Mad Scientists' Club

by Bertrand R. Brinley

  "Then I suppose you're the one who made these very authentic-looking footprints in the sand?"

  "Yes!" said Harmon. "We figured that would give them a real charge."

  "Well, you're a very clever young man," said the professor. "Now, supposing you show us the real egg."

  "It's back at our clubhouse," said Harmon, and he started to lead the way back up the path.

  "Harmon has always been one of the cleverest young lads in Mammoth Falls," Mayor Scragg confided to the professor, as he hurried to keep up with him over the rough ground. "I'll have to remember to tell him so."

  The rest of us fell in behind them, and as we trudged back out to the road the members of the Mad Scientists' Club were the most dejected lot you ever saw. But I noticed that Henry had stayed behind and was searching among the broken chunks of plaster in the sand. I saw him put something in his pocket, and when he caught up with the rest of us he was wearing that quiet, mysterious smile again.

  It was pretty hot on the second floor of Stony Martin's garage, and Mayor Scragg was already mopping the top of his head with his handkerchief on the way up the stairs. When Professor Mudgeon saw the big egg on the table he sucked a lot of air in through his teeth and lunged toward it with his hands outstretched.

  "Ah, yes! This looks like the real thing," he exclaimed. "And such a beauty, too!"

  The reporters were crowding around him as he bent over it with his glass. Somehow or other, Henry had managed to worm his way in among them and was standing right at the professor's shoulder.

  "The light isn't very good here, Professor. Why don't we take it over to the window."

  "An excellent idea," said the professor, "but be very careful. This looks like a very valuable fossil specimen."

  "Oh, I'm sure it is," said Henry, as he spun around with the thing held lightly in his hands.

  "Wait a minute! I'll carry it!" said Harmon Muldoon, grabbing Henry by the elbow.

  "Look out!" Henry cried. The egg popped out of his hands and crashed to the floor, where it practically exploded into a litter of shards and white powder. "Gosh, I'm sorry, Harmon!" said Henry. "I'll clean it up for you."

  "Never mind!" said Harmon, looking aghast at the mess on the floor. "I guess you win, Henry." And he crushed a big chunk of the plaster under the heel of his shoe. Something bright among the powder glinted in the faint light from the window Harmon bent down and picked it up. "Hey, that's my ring!" he said. "I lost it when I took it off the other day to mix the ..."

  "To mix what?" asked Henry.

  "Never mind," said Harmon, sheepishly. Then he looked hard at Henry. "Hey! This must be the egg that I cast to put out in the swamp. How did it ever get back in here?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea," said Henry.

  "But the one out in the swamp --"

  "Was a fake!" said Henry.

  "So you were a step ahead of me all the time!"

  Professor Mudgeon cleared his throat. "Excuse me! But I'm thoroughly confused."

  "You said a mouthful, Professor!" muttered Dinky, as he stepped up to Henry with his face all red. "Do you mean you had us spend all night carrying chunks of plaster back and forth to that stinkin' swamp?"

  "It wasn't my idea for you to switch those eggs," said Henry, calmly.

  "Well, that wasn't very scientific," Dinky pouted.

  "No!" Henry agreed. "But it was pretty funny."

  "Well, you sure had me fooled," Harmon admitted. "I really thought you had found a genuine dinosaur egg out there in the quarry."

  "We did!" said Henry.

  "You did?"

  The reporters pricked up their ears at this, and a barrage of questions hit Henry from all directions. But Mayor Scragg's voice trumpeted over all of them.

  "Well, where is it, you young fool -- I mean, won't you tell us where it is, Henry?"

  "It's out in the swamp," said Henry, wiping the perspiration off his glasses, "but in a different place."

  "Oh no! Not out in that swamp again!" groaned the Mayor, looking down at his muddy feet.

  "Just a minute. I'm puzzled about one thing," said Mr. Bowden "My paper will want to know why you buried that fake egg in the first place, and why you led us out there on a wild-goose chase."

