Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris on the Briny Deep - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 7

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Pee-wee sat up rubbing his eyes. There were no wagon loads of coin. No music echoed in the silent night; the Liventi brothers slept peacefully. No scout was serving waffles to a hungry multitude of lavish spenders. There were no jawbreakers of the appalling magnitude of tennis balls.

From the cot of Eddie Carlo came the steady breathing of a weary Chipmunk dead to the world and its disillusionments. Little Billy Jansen was in a land where business cares are unknown. Amid the wreck and ruin of the great carnival, Ben Maxwell lay in untroubled slumber. There was no seething throng at the gate.

Glancing drowsily through the open doorway of their rustic dormitory, Pee-wee saw the well trimmed hedge, a long band of black, in the still night. A myriad of shining stars twinkled in the sky as if they were winking at the leader of the Chipmunk Patrol. A genial little cricket sang in some cosy crevice of the old pavilion—such an anti-climax to the deafening strains of the gigantic marimba! There stood the real marimba, under its gorgeous cover containing the tinseled initials of the Liventi boys. There it stood, their pride and joy, innocent and silent.

Outside, just in line with the doorway, stood a queer black figure with a hat rakishly tilted on its head. And the roaring continued. It followed Pee-wee out of his rapturous dream, and assailed the night with its terrifying clamor. It was real.

Pee-wee rubbed his sleepy eyes again and looked about. That strange figure a few feet distant from the door did not move. And Pee-wee dared not move for fear his stirring might be heard by that stealthy, waiting spectre. The roaring had ceased; he began to think that after all it might have been a part of his fantastic dream. He lay down again and tried to sleep. In a few moments he moved enough so that he could see out through the doorway, and there, still, was the silent figure standing motionless. Its hat was at a slightly different angle than before; it might have approached a little, he did not know. Should he ask who it was? Then, suddenly he heard the sound again, this time a low, complaining growl.

Then it came jumping into Pee-wee’s startled senses that maybe the Silver Foxes were playing a trick on him; he would not put it past them, as the saying is. So he groped for his flashlight which he always prudently kept within reach, and looked at his scout watch. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. No Silver Fox, however lawless, would be out at such an hour.

Might that weird figure be a gardener on the Baldwin place? What should he do? Wake Ben Maxwell? Ben was the only “big fellow” in Pee-wee’s patrol. The mighty leader was not above falling back on Ben in terrible emergencies. But if, by any chance, the Silver Foxes were abroad and up to any of their nonsense, Ben would laugh with them—he always did. Pee-wee was no coward; he was a true hero. Indeed, he was two or three heroes, highly compressed. He softly stole from his troubled couch, quietly pushed the door part way closed, then hurriedly put on his clothes.

Stealthily, ever so stealthily, he reopened the door. That mysterious figure had not moved. Not without a tremor he emerged from the pavilion and said, “Who’s that there?” There was no answer. Then he saw another figure, hatless, some dozen yards distant. An inspiration seized him and on the instant he became brave and resolute. He walked boldly up to the nearest figure, and pulling the hat off it, left nothing but a harmless tennis net post. Ben Maxwell had tossed his hat there before retiring.

Now Pee-wee felt reassured. What a strange thing is the night! How it conjures up images! Of course, the roaring he had heard was nothing but a dog. Pee-wee had been fooled by that cunning old magician, the night. He was glad he had not aroused any of his patrol. He returned to the pavilion and was just about to make a second plunge into slumberous depths when there arose, as it seemed, not fifty yards distant, such a bellowing roar as made his blood run cold. No dog that ever lived could have uttered that discordant clamor. If a dog were five times its own size and were afflicted with chronic bronchitis it could not startle the peaceful night with such a sound. To the sturdy little scout (for Pee-wee was always a scout and only sometimes a producer) there was something astonishingly out of place about that husky uproar. Something quite alien to all the voices of civilization.

He crept out of the pavilion again and went stealthily in the direction whence the roaring had emanated. He followed the hedge to where it was broken by the stone pillars and the handsome grilled gate through which he had dreamed of multitudes entering. Here two great elm trees flanked the gateway and deepened the darkness beneath their sheltering branches. They were inside the gateway, on Mr. Baldwin’s land, but the spreading boughs extended far out over the quiet street, and in the shadow of one of these majestic trees, Scout Harris beheld a harrowing sight.

Two glistening eyes were fixed upon him and between him and this fearful sight was only the yielding hedge. Then, horror of horrors, he saw another eye, weird and uncanny, gazing at him in the glassy fixity of death. Three eyes. They were eyes that had no more expression than a real agate, and bespoke none of the savagery conveyed by the appalling roar. Cold, glassy eyes, cocked in unnatural positions, and fixing him with their hollow, frightfully impersonal glare.

Pee-wee’s blood ran cold.