The box from japan, p.61
The Box from Japan, page 61
At length, however, Baxter rose suddenly and pressed the button on the end of the seat.
“Now we go a-hiking,” he announced in a low voice. “Here’s where we maroon ourselves completely from civilization. I suppose Hans Brinker of the wooden shoes is fast asleep by now!”
Halsey followed him from the car. That vehicle, with its three remaining lone passengers, whirred quickly away, its tail lights disappearing in a stretch of woods. And now they were quite alone in the wilderness. Halsey looked about him in the cool night air. The single track full of bumps and curves running in either direction; a sunbaked waiting station composed merely of a wooden bench and a pagoda-shaped roof creaking in the breeze; a well rolled road of crushed stone crossing the tracks at right angles; a now slightly cloud-mottled sky that dipped into a tree-broken horizon on all sides.
Baxter looked at his watch. “Good heavens—what a ride!” he exclaimed irritably. “Nobody but a man with a half dozen Packingson-12’s, and a dozen Cyclopses, and two dozen Cado-Merling one-seater planes, could afford the time to live out in this Weedville!”
He glanced about him a moment as though to make sure of his bearings, and then with a nod of his head struck off north ward along the road that crossed the track. It was well kept, and far to the south of them the twinkling green tail lights of an automobile showed that it was by no means without traffic. They tramped along in silence for a while, each man’s thoughts undisturbed by any sound other than the crunch of their footsteps and the buzz of the millions of nocturnal insects. Soon they came to the end of a long field of lettuce and carrots, and Halsey saw that they were confronted by a narrower, poorer road, with great ruts in the dried mud, and rickety fence posts on either side. The moon, coming out for a moment from behind the edge of a scurrying cloud behind which it had partially hidden, showed a pole bearing a faded sign which read: Keegan’s Road—Private. On the opposite side, a farmer’s rickety house sat far back from where they stood. Its windows were dark, each and every one. It was plain that its Hollandish occupants believed that early to bed and early to rise, made a field of carrots its owners could prize!
“That’s the place,” said Baxter in a low voice, inclining his head toward it, “where the Dutch truck gardener lives who gave me what information I was able to get this morning. Indeed,” he added, “this is as far as I tried to go this afternoon. Now, Halse, we’ll turn off for the big tour of exploration. We don’t know exactly where we’re going; so no use of floundering through fields and groves. If by any chance we pass anybody, start arguing about the Desplaines River; claim vehemently that it must be west of here, and I’ll indignantly deny it!”
With a nod, but no words, the younger man followed the older as the newspaperman led the way up Keegan Road. The rickety house across from the intersection shrank in their rear and suddenly vanished as the road curved quite definitely, and on top of that carried them through a great towering grove of poplar trees, so high and thick that they threw a stygian blackness over its heat-hardened surface. They came out again, however, in the clear. And they continued to trudge along in silence. Presently the unstable fence posts gave way to more erect, newer ones, strung with straighter, firmer wire. It was plain that they were now passing the boundary line between that part of the estate which had been long out of use and cultivation, and the part in which some effort had been made to keep it in repair.
A sudden sharp turn in the road almost at right angles, marked with another cluster of thick poplars both sides, brought into their view, as soon as they cleared it, an irregular blot against the sky that appeared to mark the end of the passage. The blot was indisputably a large, generously sized manor house, or country residence. No lights were visible, however, exactly as in the case of the Dutchman’s residence. Baxter moved over to the shadow of the fence.
“There’s Carleton McCollum’s residence beyond doubt,” he announced. “Now, Halse, no more talking unless it’s absolutely necessary. Ears open—eyes open—but lips closed, Moon’s concealing itself again. So we’ll creep along in the shadow of the fence from this point on. Just follow me, and when Lady Luna comes out, squat down on your haunches and wait until things gloom up a bit.” And with these words he took the lead, tramping along in the high weeds at the edge of the roadside.
