Part 7

“Well, I’ve been tied down awfully close to that Bain case. Glad it’s over.” Dobbs turned to Allan. “You remember the Ghost?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we sent him up yesterday for fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years!” Allan recalled the white face of the man at the police station. It was the first time that any one he had ever seen had been sent to prison. Fifteen years! It seemed like a sentence for life. Could that white face grow any whiter in fifteen years?

“He was a hard case,” said Mr. Thornton.

“He was that,” said Dobbs. “As bad as they make them. But a queer fellow; you never could make him out.”

“What did he say when they sentenced him?” Allan asked of Dobbs.

“Not a word, you couldn’t get anything out of him. Even ghosts speak, they say. But this one was silent as the grave.”

“Did you take the zebra?” broke in McConnell.

“No,” said Dobbs. “I was just flirting with him. But I think I will take him.”

It ended by their all following the zebra, who looked very much amused, and finally came over to push his nose through the wires.

“He isn’t painted, either,” said McConnell, scratching the zebra’s back.

“Oh, this is a very honest show!” laughed the detective.

It turned out that Dobbs knew a good many of the people at the Zoo, and before the company started homeward he had made it possible for the club to do pretty much as it pleased.

When the club was ready to start, McConnell found every one but Miss Illwin. Owen had seen her over by the rhinoceros tank. Mr. Goodstone and Mrs. Creigh had left her with the deer. But no one was able to actually find her.

“Where can she be?” queried Miss Manston.

“You don’t suppose anything could have happened, do you?” asked Mrs. Creigh, her face indicating real anxiety.

“Well,” said Major Mines, mischievously, “she was taking the tiger at twenty feet. It seemed safe enough.”

“The lady or the tiger,” muttered Mr. Thornton.

“I really think,” said Mr. Goodstone, solemnly, “that some of us ought to look up the rhinoceros part of the story.”

“Do you think so?” asked Miss Manston, half inclined to think this was no joke. She was so afraid of rhinoceroses herself. “Horrors! Suppose she fell in!”

“Don’t!” protested Mrs. Creigh with a shiver.

McConnell and Allan went out as a scouting party, with the result that Miss Illwin was found sitting on a bench by the lake, her camera carrying case beside her. She was reading a book. As he came up Allan noticed that she was without her hat.

“You know,” she said, when she saw Allan, “my hat blew into the water when I was setting up just now. Wasn’t it annoying? I was afraid I should have to wait until it drifted over, but that boy with the little yacht aimed his boat so nicely that it caught the hat not far from the shore and now it is pushing it over. See!” and Miss Illwin pointed toward the middle of the pond. “Unfortunately the wind has shifted once or twice, and the yacht has been tacking about in a most provoking way. But there is nothing but to be patient.”

“We are all ready to go,” said Allan.

“Are you? Then I suppose you’ll have to leave me—unless this boat stops tacking.”

“There it comes!” yelled the boys who owned the boat.

The yacht was making straight for the shore. But when it had come within about fifteen feet of the bank, the band of the hat became loosened from the bow, and the yacht came jauntily into port, leaving the hat in its wake.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Miss Illwin. “How provoking.”

“The breeze is carrying it, anyway,” said McConnell.

But the hat drifted very slowly, and finally stopped altogether, anchored by a water-lily.

“If you will let me have your tripod, Miss Illwin,” said Allan, “I think I can reach it with that.”

A single leg of the tripod proved insufficient, but, by hitching two of them to the top piece, Allan managed to reach the vagrant hat.

“Is it spoiled?” asked McConnell.

Miss Illwin shook the bedraggled hat. “I’m afraid it is,” she said, adjusting it with a wince, and pushing through the pins. “What a providence that I didn’t wear the one with the feather!”

The club appeared much relieved to see Miss Illwin.

Everybody had a story about the loss of a hat, but no one claimed to have recovered one under such picturesque conditions.

“Well,” said the Major, as they walked toward the “L” station, “I’ll wager none of you ever had your hat blow into the crater of a volcano.”

“Gracious! Suppose you had gone with it!” cried Miss Manston.

“Couldn’t you get it with a pole, or a hook and line?” asked McConnell.

