky reasoned.
"Too risky," said Freddy, taking another bite. "Besides, I need my lunch."
"You and your lunch!" Dinky fumed. "What would you rather be, a dead fat boy, or a live skinny one?"
"I'll have to think that over," Freddy answered, licking the mustard off his lips.
"Gimme that sandwich!" Dinky shouted, and he lunged straight at Freddy with all the fury his seventy pounds could muster. Freddy met him with a stiff-arm right in the chest and he bounced back ten feet, sprawling full-length in the sand. But he was up in a flash and threw a handful of sand at Freddy. Freddy grabbed a handful of the stuff himself, and poised to throw it -- but it never left his hand. A deep-throated snarl stopped his hand in midair, and he found himself looking into the menacing eyes of Kaiser Bill.
Freddy retreated a step, holding the half eaten sandwich high above his head. Kaiser Bill moved forward an equal distance, with the hair on his black saddle standing erect.
"Get outta here!" Freddy blustered, but his voice quavered and Kaiser Bill moved a step closer with his lips curled in another snarl.
New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club Page 12