Stand By -- London Calling! by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, detective, sleuth, murder, classic
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXIV

This Side of Nowhere!

Pell Barneyfield brought to a stop the weird vehicle he was driving. Squinting his eyes fiercely against the dazzling noonday sun that was beating downwards in seeming waves, he peered along the deserted hard dirt road over which the gas-driven cylinders of his strange-looking conveyance had been impelling him, thence toward the lone, dilapidated clapboard-constructed and tarpaper-thatched store that hovered by the godforsaken wayside. And over whose front was a long white-painted plank with crude black lettering reading:

THE WONT-FIND-NO-FURTHER STORE

formerially “ELUM’S”

The place was a desolate countryside region—a region of uncultivatable knolls, becoming bigger and bigger toward the south or left, with here and there, in all directions, patches of malignant looking weeds, and here and there, too, clusters of scrub oak—with more of the same in all directions. There were no fences anywhere, because of apparently nothing that had to be kept in or out.

So utterly detached in space did Pell Barneyfield feel, that he turned suddenly about, on his high coat-padded seat, to see if the thing that was supposed to be both under him and behind him really was still there! Which, of course, it was. And which consisted of a circus truck, gilded and crimsoned aplenty outside, but minus both of its ends, for the reason that it held, slightly nozzled upward, and supported in that position by a curious lifting framework of wood in the rear of the truck, a great long wooden cannon that stuck out from the back of the truck all of eight feet—a cannon large enough to contain a man. And which in fact did—every night! The base of the great wooden tube, which was of metal instead of wood, was complicatedly pivoted and connected to a more powerful metal undercarriage on low wheels, the latter just now locked tight by chains, and with half a dozen ground anchors swinging from it by chains; the latter undercarriage was a bewildering thing of shiny handwheels, nickled levers and calibrated scales, obviously permitting the tube to be ever so delicately angled, so that it would toss its human contents each night unerringly into the small net at the Big Top’s end—and not into the next county! The cunning device inside the tube by which the exploding gunpowder merely drove forth, a brief way, a tight-fitting piston, was not visible; but the holes where the flash and the fire came forth!—and the hole for the spitting fuse which always caused the audience to hold its collective breath—were in full evidence.

And the entire story of the device—though Pell himself could not see that just now—was being carried upon the outside surfaces of the two side walls of this truck; for there, on each, was lettered the screaming announcement:

HUGO, THE HUMAN CANNONBALL!

See Him Defy Death Each Night!

It was about time, Pell discomfitedly knew, for gaping mouths to appear at the heavily-screened door of the wayside store. And to ask, beyond any doubt, “Whut’s that fer, Mis-ter?”

But none, for a wonder, did! And because

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