The Firebug

In the earlier days of Johnny’s experiences on the Chicago river, he had made many strange friends. Among them was an old man who owned a boat, a clumsy but quite seaworthy craf...

“No need to be a wizard to tell that. This is the fourth fire on city property and every one started near the office. Time we were learning something from that one fact, somethi...

It was a dramatic moment, such a moment as comes at times to the lives of firemen. Had the building been a tenement it would have been searched from cellar to garret; had it eve...

After receiving Mazie’s assurance that the little waif of the schoolhouse would be properly cared for, Johnny went at once to his own room, where he caught ten winks before the...

The strain on Mazie’s arms as she let herself down the rope which hung from the window of the burning building seemed greater than she could bear; but with the grim determinatio...

It was midnight. The room in which Johnny Thompson sat was a place of odd noises and strange flashes of light. Here in the corner a tick-ticking was followed by a yellow light t...

Many of the expected thrills and terrors of life never materialize. It was so with Mazie and the tiger. If the tiger had been roaring in a manner fit to curdle the blood of a pi...

One moment Johnny sighted the familiar, stooping figure, the next he had lost him in the throng which appeared to have sprung up from the ground. However, he did not despair of...

Forest City was on fire. The wind was directly behind the blaze. Before it, beckoning it on, were tons of confetti, board walks, dry as tinder, and flimsy structures of stucco a...

At a quarter of six next evening, at the request of the Fire Chief, Johnny was lurking in the shadows back of the building on Randolph Street that housed such a strange collecti...

The forenoon was all but gone when Johnny stirred in his bed, then sat up abruptly to stare about him. He had been dreaming, and woven into the web of his dreams was the face an...

After dragging the Zoo telephone from its box and taking the scrap of black cardboard from a shelf, Johnny sat down to tell his story. He told it, too, from beginning to end; fr...

“Doubtless they were acquainted. Men of the same trade, even if it’s of a criminal nature, usually are. Birds of a feather, you know. It may be, too, that Knobs was encouraging...

As Johnny gave the pole at the side of the boat a vigorous shove, then another and another, he found no time for thoughts other than directing the silent maneuvering of his clum...

“I—I got a bump there.” Johnny did not wish to tell the Chief about his island experience. He was afraid the Chief would not like his going against advice; and besides, if somet...

“Well, if your gyroscope’s workin’ sufficient well to let you navigate without too much of a list to starboard, we might set sail. I’ve got some coffee, and I guess there’s stil...

As the elevated train rattled noisily along over the low roofs of cottages and between endless rows of apartment houses, Johnny Thompson sat staring dreamily at the lattice-like...

Since there were no new clues to be followed out, and because he had grown tired of haunting the central fire station with its incessant clatter of telegraph instruments and its...

In the meantime alarms had gone in. At the central fire station the third alarm came in before the megaphone had repeated the second. Clanging and screeching, forcing their way...

The moon was just rising out of the marsh; turning the dark rushes to a deep bottle green and spreading a bar of gold down a channel. For two solid hours Johnny had managed to t...

As for Johnny and Mazie, they had visited the park many times before. The amusements were an old story, but the crowd was not. No crowd is ever tiresome to a person who has a ke...

Forest City was a place of many marvels; at least so it had seemed to Mazie in the days when, dressed in rompers, she had come there to play. The moment you entered the gate you...

After accompanying the police boat to the island and having watched in silence the investigation made by the police, which was followed by a short search for the man who had vis...

Strangely enough, as Johnny crept over the railing that hung out over one hundred and fifty feet of empty air, he chanced to think of the black bag beneath the bed in his room.

Johnny was up against the most puzzling problem of his whole life. A tensely dramatic situation, a novelist would have called it. Having long since abandoned the theory that the...

With fear in her heart Mazie again entered the burning Zoo. This was the most spectacular fire she had ever known anything about and she was determined to see it through to its...

Johnny told of the pink-eyed man and the tall stooped one who limped. Without thinking much about it, he told the Chief for the first time of his visits to the marsh, of his mys...

Johnny found the fire chief in a sour mood next morning. Two disastrous fires in a single night, both probable cases of arson. One had been tipped off to him beforehand and he h...