The search continues; luck attend the way.
I am the seventh clue and I am near.
Prisoned in ice, denied the light of day,
Rescue me quickly or I disappear!
P.S. And this means quickly; before Monday morning!
Randy looked at Oliver. He looked blankly back at her. They were standing beside the mailbox. Father’s New York paper and the January bills were held forgotten in one of Randy’s mittened hands; in the other fluttered a page of the now-familiar blue letter paper.
The dogs waited beside them, breathing steam in the cold air.
“Prisoned in ice,” said Oliver. “Gosh, when you think of all the ice around here. Gosh.”
“I know. Gosh,” agreed Randy; for it was still very cold, the brook was frozen solid and so was every pond. Worse still, two days before—the day the others had gone back to school—there had been a mild spell, with rain, and when the cold set in again that night a great glaring crust of ice had formed on top of the snow.
“I mean it could be anywhere, right here or anywhere,” objected Randy, kicking at the crust with the heel of her galosh. “Why, we could search forever! And it’s Saturday already.”
“Well, at least it’s Saturday. We have some time to work on it,” said Oliver.
Gingerly they began making their way down the icy road. It was really as much as your life was worth; even the dogs kept skidding and now and then fell flat, spread-eagled, with all their paws splayed out; it embarrassed them when this happened and they pretended not to notice it. Randy and Oliver found it easier to walk on the banked snow beside the road and bash their feet down hard with every step to break the crust. It kept them from slipping and made a very nice noise. The sun was out, the snow was dazzling bright, and all the trees, encrusted with ice to the last twig, were like trees made out of diamonds. When the breeze stirred their branches they creaked and squeaked with a nervous brittle sound. Randy picked up a dead beech leaf coated with ice; when she pulled the old fragment off she had a perfect leaf made out of crystal, with every vein intact. It melted slowly on her palm.
“Ice everywhere,” she said. “I don’t know where to start.”
“What did it say about the light of day?”
“Let’s see. ‘Denied the light of day’ it says. So the thing’s all frozen up in the dark somewhere.”
“Maybe under the waterfall?”
“I suppose it could be! That’s frozen solid, and in under those rocks it’s probably very dark. Let’s go see.”
They stamped their way down the hill and across the blinding lawn to the brook. It was frozen and covered with snow, so that it looked like a path or road that nobody had walked on; the only way you could tell it was a brook was by the little dark air holes here and there, and a locked-in tinkle of water that sounded from within it. The waterfall, as Randy had said, was frozen solid; it was a thick festoon of icicles like mammoth candle drippings, and it was strong. The children tried to break off pieces of it in their mittened hands but it was too hard and thick and slippery. Oliver went and got a hoe and Randy got a hammer, and they chipped and hammered and got red in the face and sweated, and bits of ice flew through the air, bright as prisms.
At last the main body of the frozen fall was cracked across; then there was a tearing, rending sound as the great fragment broke loose from the rocky ledge where it was fastened. It came off in their hands, and with it, most unexpectedly, came the water that had been dammed up behind it! Randy and Oliver were suddenly and forcibly struck with a mighty burst of ice water, exactly as if someone had trained a fire hose on them. Oliver fell over backward, and Randy stood screaming so piercingly that the dogs began to bark and Cuffy came rushing out of the house with the eggbeater still in her hand and no coat on. As she floundered and skidded across the crusted lawn the children floundered and skidded to meet her, soaked to the skin.
“What in time have you been up to now?” wailed Cuffy. “How could you contrive to fall in the brook when the brook’s froze solid? No one else could.”
“We were just chopping off the waterfall,” said Oliver.
“It turned ugly on us,” Randy said.
“Chopping off—but why?” lamented Cuffy. “Why in the world? What will you think of next? No, don’t talk, just hurry, now, into the house and change your clothes!”
As they slopped, dripping and shivering, up the stairs, Oliver said to Randy, “I guess it wasn’t there.”
“At this minute I couldn’t care less,” replied Randy, through a lively chattering of teeth.
While Oliver was changing his clothes he thoughtfully hung his wet socks out of the window. It was in the nature of an experiment; he wanted to see if they would freeze, and he was rewarded. That night when he examined them they were frozen hard as boomerangs. They were shaped like boomerangs, too, though when he threw one it did not return to him. Willy, somewhat puzzled, found it three days later, still frozen, in the middle of the lawn.
Long before that, however, the Melendys had changed their clothes, drunk the hot cocoa Cuffy forced on them, put on dry snow togs and continued their desperate search. They kept at it doggedly, looking in all the dark places they could think of where ice might be: deep in the pocket of each rotten stump, each hollow tree; under every overhanging boulder, into every crevice of rock, but they found nothing except a rusted scout knife that Rush had lost the year before. By nightfall they were cold, tired, and discouraged.
“I don’t think this clue is explicit enough,” Randy complained. “When the whole world is turned to ice all of a sudden, how do we know which ice? And when they say near, how near do they mean? As near as you are to me, or as near as Carthage is to home?”
