Part 26 (1/2)
Hopelessly Fred tossed his arms heavenward.
”Open a case!” he roared.
At ten o'clock, when they were still at table and reaching a state of such mutual appreciation that soon they would be calling each other by their first names, Gridley brought in a written message he had taken from the telephone. It was a long-distance call from Yonkers, sent by James, the faithful chauffeur.
Fred read it aloud.
”I got that party the articles he needed,” it read, ”and saw him safe on a train to Boston. On the way back I got arrested for speeding the car on the way down. Please send money. I am in a cell in Yonkers.”
Chapter 8. THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF
Before he finally arrested him, ”Jimmie” Sniffen had seen the man with the golf-cap, and the blue eyes that laughed at you, three times. Twice, unexpectedly, he had come upon him in a wood road and once on Round Hill where the stranger was pretending to watch the sunset. Jimmie knew people do not climb hills merely to look at sunsets, so he was not deceived. He guessed the man was a German spy seeking gun sites, and secretly vowed to ”stalk” him. From that moment, had the stranger known it, he was as good as dead. For a boy scout with badges on his sleeve for ”stalking” and ”path-finding,” not to boast of others for ”gardening” and ”cooking,” can outwit any spy. Even had, General Baden-Powell remained in Mafeking and not invented the boy scout, Jimmie Sniffen would have been one. Because, by birth he was a boy, and by inheritance, a scout. In Westchester County the Sniffens are one of the county families. If it isn't a Sarles, it's a Sniffen; and with Brundages, Platts, and Jays, the Sniffens date back to when the acres of the first Charles Ferris ran from the Boston post road to the coach road to Albany, and when the first Gouverneur Morris stood on one of his hills and saw the Indian canoes in the Hudson and in the Sound and rejoiced that all the land between belonged to him.
If you do not believe in heredity, the fact that Jimmie's great-great-grandfather was a scout for General Was.h.i.+ngton and hunted deer, and even bear, over exactly the same hills where Jimmie hunted weasles will count for nothing. It will not explain why to Jimmie, from Tarrytown to Port Chester, the hills, the roads, the woods, and the cow-paths, caves, streams, and springs hidden in the woods were as familiar as his own kitchen garden, nor explain why, when you could not see a Pease and Elliman ”For Sale” sign nailed to a tree, Jimmie could see in the highest branches a last year's bird's nest.
Or why, when he was out alone playing Indians and had sunk his scout's axe into a fallen log and then scalped the log, he felt that once before in those same woods he had trailed that same Indian, and with his own tomahawk split open his skull. Sometimes when he knelt to drink at a secret spring in the forest, the autumn leaves would crackle and he would raise his eyes fearing to see a panther facing him.
”But there ain't no panthers in Westchester,” Jimmie would rea.s.sure himself. And in the distance the roar of an automobile climbing a hill with the m.u.f.fler open would seem to suggest he was right. But still Jimmie remembered once before he had knelt at that same spring, and that when he raised his eyes he had faced a crouching panther. ”Mebbe dad told me it happened to grandpop,” Jimmie would explain, ”or I dreamed it, or, mebbe, I read it in a story book.”
The ”German spy” mania attacked Round Hill after the visit to the boy scouts of Clavering Gould, the war correspondent. He was spending the week end with ”Squire” Harry Van Vorst, and as young Van Vorst, besides being a justice of the peace and a Master of Beagles and President of the Country Club, was also a local ”councilman” for the Round Hill Scouts, he brought his guest to a camp-fire meeting to talk to them. In deference to his audience, Gould told them of the boy scouts he had seen in Belgium and of the part they were playing in the great war. It was his peroration that made trouble.
”And any day,” he a.s.sured his audience, ”this country may be at war with Germany; and every one of you boys will be expected to do his bit. You can begin now. When the Germans land it will be near New Haven, or New Bedford. They will first capture the munition works at Springfield, Hartford, and Watervliet so as to make sure of their ammunition, and then they will start for New York City. They will follow the New Haven and New York Central railroads, and march straight through this village.
I haven't the least doubt,” exclaimed the enthusiastic war prophet, ”that at this moment German spies are as thick in Westchester as blackberries. They are here to select camp sites and gun positions, to find out which of these hills enfilade the others and to learn to what extent their armies can live on the country. They are counting the cows, the horses, the barns where fodder is stored; and they are marking down on their maps the wells and streams.”
As though at that moment a German spy might be crouching behind the door, Mr. Gould spoke in a whisper. ”Keep your eyes open!” he commanded.
”Watch every stranger. If he acts suspiciously, get word quick to your sheriff, or to Judge Van Vorst here. Remember the scouts' motto, 'Be prepared!'”
That night as the scouts walked home, behind each wall and hayrick they saw spiked helmets.
Young Van Vorst was extremely annoyed.
”Next time you talk to my scouts,” he declared, ”you'll talk on 'Votes for Women.' After what you said to-night every real estate agent who dares open a map will be arrested. We're not trying to drive people away from Westchester, we're trying to sell them building sites.”
”YOU are not!” retorted his friend, ”you own half the county now, and you're trying to buy the other half.”
”I'm a justice of the peace,” explained Van Vorst. ”I don't know WHY I am, except that they wished it on me. All I get out of it is trouble.
