Four Corners, Volume 1 (The Argosy Library) by Theodore Roscoe

Author:Theodore Roscoe [Roscoe, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Action and Adventure
Publisher: Altus Press
Published: 2015-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

I Was the Kid with the Drum

Once I was a boy in a strange, fascinating world….

Hats off! Along the street there comes

A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums.

—Bartlett.

Chapter I

THE drum was beating by itself…. To this day I can see it standing there in the corner gloom of that upstairs back bedroom, round as a cartwheel and fat as two washtubs, its varnished hull gleaming faintly in the smoky yellow light of the chimney-lamp on the dresser, its huge-bulged shadow stenciled blackly on the gray wallpaper behind it; the drumhead, enormous, moon-pale, facing the window with the gold legend: Four Corners Military Band, and going, Boom! Boom! Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom—! filling the room and the night outside with its basso bellying resonance.

And to this day the sound of a base drum—summoning smaller boys as a magnet—starts a tickle down my spine, and gives me the same scalp-sensation I had that night when, on the woodshed roof behind the Sleeper house, I spied into an upstairs window and saw a drum booming under no visible drumstick, with no Joe Sleeper, no drummer there.

You may ask what I was doing on the Sleeper woodshed to begin with, behind that somber mansion on a night so black the stars must have turned to coal.

Be reminded that a woodshed is as fair a nocturnal territory for a boy as for a cat; and when was a bass drum not a summons? The combination of the two—forbidden precinct in a place of shades, and the biggest bass drum in (as I remember it) the world—was too much for any twelve-year-old torn between the desire to play such a drum and the ambition to be a detective.

Sousa and Sherlock Holmes—certainly my youthful predilections were satisfied that night. A drum in the corner of a dim-lit bedroom. In that house! Beating by itself! I can still feel the pull at the roots of my hair, the fear-ache in my throat that was like crying.

“But there’s no one playing it!”

I remember whispering that to myself. And how the fact, given credence by my utterance, would have sent me flying had not terror held me fast on a slope of shingles, peering across a ten-foot gulf of nothingness into that vacant room where a drum, unattended, was booming. In the sticky dark, through air too tired to move after a wilting August day, the drum-beats marched away with the sluggish tread of heavy boots in tar; and watching them come from that yellow upper window, I went clammy sick.

The window was up a scant ten inches, but between blind and sill I could see quite enough. A bony iron bedpost. White china pitcher on wash-stand. Joe’s band uniform, empty of Joe, limp on its wall hook under the girl-with-parasol calendar from Clapp’s Store. All as I had viewed it on previous occasions of espionage, except—except the kitchen chair in which Joe would sit while practicing, mid-floor, big drum clamped between big knees—the chair that night was tilted

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