  "I'm sorry about that," Henry apologized. "But without mentioning any names, I had an idea somebody would try to swipe the real egg. So I made a plaster cast of it the first night we brought it in, and took the real egg right out to the swamp and buried it. I couldn't resist taking you out to where the fake egg was buried, because you never would have gotten the whole story if I hadn't."

  "And the culprit never would have come to light," boomed Mayor Scragg, fixing a baleful glare on Harmon Muldoon.

  "I think the Professor will agree that a scientist can't be too careful about protecting his discoveries," Henry observed.

  It was the professor's turn to wipe off his glasses. "Yes. . . . Hmm. . . . Uh," he stammered. "Unfortunately, history provides us with some classic examples of fraud and deception in the natural sciences -- er -- particularly in the field of paleontology, I may say."

  "Like the Piltdown man?" questioned Mr. Bowden.

  "Er ... like the Piltdown man," agreed Professor Mudgeon.

  As we went down the stairs and out into Egan's Alley, Mayor Scragg was again hovering at Professor Mudgeon's shoulder. "That young Muldoon lad always was a meddlesome boy!" he said, confidentially.

  "Very interesting! Very interesting!" said the professor.

  Henry led us this time to the opposite side of the swamp, near where the White Fork road starts up into the hills. Not far off the road, at the foot of a bluff, he stopped at a point in the middle of a white stretch of sand. He dug into the sand with his hands and unearthed the big egg. It looked just the way it had that first night. Dinky carried it over to the professor to examine.

  "Now I know why it felt so light that next day," he said.

  The professor was enthused, and Mayor Scragg beamed proudly. "Truly a beautiful specimen," said the professor.

  "Looks kind of ugly to me," said the Mayor. "But then, you know best, Professor."

  While the professor was examining the egg, and everybody with a camera was taking pictures of it, I noticed Henry pulling something else out of the hole in the sand.

  "What's that you have there, Henry?" I asked. It looked like one of our miniature transmitters.

  "It's a sort of booby trap I rigged up as a burglar alarm," he said, and showed it to me. It was a little transmitter, all right, but Henry had rigged it with a pressure-type switch.

  "As long as the egg was sitting on top of it, it kept on sending out a steady signal that I could pick up back at the clubhouse," he explained. "But if anyone moved the egg, the transmitter would shut off, and I'd know something was wrong."

  "That was why you were never really worried about the egg?"

  "That's right! I knew the real egg was here all the time, safe and sound. Any time I wanted to check, I'd just tune in this beep on our receiver."

  Then I looked at him hard.

  "Henry," I said, "is that what I saw you putting in your pocket over there when we dug up the fake egg? is that why you knew we were in Stony Martin's garage that night we switched the eggs?"

  "Oh, that?" said Henry. "That was a little different. When I cast the fake egg I did happen to drop one of these transmitters into the plaster. No matter where the egg went I could always follow the beep with our directional antenna. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

  "So you tracked us all the way from Stony's garage out to the swamp, and then slipped over there just to scare the life out of us!"

  "Not exactly. I wanted to make sure you were all right."

  Then another thought struck me. "Come to think of it, Henry, you knew the minute Harmon had swiped that egg, and you also knew where he took it."

  "Just about."

  "But you let everybody poke fun at Dinky and Freddy for claiming the egg had been stolen!"

  "I a
m a little ashamed of that," Henry admitted. "But I didn't want to louse up my plan. If I had admitted that the egg had been stolen, all you guys would have wanted to raid Harmon's clubhouse, and we wouldn't have had nearly as much fun."

  "You mean you wouldn't!" I told him, shaking my head.

  When the professor had finished examining the big egg he announced he was satisfied that it was genuine. He also asked the Mayor if the museum and the university could have the permission of the town authorities to conduct further excavations in the old quarry, in the hope that further fossil remains might be uncovered. Never one to stand in the way of the forward march of science, or the possible establishment of a tourist attraction, the Mayor assured him that the town would be most cooperative.

  "What are you going to do with this egg?" asked one of the reporters.

  Professor Mudgeon looked at Mayor Scragg, and Mayor Scragg turned and looked at Henry.

