Candle smoke, and wood smoke too.”
The flashlight suddenly went on again, its beam shooting across the room to the fireplace, then moving quickly to either side.
“Jeepers!” a third voice said. “Look at all those magazines piled up there. Let’s get ’em!”
There was a scuffle in the doorway as two or three people tried to push in and were held back.
“Wait a minute,” the voice with the flashlight said. “This may be a trap. We know they came in here. They may be hiding somewhere.”
“Oh, come on,” a girl’s voice said. “They must have gone. They probably heard us pull that board off the window and slipped outside. Let’s go in.”
“In that case why haven’t the scouts outside signalled?” the first voice said. “They must still be here somewhere.”
Nevertheless, he began to advance into the room a few paces, slowly swinging the flashlight beam around the walls and the piles of magazines that lay everywhere.
Several other dim figures, both boys and girls, pushed into the room behind him and now another flashlight was switched on.
Behind the piled magazines against the rear wall the five leaders of the Annex Gang waited grimly, hardly daring to breathe. They had recognized the intruders. The Spadina Gang had tracked them down after all.
The boy with the second flashlight came over to one of the piles of magazines to pick up a comic book from the top and look at it. As he did so, he suddenly saw the rigid body of Fatty, its eyes glaring upwards.
The boy gave a yelp and almost dropped his flashlight, retreating several paces into the centre of the room.
“Look out!” he yelled. “There they are!”
It was the signal the Annex Gang had been waiting for. Before the boy who had given the alarm could utter another word, Fatty was on his feet and had grabbed him, scattering the pile of magazines in all directions. He snatched the flashlight from the boy’s hand, switched it off, and threw it behind him into the corner.
At the same moment, Red hurled himself like a thunderbolt at the leader of the Spadina Gang, who had the other flashlight, and grabbed it too. At once the room was in total darkness again and a scene of the utmost confusion began.
Taking advantage of the fact that this attack had surprised the Spadinas completely, the five members of the Annex Gang, although outnumbered, began to do a tremendous amount of damage. Shifting from one enemy to another, they would wrestle them to the ground, pummel them for a few seconds and then move on, before the person they had downed had had time to recover or could begin to fight back. In the confusion, with figures moving from place to place all round them and blows landing from all directions, the Spadinas even began to fight with each other, rolling and wrestling all over the floor with anyone who happened to bump into them.
But the confusion was too good to last. The Spadinas had raided in force and the five leaders of the Annex Gang were hopelessly outnumbered. The noise of the fighting and the shouts from the basement brought another group of the Spadina Gang running from another part of the house, which they had been searching. They brought several more flashlights into the basement with them and found and opened the garden door. This let in yet another group of the Spadina Gang which had been keeping watch on the outside of the house, in case the Annex Gang members tried to escape from the attack that way.
In a few minutes more all five had been overpowered and made prisoner, still struggling fiercely, with members of the Spadina Gang sitting on their arms and legs and chests and threatening to sit on their heads as well if they didn’t lie still and stop trying to break loose.
The leader of the Spadina Gang, wiping a streak of blood from his nose where he had run into someone’s fist, came round and looked down at each of them in turn, shining his flashlight in their faces.
“Right,” he said finally. “Now, let’s get one or two things straight. First we owe you something for spreading that garbage all round our headquarters. For that I think we’ll take your collection of magazines and comic books and muss up your own place a bit, so that it won’t be quite as good to live in. But before we get around to that, there’s this business of the dog to be settled. I think we’d better deal with that right away.”
“You’re right, we’d better!” Blackie said, struggling again with the Spadinas who were holding him prisoner. “Raids on the other gang’s headquarters are okay, but stealing dogs is just low-down, dirty thieving! Especially with the race coming up next week!”
The leader of the Spadina Gang looked surprised and walked over to Blackie, prodding him gently in the ribs with his foot as he lay on the floor.
“You’re right it’s low-down, dirty thieving,” he said. “But if you feel that way about it, I’m surprised you do it. What’ve you done with our dog?”
“What’ve we done with your dog!” the Professor yelled, looking up angrily. “What’ve you done with our dog, you mean!”
“Now look,” the Spadina leader said threateningly. “This isn’t going to get you anywhere. You know you’ve swiped our dog and we know you’ve swiped our dog, so just tell us where it is and get it over with. You could save yourselves a lot of trouble.”
“You mean to say someone’s taken your dog, too?” Fatty said, struggling unsuccessfully to sit up. “When?”
“You know when!” the Spadina leader said angrily. “Tonight! Just around supper time!”
3
The Mystery Deepens
It was a few minutes before the two gangs could really believe that they had both lost their dogs, at what must have been almost the identical time—just around dusk. But then the talk between them grew fast and excited. The Annex prisoners were allowed to get up and the whole group stood around in the basement asking each other questions and arguing about this strange coincidence.
“What makes you so sure your dog was stolen?” Blackie said. “Was he tied up before he disappeared, the way ours was?”
“Well, no,” the Spadina leader said, “he was loose, sitting out in front of one of our houses. But that doesn’t make any difference. He never wanders away by himself, because we’ve trained him not to. He certainly wouldn’t have wandered so far away that we couldn’t find him when we looked for him, and we’ve looked everywhere. We walked a couple of blocks in every direction. He even left a big beef bone on the sidewalk, that he was chewing on, and that’s pretty strange. So then we figured you must have taken him, because we knew you were entering your dog for the race next week, and you’d already raided our place and spread that garbage all over everything.”
“Well, if he wasn’t tied up or anything, he still might have wandered off by himself,” the Professor said. “He may turn up again. Wouldn’t he have barked or anything if someone had tried to take him away?”
“Your
