The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers Part 13

Phil then examined the door, finding that this was evidently made of several thicknesses of hard wood, so thick was it, that when he rapped strongly with his knuckles, it gave forth a dead heavy sound, showing that it was unusually thick. It was so thick and hard, in fact, as to defy any effort to cut it through with his knife. Phil hardly knew what to do; all way of escaping seemed barred to him.

There was one chance, however, and that was a possibility of attacking whatever guard came to bring him food in the morning, for he did not believe that they intended to starve him to death.

Grasping the bottle that held the candle, he went over and made an examination of the cot. It was an old folding cot, made of fairly heavy cross braces, bound with substantial pieces of metal.

Phil unshipped his knife from the coat lapel cache, and immediately set to work to whittle away one of the cross pieces that supported the cot.

He whittled in such a fashion that on one end remained one of the iron braces, screwed securely to the stick of wood. Hefting it in his hand, and then swinging it about his head, Phil discovered that he had a weapon that would almost fell an ox. His plan was to wait beside the door in the morning until whoever brought him his food should have unlocked the door, then to strike him down, and while he was stunned, take a chance on escaping from the house.

The broken cot did not offer a very comfortable sleeping place, but Phil propped it up the best he could and lay down upon it. It was too rickety, so stripping the tattered blanket from it, he lay upon the floor.

This was no hardship to him, as he had spent many a night of his life sleeping upon the hard, solid earth, which is not a whit softer than a flooring made of pine boards.

As he lay dozing, he almost fancied that he could hear a very low murmur of voices. Telling himself that it was only his imagination, he rolled over again and tried to sleep, but the excitement and the uncertainty made him sleepless. Again he heard a low mutter of subdued voices, then he sat straight up in his blanket.

Since he could not sleep, he felt that he might as well be busying himself about something, so drawing a blanket over to a corner of the room, he laid down flat upon it, and with the drill punch on his scout knife, began to bore a hole in the floor. He remembered that the ceiling of the restaurant was made of boards and not of plaster, and he decided that this was probably the case all through the rest of the house. There was probably a double thickness of boards, and the longer he drilled the more certain he became of this.

Finishing, he could feel that he was within the merest fraction of an inch of piercing the double thickness of boards, through which he had carefully bored his way. Instead of piercing his knife blade straight through the thin bit of board that was left, he began to enlarge the hole that he had already made. When he had done this to his satisfaction, he blew out the candle, for he wanted no stray gleam of light to betray to whoever was in the room below him his course of action.

Having extinguished the light, very carefully and slowly, he dug away tiny splinters of the thin bit of board that separated him from hearing, and perhaps seeing, what was taking place in the room below. As he made the hole, the murmur of voices became more and more distinct. At last, the sharp point of the knife pierced the board, and then working as carefully as though he were handling the most deadly explosive, he began to enlarge the little c.h.i.n.k that he had made.

Having completed his peep hole, he glued his eye to it, but was unable to make out anyone in the room below him. Evidently, the occupants of the room were outside of his field of vision. Giving up trying to see what was going on, he lay on his side with his ear pressed closely to the aperture that he had made. He could distinguish LeBlanc's voice, also that of the French restaurant proprietor. There seemed to be two other men in the room, for he could make out the difference in voices, but they were strangers to him. Evidently, the two strangers could not speak French, for LeBlanc and the proprietor were talking in English.

Phil could hear the conversation as plainly as though he were sitting in the room with them. As soon as he discovered what they were talking about, he became very much excited, for they were discussing the details of a fur smuggling trip that was to take place that very week. Phil thought to himself, that if he could only get out of the prison room, he had the most valuable clue that he or his chums had yet discovered. He thought it strange that they made no remark about the deserted logging camp, for Phil was certain that this was the headquarters, or at least a rendezvous, of the smuggling band.

Phil had wondered that he had seen or heard nothing of Anderson, for he expected wherever LeBlanc would be, the other would be found also.

However, from the conversation he learned that Anderson had already crossed the border line, and was even then busily engaged in buying quant.i.ties of furs from Canadian trappers. When they had consulted the minor details of the trip, without, however, mentioning at what point they crossed the border, much to Phil's disappointment, LeBlanc then told his companions that as soon as they had completed the deal in furs, that he had something very much bigger that would net them all a fortune. In fact, he told them, he would not have bothered with the fur trip at all, except that he and Anderson had used practically all their available money in buying furs.

From the bustling sounds of the room below, the others evidently crowded nearer to hear what this new scheme was, when suddenly there was a commotion at the door of the room below, and a voice was heard, demanding admittance.

"Ha," exclaimed Jean LeBlanc, "that is P't.i.t Vareau. I don't like him, and he shall not come in with us on this big scheme. Tomorrow night I shall discuss it with you at our friend M'sieu Henderson's place. Now, you may let him in, but not a word of anything other than about the furs."

Vareau made his entrance, and there was some desultory conversation, and then all of them left the room.

Phil's heart was bounding in excitement. Here he had all the details of the plot at his finger ends, and all that needed to be done was to keep close tabs on LeBlanc, and he would lead them direct to the headquarters of the smuggling crew.

Truly his attempt at escape next morning must not fail.

Garry and d.i.c.k, back at the lean-to, were discussing the possibility of Phil's stumbling upon important information, not knowing at that moment he was a prisoner, trapped in the old French restaurant, and in the hands of the most vengeful enemy that the three possessed.