  "What do you do with a dinosaur egg?" he asked.

  "Usually they go into museums," said Henry.

  "Unless the International Egg Syndicate happens to get hold of them," said Mortimer Dalrymple, sotto voce .

  "I'm certain the American Museum of Natural History would be very pleased to have it," said Professor Mudgeon, suggestively.

  "I suppose they would," mused Henry. "On the other hand, would you mind if we tried to hatch it first? They might rather have a live brontosaurus."

  "Ohhh ... I'm sure they would," said the professor, amidst the general laughter. Then with a gallant bow he added, "Why don't you proceed with your experiment, Professor Mulligan. The museum and I will be happy to wait our turn."

  "After you, Professor!" said Henry Mulligan, indicating the path leading back to the cars.

  "After you , Professor!" said Professor Mudgeon, waving Henry before him.

  While they were gesticulating, Mayor Scragg stepped ahead of both of them and walked grandly up the path, beaming broadly.

  We checked on the egg, off and on, for several weeks. Then one day Dinky and Freddy came tearing up the driveway to Jeff's barn on their bicycles.

  "The egg has hatched! The egg has hatched!" Dinky was shouting, long before he was in earshot.

  "Honest Injun! May my mother have pneumonia if I'm telling a lie!" cried Freddy.

  We all got on our bikes and pedaled out the White Forks road as fast as we could.

  "See, there!" shouted Dinky, as soon as we had gotten to the stretch of sand by the bluff. He was pointing to a shallow pit where the egg lay, broken into three pieces. Down by the water's edge were the same footprints we had seen before. But this time there was a definite line in the wet sand about as thick as a clothesline, waving among the tracks.

  "Look! There's his tail! There's his tail!" Freddy shouted, while he jumped up and down.

  We searched the bushes and the shores of the swamp for several hundred yards on either side of the little beach, but we could find no more footprints.

  "It couldn't have gone into the water," Dinky blubbered. "Dinosaurs couldn't swim."

  "That's right," Henry nodded. "They went into shallow water when they got too heavy to stand upright on dry land. But they were heavy enough to sink, even in loose mud. That's why so many of their skeletons were preserved as fossils."

  Henry spent a long time studying the egg fragments and the footprints. Then he professed himself stumped.

  "I don't know what to think," he said finally. "I'd like to think that we had hatched a live dinosaur, but if we can't find it we'll never know. It could just as well be that Harmon ended up a step ahead of us this time, after all."

  The Secret of the Old Cannon

  (c) 1961 by Bertrand R. Brinley

  Illustrations by Charles Geer

  WE ALL WONDERED why Homer Snodgrass had been spending so much time at the library with Daphne Muldoon. We knew he was sweet on her. But what can you do in a library except look at books? Anyway, they'd been there 'most every night until the library closed, and we hadn't seen Homer around the clubhouse for three weeks.

  The next time we had a meeting of the Mad Scientists' Club, Jeff Crocker, our president, said that if Homer didn't show up at the next regular meeting we would take a vote on whether we should revoke his membership. We never did take the vote, though. I had just finished reading the minutes of the last meeting when all of a sudden Homer burst through the door of Jeff Crocker's barn.

  "I've got something important to bring up before the club," he said, kind of all out of breath.

  Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the old packing crate we use for the president's podium, and told Homer to sit down.

  "We've got to go through the old business yet," he said. "If there's any time left when we get through, you can have first turn, Homer."

  Homer slouched back on his stool and pretended to look out of the window as if he wasn't interested in any old business.

  Then we had a long discussion about how we might raise some more money, but it was pretty evident that we weren't going to get a hot idea because there wasn't any smoke coming out of anybody's ears.

  Finally Homer couldn't stand it any more, and he stood right up and blurted out, "I know where you can get a whole bunch of money! Not just a little bit -- a whole bunch!"

  Jeff rapped his gavel hard on the packing case and shouted at Homer, "I thought I told you to wait until we got around to new business!"

  Homer sat down again, but right away Jeff thought better of it.