“No, I couldn’t,” grunted the Major. “Never saw the crater of Vesuvius, did you?”

“No,” admitted McConnell.

“Well, it isn’t good fishing there.”

“Fancy!” exclaimed Mrs. Creigh.

“And I had to go back bareheaded—I refused a crazy bonnet that one of the guides found for me—and those people at the hotel said, ‘These Americans are so funny!’”

“Where shall the club go next!” some one asked. “Better wait until you find out what sins you committed to-day,” said Mr. Thornton.

XI.

AT CONEY ISLAND.

THE scene at the club that night was a busy one. Mrs. Creigh and Mr. Thornton were first to begin developing, and several other members who did not have dark rooms at home came around and waited their turn.

Dr. Hartel had advised Allan not to do any developing under any circumstances, but to wait until the following day, when everything was quiet. Allan thought that anyway it was but fair for him, living so near, to make use of the dark-room at times when there was not a pressure of other members.

It was the next morning that Allan and McConnell developed their plates and films. Allan had two wrongly focussed pictures, and McConnell had made a double that perched a goat on the back of a dromedary. But most of the pictures were good, and gave both boys a great deal of delight.

“Wait till Bill sees this!” exclaimed McConnell, holding up his picture of the lion cage.

Allan highly prized a picture of the eagles, and another of the club emerging from one of the arches under the drive.

“Do you know,” said Allan, “the club won’t be taking another outing for a couple of weeks. I wish we could go to Coney Island before that. If we wait two weeks they might not want to go there, and I’m afraid if the weather gets cooler the season will be over in a week.”

“What do we care for the season?” asked McConnell.

“The season doesn’t make any difference to the ocean,—except that it’s the clearer, I suppose, when so many people don’t wash in it; but it makes a great deal of difference at the beach. It’s the people I care for, the people and all the things they have there to show the people.”

“That’s so,” said McConnell.

“I wonder if Owen would go?”

“Of course he would. I guess my mother would let me go with you.”

“Suppose we go on Wednesday. School begins next week.”

“How much would it cost?” asked McConnell.

Allan figured the thing out on the back of a platebox. “If we carry part of our lunch with us it ought to cost about seventy cents for each of us.”

“And we could get some great things down there,” commented McConnell. “We could shoot from the Ferris wheel.”

“Yes, and we could shoot the chutes.”

McConnell chuckled. “I’d like to go.”

Owen liked the idea. “I’ve been wanting to go down all summer. And what do you say to this? There is a freight-boat that stops at Howlett’s Dock every morning about seven and comes back every night. I know one of the men on it, and I think we could get him to take us down to Twenty-something Street and back. That would only leave us the Coney Island boat to pay for.”

“Good!” cried Allan.

Owen’s plan was carried out. Wednesday morning opened cloudy, and the boys were not in very high spirits when they reached the rendezvous at Howlett’s Dock.

“Is there any use going when it’s so cloudy?” asked Owen.

McConnell was certain it would clear.

A man was fishing from the end of the dock. Allan went over and asked him if he thought it was going to rain.

“Rain before seven, clear before eleven,” said the man, without looking up.

“But it isn’t raining,” chimed in McConnell.

“Yes, it is,” said the man, without moving; and then Allan felt a drop on his hand.

“What a strange man,” said McConnell, as they moved away.

“When they are queer like that they always know about the weather,” said Allan.

“What did he say?” asked Owen.

“That it would clear before eleven.”

“Then that’s all we want. We won’t get to Coney Island much before twelve.”

The fisherman was right. The light drizzle fell until after nine. At ten the clouds began to lift; and while they were on their way down the bay on the Coney Island boat, the sun came forth cheerily.

Allan celebrated the arrival of the sunlight by photographing the group of Italian musicians on the upper deck, and McConnell blazed away with the Wizard at an ocean steamer that had just come over the bar.

An old gentleman in a bicycle suit who sat smoking at the forward rail, after watching the three boys with cameras, fell to talking with them, and soon had examined all three apparatuses in a way that indicated some knowledge of photography.

“These are all very convenient,” he said. “They make me want to take up photography again.”

