The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn (18 page)

When the safety belt was finally unhooked, the fireman, who had been talking reassuringly the whole time, eased Anthony down from his perch to the rungs of the ladder. He asked Anthony to follow him slowly down the ladder. But now that the real danger had passed, Anthony went all to pieces. He shuddered and shivered and clung rigidly to the ladder. “I don’t wanna go down! I’m scared!” he wailed.

The fireman smiled sympathetically at Anthony. He had seen cases like this before. Without hesitating, he turned and bellowed an order down to the men who were working the controls of the ladder. More rattling and grinding of gears. Slowly, the top section of the ladder began to slide down with Anthony and the fireman still on it. Click, click, one rung at a time. The ladder went on collapsing like a telescope until the two sections were lying one on top of the other. Now the ladder was only half as long as it had been before. More gear-grinding. The ladder swung around in a big arc and slowly laid itself down on top of the long red truck. A dazed Anthony found himself being led by the hand along the top of the truck and down some steps to the ground.

And there, standing next to the truck, were his mother and his father and Keith. They looked anxious and frightened and happy, too, all at the same time.

“Where’s Miss Eells?” asked Anthony weakly.

But nobody seemed to hear him.

Mrs. Monday rushed forward and grabbed him in her arms and hugged him violently. “Anthony, Anthony, oh, I’m
so
glad you’re safe! What happened? What happened to you? Why did you run away? Did that man over there kidnap you? What happened? Oh, I’m
so
glad you’re back,
I’m so glad!”

Anthony felt very happy. His mother hadn’t seemed so glad to see him in a long, long time, he thought. Now Keith and his parents were all talking to him at once, bombarding him with questions that he couldn’t answer. He felt dizzy and confused. It was almost as if he were walking around in a dream. In the midst of all this, he felt a tap on his arm. He turned around, and there was the fireman who had rescued him.

“Excuse me, young man, but I believe this belongs to you. You had it in your hand when you were up there, and you wouldn’t let go of it for love or money.” The fireman held out the package that had fallen out of the reindeer. Anthony grabbed it and hugged it to his chest.

“Gee, thanks, mister. Thanks an awful lot!”

Now Mrs. Monday turned to the fireman, and for a moment it looked as if she were going to hug him. “Oh, thank you, thank you so much! What is your name, officer? I’m going to see that you get a medal for this!”

The fireman smiled politely and touched the brim of his helmet. “All in the line of duty, ma’am. Glad to see the boy is safe and sound again.” And with that he turned and went back to his truck. The newsmen who had taken Hugo Philpotts’s picture now crowded around Anthony and snapped his picture, too.

And now someone else arrived on the scene: Miss Eells. With her head still swathed in its bloody bandage, she came tottering down the front steps of the library and rushed over to Anthony. She threw her arms around him and gave him a very large hug.

“Anthony, Anthony! My Lord, what on earth is going on around here, anyway? I remember falling down the steps in my house and hitting my head, and then I woke up here just now and heard all this racket going on outside!”

“I found the treasure, Miss Eells!” Anthony exclaimed. All his fear had melted away now, and he was feeling very proud about what he had done. “It’s Alpheus Winterborn’s treasure! It’s really here, right here in this package!”

“If it
is
Alpheus Winterborn’s treasure, it belongs to me—I mean, it belongs to the Winterborn family, and I am a member of that family.” This, of course, was Hugo Philpotts talking. He had been standing next to the fire engine and shivering under his blanket, but now, seeing Anthony amid the little knot of people that had gathered around him, he had stepped forward. He stood stiffly, glowering at them all in turn, and then he shoved his way forward and stretched his hands toward the package that Anthony was holding. “It’s mine, you filthy little wretch! Give it to me!” he snapped.

Mr. Monday stepped in between Anthony and Hugo. There was an angry frown on his face, and his fists were doubled up. “Who the heck are you calling a little wrench?”

“Wretch,” said Hugo, correcting him.

