New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club (13 page)

       
"Mr. Mayor," said Mrs. Larrabee, in the tone of voice women use when
they think things have gone far enough, "what do you intend to do about
the rain?"

        Mayor
Scragg buried his face in his hands and sobbed loudly, twice. Then he looked
up, and a fiendish gleam leaped into his eyes. With magnificent self-control he
said, "Mrs. Larrabee, I intend to give you authority to stop it!"

       
"Excellent!" said Mrs. Larrabee. "Then I have an announcement to
make."

       
"Yes, Mrs. Larrabee," sighed the Mayor. "What is your
announcement?"

        "The
ladies of the Greater Mammoth Falls Garden Circle, of which I am president, and
the ladies of the Mammoth Falls chapter of the Friends of the Wildwood, of
which I am also president as well as corresponding secretary, have invited the
members of the Daughters of Pocahontas and their husbands to join them in an
ancient Indian sun dance. It is a ritual dance of the Pawnees, and one in which
they had great faith."

       
"Yes, Mrs. Larrabee!"

        "We
intend to perform the dance at six a.m. tomorrow morning at Lookout Rock on the
top of Indian Hill. It's a most appropriate place, don't you think?"

       
"Yes, Mrs. Larrabee!"

        "We
would like you and all the Town Council members to be there. We think the whole
community should support us."

       
"I'm sure they will, Mrs. Larrabee."

       
"But will you be there, Mr. Mayor?"

       
"Yes!" said the Mayor wearily. "I might as well be. My house
will probably be under water."

       
"And the members of the Council?"

       
"Yes, Mrs. Larrabee. They will be there."

        This was
something we couldn't afford to miss. Tired as we were, we dragged ourselves to
the top of Indian Hill in the pale gray light of the morning. We had worked all
night on the dikes, and there was nothing more that could be done. If the creek
rose any higher, the sheer weight of the water would burst the sandbag walls.

        It was a
motley crowd that assembled in the grassy clearing behind Lookout Rock that
morning. A persistent drizzle was still falling from the leaden overcast above,
and most people were huddled under umbrellas. Mrs. Larrabee was circulating
among them, trying to persuade everyone to take down their umbrellas and join
in the dance. Meanwhile, Abner Larrabee, with the help of a couple of other henpecked
men, was trying to coax a sodden mass of newspapers and twigs into flame.

        The
Daughters of Pocahontas had been using this clearing as a meeting place for
years, and they had arranged a lot of fieldstones in a circle for seats. At one
side of the circle was a sort of gateway, where you were supposed to stop and
pick up a twig to throw on the council fire in the center as you entered the
sacred circle. At the side opposite the gateway was a large slate slab,
suspended across two rocks, which served as a kind of throne for whoever was
the high muckety-muck of the council. In the center was a ring of smaller
stones to mark the spot for the council fire, and this is where Abner Larrabee
was striving to get a blaze started.

        We
clambered up onto the top of Lookout Rock, which was directly behind the
throne, to watch the proceedings -- all except Dinky Poore, that is. He curled
up at the base of the rock in a poncho and fell fast asleep.

        A lot of
shouting went up from the women when the first flicker of flame shot up through
the stack of kindling Abner was fanning. Raincoats came off, and somebody
started beating a drum, and all of a sudden there were about three dozen people
inside the circle in full Indian regalia. The crowd of onlookers pressed in
closer, and before we could even start laughing, Mrs. Larrabee was reciting a
mystic chant in some language we couldn't even understand. She was standing in
front of the throne with her face turned up to the sky and her arms thrust out to
her sides with the palms facing forward, toward the east. A rhythmic clapping
from those seated in the circle punctuated her chant, and every once in a while
they threw in another shout.

        Pretty
soon the men in the group stood up and started stamping their feet in time to
the clapping. The beat got faster and faster, and then the chant turned into a
song, which everybody was singing. Mrs. Larrabee stepped forward to the council
fire, where she raised her arms up high and pointed her fingers toward the sky,
and one of the men leaped up with a large hoop in his hands and started
gyrating wildly about the circle, doing all sorts of fancy stunts with the
hoop. Then all the men moved in to form a ring around the fire and started to
dance in a circle, stamping their feet hard on the ground and throwing their
heads back every time they shouted. The women all joined hands and started
moving in a larger circle in the opposite direction.

        Henry
sat on the rock with his chin propped on his knees and stared at the dancers.
"Not very scientific!" he said.

        Suddenly
someone screamed, and all the men started beating on the fringes of Mrs.
Larrabee's Indian dress, which had caught fire from being too close to the
flames. But the dance went on without interruption, in an ever-increasing
cadence, and nobody seemed to notice that it had stopped raining.

       
"Holy mackerel! There's the sun!" shouted Freddy Muldoon, standing up
on the rock and pointing across the valley. We all jerked our heads around and,
sure enough, you could see the top of it shining through a rift in the clouds
on the eastern horizon. Mrs. Larrabee heard the shout and brought her head down
out of the clouds. She shouted too, and stretched her arms out straight toward
the east. The song changed to an even weirder tune, and all the dancers flung
themselves about the circle in wild abandon. Then the dance stopped suddenly,
and they all knelt down and bowed toward the east, placing the palms of their
hands flat on the ground.