“Did you once have a camera?” asked Allan.

“Yes, when I was younger I had a wet-plate outfit. I don’t suppose you know what that was?”

The boys shook their heads.

“Well, in the wet-plate days, before there were any dry plates such as you use, and very long before there were any films,” the old gentleman added, indicating Allan’s Kodak, “we had to coat and sensitize our own plates before exposing them. We had to do this where we made the picture, or very near it, for we had to expose the plate while the coating was still somewhat moist.”

“It must have been a lot of trouble,” said McConnell.

“It was; but I enjoyed it.”

“Then you had to develop them right away, too?” suggested Allan.

“Yes, we had to do the whole thing—sensitize, expose, and develop—at the one time. Ah!” continued the old gentleman, slapping his knee, “but they made beautiful plates! More beautiful than your new-fangled plates!”

They were now nearing the iron pier at Coney Island.

“Boys,” said the old gentleman, “what are you going to do to-day?”

“I don’t know that we are quite sure,” laughed Allan. “We have carried our cameras down to shoot at the island—anything that seems interesting.”

“I tell you what I wish,” continued the old gentleman. “I wish you would go up in the Ferris wheel with me.”

“Thank you,” replied Allan, “we did want to go up in the wheel.”

Owen and McConnell indicated their willingness. “I’ve been around the world since I saw Coney Island before,” the old gentleman went on, “and I have run down to see how much it has changed. I suppose it has changed a good deal. I have too.” The old gentleman smoked in silence until it was time for them to go ashore.

The beach was not so crowded as on a Saturday, but there were animated scenes on every hand. A great chorus of sounds went up from the West End—the shouts of hawkers and doorkeepers; the blare of a dozen merry-go-round organs; the whir and clatter of the switch-back railways; the hum of thousands of voices; the screams of children at the water’s edge, mingling with the swish and roar of the surf.

“Just the same!” said the old gentleman, smiling; “only more so!”

The old gentleman led the way to the largest of the wheels that swung its great spokes into the air. Allan took a seat with the old gentleman in one car, while Owen and McConnell stepped into another, when the engineer had swung it into position.

“I suppose they distribute us this way to balance it,” said Owen. The wheel now began to revolve slowly.

“My name is Prenwood,” said the old gentleman. “What is yours?”

“Hartel,” said Allan. He already had said that the boys were from Hazenfield.

As their car swung over the top of the wheel Mr. Prenwood exclaimed, “Yes, the same old place!” and was silent again for the whole circuit of the wheel. Allan found it harder than he expected to accomplish a sighting of his camera. There was something curiously confusing in the constantly changing situation of the car. Looking for the other boys was also a difficult matter. Sometimes they were below him, sometimes above. McConnell was making persistent efforts to bring his Wizard to bear on the beach without having the rim or spokes of the wheel in the way. Allan could hear him laughing, and Owen urging him not to lean over so far unless he wished to fall out.

“Hartel,” said Mr. Prenwood, “I used to come down here with my little nephew. He was too young to see any of the vulgarity. He just enjoyed the life and stir, the bustle of the place, just as you boys do. He called these wheels—they were little then—the big pin wheels; and those were the ‘slam-bang railroads.’ It was fun to watch him! While I was away in the Mediterranean they buried him.” Mr. Prenwood sat very quietly for a moment. “They tell me that last summer he used to say he wished Uncle Amos would come home, and take him to Coney Island. No one else would take him, it seems. And now no one can take him. Isn’t it a shame, Hartel, that I couldn’t have been here?”

“How old was he?” asked Allan, who could see tears in Mr. Prenwood’s eyes.

“Only six,” said the old gentleman. “What a little man he was! You should have seen us wading on the beach, and how he used to laugh when I rolled up my trousers! And he seemed to know just how funny it was when I sat on a horse beside him in the merry-go-round. But we are missing the view altogether. How gay the sun makes everything look! What a good thing it is the sun never gets sad! If the clouds will only let him shine, he’s always as jolly as ever.”