“Heck, I bet we never find it,” said Oliver gloomily.
But the next day, of course, they felt differently and tore through their Sunday waffles, mad to take up the chase.
“By the way, kids,” said Father. “What happened to yesterday’s mail? I never saw it, and there must have been some. There’s always some, and usually too much, at the first of the month.”
“Jeepers,” said Randy. Horrified, she stared across the table at Oliver, and Oliver staring back forgot to chew; his cheek bulged with waffle like a chipmunk’s.
“We had it down at the brook when we were taking the waterfall off,” said Randy. “I remember I put the mail down beside me on the snow.…”
“When you were what?” said Father, setting down his coffee cup. “I wonder if everyone’s children act like this? I always thought children just lived normal lives: eating, playing baseball, reading books … not taking waterfalls apart and mislaying their parent’s mail.”
“We better go look,” said Randy wanly. “After we took the waterfall off, there was sort of a flood, and I don’t know…”
Father went with them, and when they got down to the brook they saw that the fall was frozen solid again, and they found the mail all right, too, though somewhat scattered and all of it frozen fast under a sheet of ice.
“Look, you can read it just as plain,” said Oliver happily. “Right through the ice you can read it. ‘Mr. Martin Melendy, The Four-Story Mistake, Carthage,’ this one says. And up in the corner it tells that it’s from the Carthage Dry Goods and Confectionery.”
“And here’s one from the telephone company,” called Randy, twenty feet away.
As for Father, he had gone to get an axe. “‘I never supposed,” he said morosely, “that the day would come when I would be chopping my bills out of the ice.”
After this somewhat dampening episode Oliver and Randy continued their search, stopping only to eat a hasty but tremendous Sunday dinner. But to no avail; they did not find the clue.
As they walked back to the house in the cold dusk, Oliver said, “Well, we’ve failed this time.”
“Maybe not,” said Randy. “We always seem to get it somehow or other.”
“Not this time,” said Oliver.
Father had gone out for the evening, too, just to add to the general gloom, and due to the pressure of the search they had both put off their weekend homework till the last minute, and there was a lot of it. Faced with the prospect they sat down dispiritedly to supper in the kitchen.
“More ice cream?” said Cuffy, at the end of it.
“No thank you, Cuff.”
“Better finish it up now, it won’t be here tomorrow, you know, I’m defrosting the icebox in the morning.”
“Oh, well, a little more then,” said Randy. “Why does it have to be defrosted tomorrow?”
“I do it every Monday. Always have!”
Randy’s eyes met Oliver’s. He also had seen the light, and they rose from the kitchen table as one.
“If only she hasn’t thrown it out!” moaned Randy as they opened the refrigerator door.
They pulled out first one tray of ice cubes, then another, and there, yes, frozen into one of the little square cells was a scrap of something blue!
“Break it!” cried Oliver. “Here, I’ll get the potato masher.”
“No, no, that would tear it. Put it on a tin plate on the stove and let it melt.”
“Let what melt?” demanded Cuffy. “I declare, what is all this?”
“Part of the same mystery, Cuffy dear,” said Randy. “Like when we searched your pockets that day and couldn’t tell you why, and you told us about Francis Wellgrove, remember? It’s not anything wrong, just kind of a treasure hunt, only it’s a secret.…”
“It’s beginning to melt!” said Oliver. “Cuffy, please don’t mind, but would you just go away for a few minutes? Please, would you?”
“Well, I suppose.…” Cuffy cast a dubious eye at the melting cube on the stove and reluctantly left the kitchen.
The two children watched the ice dissolve into a little puddle, and then Randy, reverently, gingerly, lifted out the saturated paper on the pancake turner. She laid it carefully on the drainboard.
“Lucky thing they wrote it in pencil this time,” remarked Oliver.
“Oh, naturally they would have thought of that. Listen, here’s what it says:
‘Number Eight’s concealed in Number Ten,
And Number Ten, though old, is always right.
Has traveled half the world and back again;
Touched Italy, touched England, and touched France;
Carried a load with strength, been known to dance.
Unpolished, down-to-earth, and none too bright,
Still, Ten has held his tongue and with good grace
Done all his share, and earned a resting place.
With other worthy objects he shall stay,
Retired with honor; never thrown away.’”
“What do they mean—Ten?” said Oliver.
“I don’t know, but we’ll find out,” said Randy, highly elated. “We find them all out. I think we’re superb!”
“Seems to me we’re always finding out by accident,” said Oliver.
“Probably most discoveries are made that way,” said Randy, not to be taken down. “Columbus was looking for India when he stumbled on America. Isaac Newton had to be hit on the head by an apple to discover the principle of gravity. Both accidents. As long as the discovery is made, it doesn’t matter if an accident reveals it!”
She lapsed into silence, pleased with the sound of her words. I think I’ll write a theme like that for the Yearbook, she thought. It’s kind of profound; I bet Miss Kipkin will like it.…
“Now, then,” said Cuffy, striking open the swinging door. “How about all that homework that hasn’t been done yet? It’s seven twenty-five already!”