  "What was that you said about money?"

  "I didn't say a thing," said Homer, and he turned around and looked out of the window again.

  "I make a motion that Homer Snodgrass tell us what he's thinking about," said little Dinky Poore.

  "I second the motion," said pudgy Freddy Muldoon.

  Then it took a lot of coaxing to get Homer to stop looking out of the window, and Jeff had to apologize for making him wait so long. Finally Homer stood up.

  "Well, Daphne Muldoon had to do this story for the school paper, and she asked me to help her with it," said Homer.

  Mortimer Dalrymple began to snicker, and Homer turned around and glared at him, and Jeff had to rap his gavel on the podium again.

  "You can laugh if you want to," said Homer, "but I think we found out where there's a whole bunch of money hidden."

  "Where?" asked Jeff.

  "Inside that old cannon out at Memorial Point," said Homer.

  The cannon he was talking about is a big old Civil War monster that sits on the south slope of Brake Hill about five miles outside of Mammoth Falls. It points right down the valley where Lemon Creek flows toward the river. It was put up there to protect the town from an attack from the South, but as far as anyone knows it never fired a shot. After the war it was just left there because it was too heavy to move. Eventually the town made a little park around it and erected a couple of statues of Civil War soldiers. Nowadays everyone calls the place Memorial Point, and it's a great place for family picnics.

  Homer and Daphne had spent many evenings in the library going through old issues of the Mammoth Falls Gazette to trace the history of the old cannon. They managed to find out where the gun had been cast, how many horses it took to haul it up the hill to where it sits now, how far it could fire a fifteen-inch ball, and all sorts of interesting stuff like that.

  After the Civil War there wasn't much written about the cannon. Daphne and Homer went through hundreds of copies of the weekly Gazette before they found any mention of it again. Then it cropped up in the news in 1910 when the Town Council voted to have the barrel plugged up with concrete to keep kids from crawling inside it. There was a big hullabaloo in town at the time, because somebody's kid had disappeared and a lot of people thought he had been inside the cannon when they plugged it up. They were just about to chip all the cement out of the barrel when the kid turned up in Cairo, Illinois. Seems he had fallen asleep in a box car down in the railroad yards and got all the way to Cairo before he could get anybody to let him out. Funny thing! H
is name was Alonzo Scragg, and now he's the mayor of our town.

  That was an exciting week for Mammoth Falls. And for the Scragg family, too. Just before young Alonzo disappeared, somebody with a bandanna tied around his nose held up the Mammoth Falls Trust and Deposit Company and got away with $75,000 in cold cash. He rode off on a horse down the Old South Road, and nobody ever saw him or the cash again.

  A lot of people thought they recognized the horse, though. They said it looked like one that belonged to Elijah Scragg, Alonzo's grandfather. It was a strawberry roan with a white splash on its nose, and there wasn't another one like it for miles around.

  Old Elijah was in high dudgeon, according to the newspaper accounts. He swore up and down that the horse had been missing for two days, and he figured somebody stole it just to pull off the bank job and throw suspicion on him. There was a big investigation and a regular court hearing. Elijah had two of his hired men to back him up on his testimony, but nobody was ever sure whether the three of them weren't in cahoots on the robbery.

  Elijah Scragg had been running for his tenth term on the Town Council. The judge ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to bring him to trial; but the mere fact he was suspected of being connected with the bank robbery ruined his chances for election. Emory Sharples, who was running against him, made a lot of the incident, and he got elected in Elijah's place.

  The Scraggses and the Sharpleses are two of the oldest families in Mammoth Falls, and they have always been great rivals; but after the bank robbery they were sworn enemies. They carried on a political feud that still goes on today. Whenever a Scragg runs for some town office, the Sharpleses always make sure they have somebody to run against him.

  This year was no exception. Mayor Scragg's term of office was due to expire, and Abner Sharples had announced himself a candidate. Abner is a young fellow, but he's one of the smartest lawyers in Mammoth Falls, and everybody figured he might get a few votes if he worked hard.