Recognizing the superior strength of his captors, young Kerry soon gave
up struggling. The thrill of his first real adventure entered into his
blood. He remembered that he was the son of his father, and he realized,
being a quick-witted lad, that he was in the grip of enemies of his
father. The panic which had threatened him when first he had recognized
that he was in the hands of Chinese, gave place to a cold rage--a
heritage which in later years was to make him a dangerous man.
He lay quite passively in the grasp of someone who held him fast, and
learned, by breathing quietly, that the presence of the muffler about
his nose and mouth did not greatly inconvenience him. There was some
desultory conversation between the two men in the car, but it
was carried on in an odd, sibilant language which the boy did not
understand, but which he divined to be Chinese. He thought how every
other boy in the school would envy him, and the thought was stimulating,
nerving. On the very first day of his holidays he was become the central
figure of a Chinatown drama.
The last traces of fear fled. His position was uncomfortable and his
limbs were cramped, but he resigned himself, with something almost like
gladness, and began to look forward to that which lay ahead with a zest
and a will to be no passive instrument which might have surprised his
captors could they have read the mind of their captive.
The journey seemed almost interminable, but young Kerry suffered it in
stoical silence until the car stopped and he was lifted and carried down
stone steps into some damp, earthy-smelling place. Some distance was
traversed, and then many flights of stairs were mounted, some bare but
others carpeted.
Finally he was deposited in a chair, and as he raised his hand to the
scarf, which toward the end of the journey had been bound more tightly
about his head so as to prevent him from seeing at all, he heard a door
closed and locked.
The scarf was quickly removed. And Dan found himself in a low-ceilinged
attic having a sloping roof and one shuttered window. A shadeless
electric lamp hung from the ceiling. Excepting the cane-seated chair in
which he had been deposited and a certain amount of nondescript lumber,
the attic was unfurnished. Dan rapidly considered what his father would
have done in the circumstances.
“Make sure that the door is locked,” he muttered.
He tried it, and it was locked beyond any shadow of doubt.
“The window.”
Shutters covered it, and these were fastened with a padlock.
He considered this padlock attentively; then, drawing from his pocket
one of those wonderful knives which are really miniature tool-chests, he
raised from a grove the screw-driver which formed part of its equipment,
and with neatness and dispatch unscrewed the staple to which the padlock
was attached!
A moment later he had opened the shutters and was looking out into the
drizzle of the night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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