The sun shone on the big, creaking wheel. Mr. Prenwood waved his hand to Owen and McConnell. A young girl who was sitting beside a young man in the car at the other side of the wheel seemed to think the salute was intended for her, and giggled.

“Why not take the wheel, with the couple at the other end?” laughed Mr. Prenwood.

Allan already was preparing to do this. The spokes and cross-bars made a curious cobweb of lines in the finder, a cobweb that twisted like a kaleidoscope.

When they all had stepped out of the wheel again Mr. Prenwood said: “Now, boys, I’m not going to bother you with my company much longer. You have things that you want to do on your own account. But I would like very much if you would go with me and have lunch. When I was a boy I got frightfully hungry at this time of day, and I haven’t altogether recovered from the habit yet.”

Owen thanked Mr. Prenwood, but said they had some lunch with them.

“Yes, I know,” laughed Mr. Prenwood, “you have some dry lunch. But that isn’t enough. Oh, I know! Come along. We’ll eat that—and something else with it! Some oysters, for instance, or chowder, or sweet corn, or watermelon. And how about buttermilk and pie and ice-cream? Hey?”

And they all laughed together as they followed Mr. Prenwood up the broad walk.

“I tell you,” said Mr. Prenwood, laughing again, as they sat at a table in the hotel dining-room, “those dry lunches are well enough to start in with. But to finish up on!—Waiter! ask these boys what they wish,—and boys! see that you wish everything nice on the bill!”

While they were eating their unpacked lunch and many good things brought by the waiter, Mr. Prenwood told them some of his adventures in the days of wet-plate photography. “You boys must come over and visit me sometime. I haven’t told you yet that I live on the other side of the river—at Stonyshore. I’ve got dogs, horses, boats,—everything but boys. I’ve half a mind to steal one of you!”

When they were shaking hands and saying good-by to Mr. Prenwood, he told them not to forget to come and see him, and he saw in their faces that they were very glad they had met him.

“Wasn’t he nice!” exclaimed McConnell, when they had walked away.

“I think we ought to send him over some prints,” said Allan.

“I believe I will,” said Owen, “if I get anything good.”

Later in the day they saw Mr. Prenwood sitting on a bench, smoking, near one of the merry-go-rounds.

Immediately after their luncheon the boys went down on the beach and walked the whole length from Brighton to the far West End. The strollers, the children wading in the foam, the sleeping figures in the sand; the chair men wrangling over the price of seats; the chowder boats and ring-toss tents; the bathing-houses, and screaming bathers in the surf; the groups at the photograph galleries,—these and a score of other sights gave the boys amusement and an embarrassment of themes for their cameras.

Then they went over to the chutes and found it more exciting to try and photograph the flying boat than they had found it to ride in one. Allan wished to catch the boat just as it left the incline and struck the water. When he had developed his plate he found that the spray hid the boat.

They walked through Coney Island’s Bowery, but it did not please them. They liked the beach better. There was much fun walking in the sand. The three boys for a while played quoits with clam-shells. Far up at the West End two young men were having a wrestling match and insisted upon being photographed while they were at it.

“Our style of wrestling is not set down in the books,” said one of the young men. But they had great fun at it; and all hands had a hundred yard dash afterward. The taller wrestler came in first and Allan second.

The winner afterward said to Allan, “I’d like to have a copy of that wrestling picture, and if you’ll promise to send me one I’ll give you this pass to Buffalo Bill.”

“But perhaps it won’t be good—I mean the picture.”

“Then you’re so much ahead. I’ll take my chances.” And he gave Allan his name and address. The pass was for two. “Isn’t he coming to Granger Fields next week?” asked Allan.

“Yes. If you live near there, that’s the place to see him. And take your camera, too. Say; wait a minute. Would you like to do the Indians? Well, you ask for Mr. Twink—he’ll fix it so’s you can photograph the Indians. Tell him I sent you. He’s my cousin. I know the whole crowd pretty well.”

“I’ll do the best I can with the picture,” said Allan.

“And I’ll take what I get and be thankful,” laughed the young man.

This seemed decidedly like a stroke of luck to Allan, not so much for the value of the pass as for the chance to get special privileges with his camera—with their cameras, for undoubtedly Mr. Twink would look with a friendly eye on any party that might come with his cousin’s name.