        There
was a lot of cheering and back-slapping among the spectators, and Mayor Scragg
stepped forward with the members of the Town Council and shook Mrs. Larrabee's
hand. The full light of the sun had broken through the rift in the clouds now,
and it shone on the faces of the dancers, which were all smeared with some kind
of reddish-brown paint.

        "I
hope I never get old enough to dress up like that!" said Mortimer
Dalrymple.

        We
clambered down off the rock and joined the line of people moving down the path
toward the road. We passed right by Mrs. Larrabee, who was still being
congratulated by the Council members.

       
"Well, Big Chief!" she called out to Henry. "What did you think
of the dance?"

       
"Very nice!" said Henry politely. "You sure picked a good day
for it!"

        We woke
up Dinky Poore and went on down the hill, muddy and tired and a little
bewildered. It looked as though it would be a nice day.

        "I
guess you were right again, Henry," said Freddy Muldoon. "Science
doesn't know all the answers."

       
"Neither does Mrs. Larrabee!" said Henry.

The Flying Sorcerer

© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer

D
INKY
P
OORE DIDN'T
usually miss meetings of the Mad Scientists' Club; so when
we hadn't seen him around the clubhouse for four straight days, we figured
something was wrong.

       
"Maybe he deserted, and joined up with Harmon's gang," said Freddy
Muldoon, who was probably Dinky's best friend. "He was pretty gloomy all
last week, and he hardly opened his mouth."

       
"Stow it!" said Mortimer Dalrymple. "Dinky wouldn't do
that."

        "I
dunno," Freddy persisted. "He was acting kinda cagey, like, and I
haven't laid eyes on him all this week."

       
"Have you been to his house?" Henry Mulligan asked him.

       
"Yeah! But he don't answer. I holler through the back fence, like always,
and Mrs. Poore says he ain't there. I think he deserted."

       
"Baloney!" said Homer Snodgrass. "You always want to make a big
mystery out of everything."

       
"Well, I ain't no Pollyanna like you!" Freddy blustered.

        "Go
soak your head!" Homer retorted, as Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the
packing crate and called for order.

       
"What do you think, Charlie?" Jeff asked me. "You always know
what to do with Dinky when he has one of his moods."

       
"Maybe we could send a delegation around to his house, and find out what's
wrong," I suggested. "Or is that too practical?"

       
"Seems like the least we could do," Mortimer observed. "After
all, he might be dead."

       
"Hoh, boy!" Freddy snorted, slapping his palm to his forehead.
"I hope you never donate your brain to science. It would set civilization
back fifty years."

        The
upshot was that Jeff appointed Freddy and me as a committee of two to make a
formal call at Dinky's house. We went there right after the meeting.

        "Is
Dinky sick?" I asked Mrs. Poore, when she answered the door.

        Mrs.
Poore looked startled for a moment. Then she said, "Maybe he is! I hadn't
thought of that."

       
"What do you mean?" I asked.

       
"Well, I don't know, exactly," she said, "but he's been acting
strangely, lately. He gets up early, and I pack him a lunch, and I don't see
him again until suppertime -- or sometimes until way after dark. What has he
been doing?"

       
"That's what we wanted to ask
you
," said Freddy.

       
"Ask
me
?" Mrs. Poore looked startled again. "Why? Hasn't
he been with you?"

        "We
haven't seen Dinky all week," I explained.

        "Oh,
dear!" said Mrs. Poore, holding the tips of her fingers to her lips.
"Don't tell me -- No! -- I never thought of that!"

        Freddy
Muldoon screwed his eyes up into tiny slits. "He isn't dead, is he?"

       
"Oh! Gracious no!" Mrs. Poore laughed. "Whatever gave you that
idea, Freddy?"

       
"Just a nutty friend of mine," Freddy shrugged. "Forget
it!"

       
"Well, do you know where he is now?" I asked her.

       
"I've no idea," she said, putting her fingers to her lips again.
"I just assumed he'd been with you boys all week. You know how it
is...." She hesitated for a moment. "Well, you boys are always busy
with some kind of crazy project -- I mean -- well, I just don't worry about
Dinky, even if he comes in long after midnight, because I know he's working on
something important with all of you, and..."

       
"Never mind, Mrs. Poore. We'll find out what he's up to!" Freddy
interrupted her. He gave an exaggerated bow and strode off the porch with me
following him.

        We knew
we could find out where Dinky was, and what he was doing. It was just a
question of how long it would take. Unless Dinky had discovered some new
hideout that none of us knew about, it was just a matter of checking all our
regular haunts until we found him. Jeff ticked off the spots on our big wall
map of Mammoth County in his barn: Indian Hill, Brake Hill, Memorial Point, the
old zinc mine, the quarry, Mammoth Falls, the old mill on Lemon Creek, Zeke
Boniface's junkyard, the old Harkness mansion, Elmer Pridgin's cabin, Jason
Barnaby's apple orchard, and a dozen other places. Then he split us up into
two-man teams (in the Mad Scientists' Club nobody goes off on a mission alone),
and we set off on our bicycles to look for Dinky.

        Freddy
and I had already checked out Zeke's junkyard, and were heading for the apple
orchard when we got a call on the radio from Mortimer. He and Homer claimed
they could see Dinky, crouched on top of Lookout Rock high up on Indian Hill.
They had hollered to him from the road, but he wouldn't answer their call and
they were going up after him.