"It"s a place, that"s all I know," Connie piped up.
"Come on, let"s wake up the kid," Wig said; "and take a stroll around.
It looks to me like a ball field or something like that. Anyway, those are tents over there."
We didn"t dare to start out without Pee-wee, so we shook him up and dragged him up and down the aisle and played football with him, and at last he let out a long groan and we knew we had him started.
"Wh-a-a-t--where--am I?" he yawned.
"We were just going to have a game of one o"cat with you," I told him; "wake up, it"s twenty years later; the peace treaty has just been signed."
"Who signed it?" he gasped.
"I did," I said; "come on, get up."
If you can once get him on his feet, he usually stays up. I said, "We"re in a land of mystery; we"ve got Alice in Wonderland tearing her hair from jealousy. I think we"re in somebody"s back yard."
"Where"s the train?" he asked.
"It went down the street to get a soda," I said.
That opened his eyes all right. "Can you get sodas around here?" he shouted.
We got hold of a chunk of wood and blocked one of the car wheels and then started out. We couldn"t see very well in the dark, but we made out that the high fence went all the way around a great big flat field.
There was a kind of a wide road around near the fence. The tracks ran right up under that building that we had seen ahead of us, into a kind of a tunnel. We saw it was an ice-house, and I guess ice was loaded onto cars there.
The two white things that we had seen were tents and there was a light in one of them, but we didn"t go in. There were little buildings around, but they were closed up. There was a kind of a big platform with a railing around it. In another place there was a long shed full of cows.
There were kind of things like mess boards all around, only some of them were too high for mess boards.
"I give it up," I said
"It"s a cross between a barn-yard and a picnic ground," Connie said.
Westy said, "I think it"s an aviation field."
"Sure," I told him; "how stupid of me. And the cows are aviators."
"What do you say we follow the fence around?" Westy said.
"What do you say we don"t?" I said. "Come on, let"s go back and I"ll cook some fritters and then we"ll get our suits off and have a good sleep, and to-morrow we"ll see what we see."
We were all pretty sleepy, so we decided to do that. If we had taken a little hike all the way around near the fence, the terrible thing that I am going to tell you about now, would never have happened. You had better get ready for it, because it"s one of the most terrible things that I ever told. When you hear about it, you"ll turn cold and your hair will stand up. Even now whenever I think about it, I just shake. That"s the word--_shake_.
Yah, hah! You thought I was going to tell it in this chapter, didn"t you?
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
OUR YOUNG HERO
Now it was so dark that we had some trouble finding our car, and before we got to it, we pa.s.sed a funny kind of a little shack with a high porch in front. It didn"t look exactly like a place to live in--gee, I couldn"t tell you exactly what it did look like. But anyway, it was all closed up. As we pa.s.sed it, we heard voices inside, but we were too sleepy and hungry to pay any attention.
All of a sudden our young hero paused and, _you_ know, stood riveted to the spot where he stood. Anyway, if he wasn"t riveted he was nailed down.
"_Listen! Hark!_" he said.
"We"re harking," I said; "what is it?"
"Shh-h," he whispered and held his hand to his ear.
"What"s the matter; have you got an earache?" Connie asked him.
"Break it to us gently," I said; "let us hear the worst."
"Shhh, listen!" he said. "Somebody"s being killed."
"How tragic!" Wig said.
"It isn"t tragic at all," Pee-wee said; "listen----it"s true."
"Have it your own way," I told him.
"In that little house," he whispered, all the while going back on tiptoe; "hark--shh."
We all followed him back, giggling, because we had been through things like this before with our boy hero. Believe me, Dauntless Dan of the Dauntless Dan Series has nothing on Scout Harris. In front of the little shack we all stood stark still, listening.
"Do you hear it?" Pee-wee whispered. "It"s a bitter struggle."
The first sound that _I_ noticed was a sound as if a chair was falling over. Then I heard a man"s voice say, "I"ll choke you till you tell me.
Are you ready to speak?" Then another voice said, "Never!"
Pee-wee said, "Shh, what did I tell you?"
We were all pretty interested by that time. Pretty soon a kind of a high, squeaky voice said, "Do you think I"m afraid of you--you big----" Then it seemed as if the voice was just kind of choked off, because there were stifled cries, sort of, and all the while a gruff voice saying, "Are you ready to take that back? This is your last chance--I"ll teach you----" And all the while that other voice kept crying and yelling, and it seemed just as if the person must be struggling.
"It"s a child," Westy said, all excited.
"He"s strangling it to death," Pee-wee whispered, so scared and excited, that his voice was hoa.r.s.e. And just then we could hear a long kind of a gurgle and a man"s voice saying, "I"ll teach you! I"ll teach you!" And then the two voices seemed to be mixed up together.
"Wait here," Pee-wee said, and off he started, pell-mell for the tent where there was a light inside.
In ten seconds he was back with a couple of men, and shouting, "_In that shack! In that shack! A man is murdering somebody in that shack! Hurry up!_"
By that time we were all pretty scared, I guess. The two men vaulted up on to the platform and pushed the door open and we stood outside looking up over the edge of the platform. All of a sudden Westy said, "_What--do--you--know----_"
That was all he could say. He just vaulted up himself with the rest of us after him. And there we all stood in the doorway, only Pee-wee pushed his way inside.