They came nearer the house, and still nearer. When they were within some five hundred feet a bare corner of the moon emerged and the blot against the sky resolved itself into a spacious residence, painted some somber color, with a broad piazza, and with old-fashioned elongated windows, entirely dark, but reflecting the fragmentary moonlight from their glass panes. There were several outbuildings, one of which, well on their side of the house, was obviously a barn; and another of which, equally as far from the house on the other side, was, judging from the wide smooth concrete path that led from it to an iron gate at the roadside, a two-car garage, but whether of stucco, cement, or stone could not be determined. Baxter waited a moment till Halsey came up with him.
“All quiet on the Potomac, this side,” he said in a low voice. “The hand of Nimbus himself is ready to pass over that moon now. Notice? So while it does, let’s skirt the front of that manor in a hurry and get to where we can see ’tother side.”
The moon went dark at that moment. They increased the speed of their progress, grasping the taut wire of the fence at times to guide their way through the tall weeds. They could hardly see the house as they passed it. In a jiffy they were on the other side of it. And getting farther from it. But a different picture was presented now. For the blot was punctuated by bright lights, windows! They squatted down low as the moon shone through a rift in that cloud.
“Do you notice,” the older man whispered now, pointing at the square cement structure which was now as near to them as the barn had been before, “that that garage is up on stilts a foot and a half above the ground?” He whipped out his opera glasses hastily, adjusted them rapidly, replaced them. “In fact, Halse, it stands right in a sort of hollow, with a short runway connecting its front doors to solid land. I’m thinking that right under that garage, on our tummies, we can lie and pike off this place to our heart’s content; it’ll give us a bully orchestra circle view of this new side of the house and surrounding grounds. And do you notice,” Baxter was continuing, in the same low voice, “that Keegan Road ends dead up there just two hundred feet or less from us?” He pointed at it. A series of wires, with turf or pasture land beyond, showed that Keegan’s Road was no more. “And do you notice that there seems to be some activity going on in our new side of the ex-Keegan mansion; that every second or so there’s a black shadow crosses one of the windows?”
“I do,” said Halsey gravely. “So let’s make for the orchestra circle!”
CHAPTER LI
Wherein Two Onlookers Constitute an Interested Audience
A heavy cloud of unusually large dimensions now took the place of the broken one that had been in front of the moon, entirely obscuring that cheerful satellite again at this instant. Baxter lost no time in taking advantage of it by lifting up one of the wires of the fence and clambering under. Halsey followed suit. The newspaperman crept over into direct line with the cement garage so that they would not be seen from the lighted windows in case the moon emerged too suddenly. For several hundred feet they scurried along in a stooping position. Nearer and nearer they approached the garage, or at least the side of it which did not face the house. At length Baxter dropped down on his hands and knees, crawled forward a few feet, and suddenly disappeared within the scant space below the garage floor.
Halsey duplicated the maneuver. As he crawled in under the edge of the cement building, his body slithering slightly forward at the same time, he found himself not only partly choked by clouds of dry dust, but in such a cramped position that he could not even move on his hands and knees. But he managed to wriggle forward toward the broad band of light which marked the opposite side of the garage floor, and came to a stop when he collided with Baxter’s heels. Drawing himself up till he was lying side by side with the newspaperman, to the latter’s left, he flattened out. He lay on his chest not more than four feet from the edge. Here, in complete security, a splendid view of the big house not a hundred feet off, was offered. His eyes, sweeping around from his prostrate position, took in several large fields back of the house; but the fence which undoubtedly had once cut off the largest and closest field of all—that one which faced the side of the old country mansion just as much as it lay rearward—had evidently been removed, for now the field in question was just a continuation—a bellying out—of the side yard itself—that side yard which contained the very garage where Halsey and Baxter were hidden. And that it had been a commodious pasture land at one time was indicated by the presence in it, not so far off from the house indeed, of an old rusty iron windmill, whose wheel creaked dismally.