“Well, whatever it was, you don’t have any right to call my son names. What the heck were you doin’ up there on that roof, anyway?”

“None of your business,” sniffed Hugo. “I’ll take care of you when the time comes,” he added with a malicious gleam in his eye.

Mr. Monday was beginning to get really angry now. It looked as if he might haul off and paste Hugo one in the kisser. “What the heck do you mean?” Mr. Monday growled.

“You’ll find out,” Hugo muttered. He looked Mr. Monday over from head to foot and added, in a tone of utter disgust, “Yes, you’ll find out soon enough, you disgusting, beer-guzzling clod.”

“What did you call me? Say that again, you dirty low-life!” Mr. Monday squared off and raised his fists. Mrs. Monday, Keith, and Anthony crowded around him, pleading.

“C’mon, Dad, don’t worry, he’s just a dumb creep,” said Keith. “Don’t waste your time with him!”

“Don’t do anything rash, Howard!” begged Mrs. Monday. “Think of your heart!”

“Please, Dad, don’t hit him!” said Anthony. Secretly, Anthony would have loved to see his dad lay Hugo Philpotts out on the pavement. Mr. Monday was an ex-Marine, and Anthony was sure he could make mincemeat out of Hugo. On the other hand, Anthony didn’t want his dad to have another heart attack.

“Okay, okay, now break it up! Just break it up, the lot of you!” A policeman stepped in between Hugo and Mr. Monday. In a small town, everybody knows the policemen by name, and both Hugo and Mr. Monday knew this one. It was Officer Earl Swett, the policeman who had investigated the burglary at Miss Eells’s house.

“That boy has some property of mine,” said Hugo, pointing at Anthony. “I demand that he give it to me!”

Officer Swett rubbed his chin. He was a big burly guy with sleepy, hooded eyes. He talked slowly, and he never did things in a hurry. “Well, now, Mr. Philpotts, maybe he’s got somethin’ of yours, and maybe he doesn’t. We’ll have to sort this out later. By the way, would you kindly tell me what you were doin’ up on that there roof?”

“Why don’t you ask that boy what he was doing up there? He was up there, too, you know.”

Officer Swett looked from Hugo to Anthony and back to Hugo again. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We’ll just have to sort all this out down at the station. I want you to come down tomorrow and answer a few questions.”

Hugo glared haughtily at Officer Swett. “I beg your pardon? Are you talking to me?”

Officer Swett looked him in the eye. “Yes, sir. I believe I am.”

“Do you know who I am?” said Hugo in his huffiest voice. He was trying very hard to be grand and majestic, but it’s hard to be grand and majestic when you’re wearing tennis shoes and dungarees and when you have just been pulled down off a library roof in the middle of the night.

Office Swett was beginning to lose his temper. With him it was always a very slow process, but when he lost it, people knew that they’d better watch out. He put his hands on his hips and stared curiously at Hugo, as if he were a bug that had just crawled out from under a rock. “Yeah, I know who you are, and I know where you were about five minutes ago. And that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about.”

“Do you understand the position I have in this community?” Hugo said in a threatening voice. “Do you know what I could do to you?”

“Yeah. You could cancel my Christmas Club,” said Officer Swett, grinning.

Quite a little crowd had gathered around Hugo and the others, and everybody laughed loudly at this remark. Hugo’s face got very red. “We’ll see about this,” he muttered. And then he turned and stalked away.

There was a lot to be talked about and taken care of, and it took a long time for everything to get thrashed out and settled. First of all, there was the matter of Miss Eells’s head wound. It turned out that she had gotten a nasty scalp wound that took several stitches to close, and she had a mild concussion. But after a few days in the hospital, she was her usual busy, cheerful self. She talked a lot about the two knocks on the head that she had gotten in less than one year.