Throughout the night they kept up a constant sentry duty, not that they really expected anything to happen, but just because it seemed to be better on the safe side--a case of rather be safe then be sorry. Morning came, and they prepared their breakfast. They did not dare to stir from the camp, for there was no telling at what moment they might get a message from Phil, telling them that their help was needed.

Despite the fact that he was worried, Phil slept the normal sleep of a healthy boy, awaking in the morning both hungry and thirsty. He immediately secured the iron tipped stick that he had fashioned the night before, and took his place at the door, ready to strike down whoever entered, and make a dash for liberty. Nearly two hours elapsed, and the strain was beginning to tell upon him, when he heard a sound of shuffling footsteps outside the door. Grasping his club firmly in his hand, he prepared to act, but to his keen disappointment, however, the door was opened only an inch or two, and he heard LeBlanc's voice, bidding him out. Through the crack of the door, he could see LeBlanc's form, and immediately in back of him, that of the big restaurant keeper.

He made no response for a moment, and suddenly the door was thrown open, and LeBlanc and the proprietor came rushing in. LeBlanc seemed to be possessed of second sight, for he seemed to know that Phil had contemplated an attack on whoever came in the room, and he foiled this by rushing at Phil, jamming him close to the wall, and making it impossible for him to raise his club, much less than to use it.

"Aha, mon brave would fight would he? I thought so, and came prepared to care for you. We will see that he has nothing left to fight with."

Bidding his companion in French remove the cot, LeBlanc cast a hasty glance around the room to see if anything was left that by any artifice whatsoever could be converted into a weapon. Phil had carelessly thrown the blanket over the hole that he had made on the floor, and in a fold had tucked away the piece of candle.

LeBlanc paid no attention to the blanket, seeming to think that with the cot broken the boy had slept on the floor. The table and the empty bottle that had served as a candlestick were removed, and then food and water was brought to him and left there.

"Tonight I am ver' busy, but tomorrow you shall be taken from here in a trunk, and you shall be dropped in the river. How you will like that, hein?" and with an evil grin he left the room, leaving Phil again in the darkness to eat his food as best he could.

Phil rescued his candle, and lighted it to eat by, and then carefully extinguished it, for he knew it would not last a great while were it to burn steadily.

He had one wild idea left. It was dangerous in the extreme, it might mean death, but it was death if he stayed in the clutches of the renegade half-breed. This idea was to try to set fire to the door, in the hopes that it would burn enough without setting the whole room on fire until he could battle his way out.

This idea he meant to carry out only as a last resort. There were two chances left to him. One was that he could find some other method of escape, the other was that his chums would come to his rescue when he failed to return at the appointed hour of sundown.

At any rate, he would wait until the last minute before trying his desperate scheme. LeBlanc, he knew, would be gone the greater part of the night, for they did not plan to start until almost midnight for Lafe Green's house.

The long day dragged on and he got hungry and thirsty. No one came again, evidently one meal was all that he was to have. Presently he decided that it must be past sundown, and he lay down on the blanket, and before he knew it dropped off to sleep.

Then out of a sound and dreamless sleep he heard a number of mysterious tappings on the iron shutter that guarded the window.

He ran to the window and listened again.

Yes, there they were, being repeated in a sort of a staccato yet rhythmic measure.

Suddenly it dawned on him what it was. The tappings were dots and dashes of the International Code, and they were spelling out:

P-H-I-L- P-H-I-L- P-H-I-L-

CHAPTER XIV.

CHUMS TO THE RESCUE.

To return now for a while to the lean-to we shall see what happened when sundown came and no Phil appeared.

"Oh, d.i.c.k, I'm sorry I let Phil go alone. We should have gone together, then there would have been less chance of anything having happened,"

said Garry brokenly.

"Cheer up, Garry, it's only a little past sundown, perhaps he didn't allow himself enough time to get back here, may have thought the distance was less than it was. You know he has been over this distance only two or three times. We'll give him a little while longer and then set our heads together and see what we can do. I have a lot of confidence in Phil, he manages to pull himself out of his sc.r.a.pes pretty well most of the time," comforted d.i.c.k, although he too feared that Phil had gotten into some sc.r.a.pe that proved too much for him. d.i.c.k's fear was that Phil had run afoul of the tramps, for neither he nor Garry knew that LeBlanc was in that vicinity.

Nearly an hour pa.s.sed, and then Garry sprang to his feet.

"There's no use waiting any longer. Phil would move heaven and earth to keep up to the agreement that was made as to the hour of return. Now we must do something. Get your rifle and lariat and hatchet. Stick the handle of the hatchet inside your trousers so that it will not be so evident, or better yet, we can do it just before we get to town. Then, too, we can coil our riatas over one shoulder, and slip our coats on over them. In that way we won't attract so much attention. The rifles won't appear to be out of place, for it would be only natural that we should take them, seeing we are supposed to be campers who will have to go back through the dark woods to camp. First, before we start, take our knapsacks, there's nothing in them that we will need, and cache them in the branches of a nearby tree. Then we'll leg it to town just as fast as we can."

Before d.i.c.k cached the knapsacks, Garry poured all the water in the canteens on the fire, thoroughly extinguishing it. Then in a trice the knapsacks were hidden in a tree, and the pair were ready to start for town.