Baxter, lying on his stomach next to Halsey, made no effort to talk now. There did indeed seem to be considerable activity going on. Figures passed back and forth against the windows, of which every one in the place, it seemed, except one on the first floor, was lighted up. Once or twice voices emanating from the interior could be faintly heard. A glance toward the cellar windows, made possible by several large but apparently dusty light bulbs suspended from its ceiling, showed Halsey an indistinct view of two little whirring electrical generators, each about two feet high, of which one, however, might have been a motor-generator seen only end to; a series of differently sized transformers with their characteristic multiple heat-radiating flanges, each mounted on a bright new pine post near the windows themselves so as no doubt to attain its maximum capabilities in getting rid of the heat evolved in it due to stepping up alternating currents in its windings; and several long tiers of ponderous wood-encased storage batteries, each cell of which was at least one and a half feet high. Far, far back of the rotating electrical machinery and the silent, rigid transformers came the rhythmical chugging of a powerful gasoline engine. It was evident, if one discounted the presence of the transformers on their comparatively new supporting posts, and took into consideration only the balance of the cellar equipment, or even perhaps one generator alone and the storage batteries, that Keegan, the original owner of the place, had installed a generous number of electric bulbs and outlets, and had taken care to have a plant large enough in capacity to run them all at one time if needs be.
Fumbling in the side pocket of his coat, Halsey managed to bring forth his field glasses. Already he could see that the man next to him was focussing his own lenses on the few details that lay in front of them. Adjusting the screw, he brought his attention to bear more closely on the machinery in the cellar, and found that he was able not only to read the brass plates on each piece, proclaiming the leftmost one to be a generator alone and the right to be, indeed, a motor-generator, but to note how the brightly colored armature windings of the latter lazied their way circularly around and around, seemingly drifting, as it were, about the machine’s own axle.
As he was thinking of the time, and figuring that it must be between 9:15 and 9:30 by now, his perplexed study of the machinery was interrupted by the opening of a side door in the big house. For the fraction of a moment three figures were bathed in the bright light that poured out of the rectangular opening. Halsey, studying them without the aid of the field glasses, caught his breath sharply. One was a huge, portly man with a square-cut brown goatee and a brown mustache, tallying exactly with the description of the man with the vanishing Cyclops car who had struck down Miss Loris. One was the bent Jap who had called at Tower Court twice in the last two days, and the third was a strapping young fellow with nut-brown, extremely mahogany complexion, stolid face, badly pockmarked as Halsey saw, bringing his field glasses hastily to play, wearing a wide-brimmed flapping straw hat, and clad in overalls and belted hickory shirt with a suspicious bulge in one side like the handle of a knife.
A few spoken words from the man in the goatee, and the door closed. The Jap and the mahogany, pockmarked fellow came across the space intervening between the house and the garage, and presently Halsey could hear the garage doors slide open and the sound of footsteps rumbling across the floor above his head. He nudged Baxter in the dark and felt the latter’s answering nudge.
Presently something began to roll as though on metal wheels. The rolling continued. It seemed to be from left to right—in the direction of the open garage doors. It rattled across the short runway connecting the garage doorway with solid land. And a second later the pockmarked fellow hove into view past the corner of the little cement structure dragging a most peculiar cart. The wheels of the vehicle were low, and evidently taken from some old piece of farm machinery; the body was but a great platform made of white pine planks. On the end was a winch, fitted with drum, gear wheels, and two handles. Laid out over the platform was a mass of what appeared in the now plentiful moonlight to be yellow canvas folded carefully and turned in around the edge. A second later the Jap appeared and laying hold of the metal tongue of the low cart, laboriously bent his energies toward helping the other drag it over the soft turf.
The two men, bent low against the tongue, the pockmarked fellow evidently providing most of the strength, propelled the low cart across the grass, leftward past Baxter and Halsey, concealed not ten feet away from them, and directly into that open pasture-like field which partly faced the side of the house, and lay partly in back of it as well. There they placed their rolling burden meticulously at one end of the unobstructed space, with a peculiar exactitude it seemed, and Halsey, adjusting his binoculars now closer as an added spurt of moonlight came on, saw that they were performing a queer operation: they were hooking each iron wheel, by some curious sort of clamp, to four iron anchor bolts which appeared to have been sunken in the ground at some former date. This done, they returned together over the path they had already traveled.