“Time for the boat!” cried Owen.

The day had slid away so quickly and they had given so little thought to time that there was not a moment to be lost if they were to catch the 4.30 boat.

The two started off for the pier on a run, until the little brown woman in the Turkish bazaar looked up from her beads to see whether any new and special excitement had befallen her street. A short cut across the sand proved to be heavy travelling, and the boat’s whistle sounded warningly in their ears. All three were much in need of breath when they reached the pier. They caught the boat. But it was a narrow escape.

XII.

BIG WOLF AND COMPANY.

BUFFALO BILL was to be at Granger Fields for three days. Great crowds came to see the Indians, and the Oriental acrobats, and the soldiers of many nations, and the “rough riders of the world.” On the third day, half an hour before the time for the beginning of the performance, Allan and McConnell arrived at the gate.

Up to the last moment it was expected that Owen would join them. But Owen had been unable to come for some reason, and the two boys had walked the three miles alone. The pass carried them past the ticket man and admitted them to the grand stand. But before taking seats there, the boys started out to find Mr. Twink. A sleek little young man, with long hair and a big sombrero, who looked like a candy cowboy, told them where they would probably find Mr. Twink.

Mr. Twink, however, was very hard to find. Each person they asked said he was in a different place. When they came down by the Indian tents, they at last found Mr. Twink. He was talking to an Indian,—an Indian decked out in gaudy red and yellow, and with many feathers dangling down his back.

When they at last got his attention, Mr. Twink told the boys that everything was in a hurry just then, that the Indians were getting ready for the grand entrée; but that if they would come around after the show, he would give them a chance to photograph all they wanted to.

“Hold on a minute!” he called after them, as they turned away. “We are going to strike camp this afternoon. You had better come around as soon as the acrobats begin. You can get back in time to see the cowboy and Indian fight.”

“Where shall we find you?” asked Allan.

“Right here,” said Mr. Twink. “Don’t forget—as soon as the acrobats begin.”

Allan promised to be prompt.

“But I hate to miss the acrobats,” said McConnell, regretfully.

“We can see acrobats any time,” protested Allan, “and we may never get a chance to photograph Indians—close up—again.”

They both photographed the grand entrée from their seats in the grand stand, though the figures of the soldiers and cowboys and Indians and Arabs looked very small at that distance, and the heads of the people in the spectators’ seats made a rather conspicuous foreground. They caught the bucking broncho while two of the cowboys were trying to master him.

When the Arab acrobats came out, the boys slipped out of their seats and went around to look for Mr. Twink. He was where he had said he would be.

“Now, what do you want to do?” he demanded, so abruptly that Allan was a little at a loss what to say.

“We should like to photograph some of the Indians,” said Allan, finally.

“Well, here’s Walking Dog, photograph him.” And Twink caught a passing Indian by the arm.

Walking Dog was very solemn in appearance, and when Twink said something to him in a language the boys could not understand—it was the first Indian talk Allan or McConnell ever had heard—Walking Dog looked at the boys and at their camera without a smile.

Allan was sure that Walking Dog resented the proposition to be photographed, and felt sorry he had mentioned it. The Indian looked so savage in his paint.

“He says all right,” remarked Twink.

Now, Allan was sure Walking Dog had not uttered a sound, and he wondered very much what language the Indian had used that Twink should feel so sure.

“How about taking him over here?” said Twink, pointing to a spot where a stretch of canvas would form a background.

Walking Dog seemed to understand at once, and, striding across, he stood with his back against the canvas, his hands on his rifle, and in a position such as soldiers take at “parade rest.”

Walking Dog refused to look pleasant while Allan and McConnell got their camera ready. Or perhaps it was his natural look with the ugly war-paint added.

“Get it?” asked Twink, when he heard the camera click.

“Oh, wait a minute!” cried McConnell. He had forgotten the slide of his plate-holder. Allan rolled his cartridge another number, and took one more to keep McConnell company. Walking Dog remained as still as a soldier’s monument while this was going on.

“I wish you would tell him we are much obliged,” said Allan to Twink.