The Italians make charges against my best friends for overspeeding and I have to fine them, and my best friends bring charges against the Italians for poaching, and when I fine the Italians, they send me Black Hand letters. And now every day I'll be asked to issue a warrant for a German spy who is selecting gun sites. And he will turn out to be a millionaire who is tired of living at the Ritz-Carlton and wants to 'own his own home' and his own golf-links. And he'll be so hot at being arrested that he'll take his millions to Long Island and try to break into the Piping Rock Club. And, it will be your fault!”
The young justice of the peace was right. At least so far as Jimmie Sniffen was concerned, the words of the war prophet had filled one mind with unrest. In the past Jimmie's idea of a holiday had been to spend it scouting in the woods. In this pleasure he was selfish. He did not want companions who talked, and trampled upon the dead leaves so that they frightened the wild animals and gave the Indians warning. Jimmie liked to pretend. He liked to fill the woods with wary and hostile adversaries. It was a game of his own inventing. If he crept to the top of a hill and on peering over it, surprised a fat woodchuck, he pretended the woodchuck was a bear, weighing two hundred pounds; if, himself un.o.bserved, he could lie and watch, off its guard, a rabbit, squirrel, or, most difficult of all, a crow, it became a deer and that night at supper Jimmie made believe he was eating venison. Sometimes he was a scout of the Continental Army and carried despatches to General Was.h.i.+ngton. The rules of that game were that if any man ploughing in the fields, or cutting trees in the woods, or even approaching along the same road, saw Jimmie before Jimmie saw him, Jimmie was taken prisoner, and before sunrise was shot as a spy. He was seldom shot. Or else why on his sleeve was the badge for ”stalking.” But always to have to make believe became monotonous. Even ”dry shopping” along the Rue de la Paix when you pretend you can have anything you see in any window, leaves one just as rich, but unsatisfied. So the advice of the war correspondent to seek out German spies came to Jimmie like a day at the circus, like a week at the Danbury Fair. It not only was a call to arms, to protect his flag and home, but a chance to play in earnest the game in which he most delighted. No longer need he pretend. No longer need he waste his energies in watching, un.o.bserved, a greedy rabbit rob a carrot field.
The game now was his fellow-man and his enemy; not only his enemy, but the enemy of his country.
In his first effort Jimmie was not entirely successful. The man looked the part perfectly; he wore an auburn beard, disguising spectacles, and he carried a suspicious knapsack. But he turned out to be a professor from the Museum of Natural History, who wanted to dig for Indian arrow-heads. And when Jimmie threatened to arrest him, the indignant gentleman arrested Jimmie. Jimmie escaped only by leading the professor to a secret cave of his own, though on some one else's property, where one not only could dig for arrow-heads, but find them. The professor was delighted, but for Jimmie it was a great disappointment. The week following Jimmie was again disappointed.
On the bank of the Kensico Reservoir, he came upon a man who was acting in a mysterious and suspicious manner. He was making notes in a book, and his runabout which he had concealed in a wood road was stuffed with blue-prints. It did not take Jimmie long to guess his purpose. He was planning to blow up the Kensico dam, and cut off the water supply of New York City. Seven millions of people without water! With out firing a shot, New York must surrender! At the thought Jimmie shuddered, and at the risk of his life by clinging to the tail of a motor truck, he followed the runabout into White Plains. But there it developed the mysterious stranger, so far from wis.h.i.+ng to destroy the Kensico dam, was the State Engineer who had built it, and, also, a large part of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Nor in his third effort was Jimmie more successful. From the heights of Pound Ridge he discovered on a hilltop below him a man working alone upon a basin of concrete. The man was a German-American, and already on Jimmie's list of ”suspects.” That for the use of the German artillery he was preparing a concrete bed for a siege gun was only too evident. But closer investigation proved that the concrete was only two inches thick. And the hyphenated one explained that the basin was built over a spring, in the waters of which he planned to erect a fountain and raise gold fish. It was a bitter blow. Jimmie became discouraged. Meeting Judge Van Vorst one day in the road he told him his troubles. The young judge proved unsympathetic. ”My advice to you, Jimmie,” he said, ”is to go slow. Accusing everybody of espionage is a very serious matter. If you call a man a spy, it's sometimes hard for him to disprove it; and the name sticks. So, go slow--very slow. Before you arrest any more people, come to me first for a warrant.”
So, the next time Jimmie proceeded with caution.
Besides being a farmer in a small way, Jimmie's father was a handy man with tools. He had no union card, but, in laying s.h.i.+ngles along a blue chalk line, few were as expert. It was August, there was no school, and Jimmie was carrying a dinner-pail to where his father was at work on a new barn. He made a cross-cut through the woods, and came upon the young man in the golf-cap. The stranger nodded, and his eyes, which seemed to be always laughing, smiled pleasantly. But he was deeply tanned, and, from the waist up, held himself like a soldier, so, at once, Jimmie mistrusted him. Early the next morning Jimmie met him again. It had not been raining, but the clothes of the young man were damp. Jimmie guessed that while the dew was still on the leaves the young man had been forcing his way through underbrush. The stranger must have remembered Jimmie, for he laughed and exclaimed:
”Ah, my friend with the dinner-pail! It's luck you haven't got it now, or I'd hold you up. I'm starving!”