Again perfectly audible words followed—words so audible that Halsey felt gingerly upward above his head well to one side of him, and detected a crumbled open spot in the garage floor that must have been a half square foot in diameter. But though the words themselves were distinct to the least syllables, they were but fragments of short, crisp directions and rnutual orders couched in broken Japanese English and slurring Mexicaneze-English, and they were immediately followed by more rolling again. This time both men appeared, dragging a peculiar mechanical contrivance fitted with bright wheels and cylinders and carrying on the end what was undoubtedly a small completely metal-encased electric motor, no more than a foot high. This combination of mechanical and electrical devices, unlike the previously conveyed luggage, rested also on a low cart made by fitting broad iron farm implement wheels to a light wooden platform. Over the turf fronting the side of the house, and rearward of it, they proceeded to drag their burden, and were soon backing it into juxtaposition with the larger platform they had left standing at the end of the field.
The Mexican, for such he undoubtedly was, leaned over, and Halsey, watching him again from his field glasses as the moon emerged conveniently at this second from a cloud, saw that the other had picked up the end of what appeared to be a long, long threadlike flexible cable visible only over the tops of the knolls or gently rolling surfaces in the field, and leading doubtlessly to the cellar of the house; a cable to which two copper lugs were connected: they must have been plugs of some sort, for the other stuck them into apertures in a small ebony panel mounted rigidly to the end of the latter cart.
Whatever switch was on that panel, however, was not thrown. For back again the two men trudged to the garage far what appeared to be a third trip. This time the lusty pockmarked fellow appeared trundling a commodious wheelbarrow on which stood a heavy keg and a great wood-encased bottle with a triangular top. Halsey recognized the latter at once as an acid container.
Within a few minutes the wheelbarrow containing the keg and the acid container stood close to the peculiar mechanical contrivance of wheels and cylinders. This accomplished, the two men appeared to be puttering around the mechanism, and once, as the moon was swallowed up completely, they lighted a lantern and worked by it.
At this juncture of operations the side door to the house opened again, and the man of the brown goatee appeared in the shaft of light. He paused a moment and then, propping open the door, came down the short flight of steps lugging a most odd-appearing contrivance. It seemed to be a huge gridwork made by soldering seven or eight thin metal bars at right angles to seven or eight more. The bright gleam of the metal in the shaft of light was that of polished copper; the squares between adjacent strands of the gridwork were a foot and a half wide; the whole was taller than the man who carried it. Handling it with a great deal of dexterity, he managed to transfer it across the open space to where the Jap and the pockmarked fellow were working, but there all their actions and the many carts became merged into confusion for the two men hiding under the garage floor.
Neither dared speak. Both were tense at the drama, whatever it exactly was, that they were witnessing out in this lonely territory on an unused road. And when next the moon appeared bright and unmarked by a cloud, Halsey could see that the biggest of the three figures, the man with the goatee, was unrolling a gleaming flexible copper wire from the canvas-covered movable platform over to the base of the windmill.
Reaching the base of the creaking, whining structure, where a rusty metal ladder appeared to run from the bottom clear to the top of the tapering iron network, the goateed man kept on uncoiling the flexible wire into a neat pile; uncoiling it, indeed, until a vivid white-painted streak coming into his hands appeared to announce that a proper length now lay available on the ground; with which he deposited the rest of his wire near-by, flung over his neck the long strand he had been unrolling, and went up the ladder of the windmill with the greatest of agility, hand over hand. Within a few seconds he had reached the top, and Halsey quickly brought his glasses to bear on the performance. There, for the first time, the younger man beneath the garage floor became aware of something that thus far had escaped his attention: a huge gleaming glass insulator was affixed to a wooden peg at the very top of the mill. Conditions were now perfect for seeing, so perfect, that he could perceive that the man of the goatee was deftly tying the flexible copper wire to the insulator, and then coming down the ladder, half sliding, half climbing. Reaching the ground the latter picked up the further section of the wire not as yet permanently and measurably deposited on the ground, and continued on toward the house, pausing a moment at the open window which was still dark to toss in the few yards or so remaining.