As for the treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, there was a great deal to be settled. Of course, nothing could be hidden now. It all had to come out, the whole incredible story of how Anthony had found the clues to the treasure, of how he had chased the treasure down one blind alley and then, almost by accident, had found the true path. As he told Miss Eells again later, he had been packing his bag on the night of the flood when all of a sudden he had realized that the motto BELIEVE ONLY HALF OF WHAT YOU READ applied to the poem. There were eight lines in the poem; the first four were just a decoy, a blind, and so was the message in the mirror. They led nowhere, or rather they led to a tin box with a four-leaf clover in it. But the last four lines of the poem were true, and once you saw this, it was all very simple. The poem even gave a clue as to how to get inside the reindeer without tearing the poor thing apart. And what was the treasure? What was inside the cloth-wrapped parcel? That, as they say, is the interesting part.

Chapter 17

To whom it may concern:

I, Alpheus T. Winterborn, do hereby declare that whosoever removes the object that accompanies this document from its hiding place is the sole and rightful possessor, owner, and usufructuary of this said object. No other person has any claim upon it whatsoever.

Signed,

Alpheus T. Winterborn

We bear witness before Almighty GocTthat the above statement was made and signed by the above-named person, viz., Alpheus T. Winterborn, Esq., of Hoosac, Minnesota, of the County of Hoosac, in the United States of America.

Simon Searle

Simon Searle, Commissioner of Oaths

22 Wigmore St., London, W.2

Anthony Twitt

Anthony Twitt, Secretary of Mr. Searle

A piece of parchment containing this statement in Alpheus Winterborn’s handwriting was one of the things in the cloth wrappings. It was signed by him and two witnesses, though it seems fairly likely that the witnesses hadn’t had any idea of what they were signing. The whole thing had evidently been taken care of in London, where Alpheus Winterborn stopped on his way back from his first trip to the Holy Land. A big, fancy seal with a crown in the middle of it had been pressed into the paper at the bottom of the document. Bundled up with the document was a small, gilt-edged diary bound in green leather. It contained an account of how the object in the wrappings had been found. This account—like the document—was in Alpheus Winterborn’s handwriting.

The object itself was a statue made of solid gold. It was not a very beautiful statue. In fact, the first time Anthony saw it (it was unwrapped down at the Hoosac Police Station, around dawn on the day after Anthony’s climbing adventure), he thought it was just a shapeless lump. It looked like something that some grade-school kid had made out of molding clay. Two big hollow eyes were gouged out of one end of the statue, and the arms were just little spindly things stuck to the sides. The feet were squashy flat pads sticking out of the bottom of the statue. Each foot had two holes in it, and from this you might guess that the statue was meant to be nailed or screwed down onto something. The nose was just a little pointed nub between the eyes. And the mouth might have been made by someone working his finger back and forth, except that it would be hard to work your finger around in solid gold. The statue had ears, too—little mashed-up ears with gold earrings that clattered when you picked the statue up.

Without the green diary, Anthony and Miss Eells and the others might have puzzled over this lumpy little object for a long time. As it was, even with the diary, there were problems.

The diary explained how Alpheus Winterborn had gone out into the wilderness of Judea with only one guide and three days’ supply of food and water. The wilderness of Judea is a barren, stony place, a maze of steep, rocky ravines. Nothing grows there. There is no water to drink. According to the account in the diary, one night Alpheus and his Arab guide camped in a little cave at the end of a steep, narrow gully. During the night, an earthquake struck, and when they woke up, Alpheus and his guide saw that a part of the rear wall of the cave had fallen in. They discovered that the rear wall was really artificial. It was a stone wall that had been built by somebody and then cleverly disguised to make it look like a natural rock wall. Behind the wall was—well, at first, Alpheus Winterborn wasn’t sure. There were the remains of a wooden box, very old and very rotten. Hardly anything was left of it. In fact, it crumbled to dust when he touched it. There were some gold rings on the outside and what looked like a couple of warped poles that had been meant to be thrust through the rings so that bearers could carry the box from place to place. Held to one of the slabs of rotting wood by a pair of golden nails was a funny little figurine. A second one lay nearby. Suddenly it came to Alpheus; he had read his Bible, and he knew what he had found. He had found the Ark of the Covenant.