ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 248, 24 March 1944, Page 12

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

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T was the dead of night, as the senSation stories say, and sleep hung over everybody. I was asleep too, In fact there was no reason for being awake, for everywhere was peace and quiet. But out of the brooding silence flopped a sudden little noise, then six or seven other little noises, scrabbling, rattling, urgent little noisesand I was awake. "Bandits, robbers, assassins, thieves in the night" the air seemed to scream, till I leaped out of bed and clattered into a pile of shoes. I flopped to the window just in time to see, etched on the pathway, the long, thin shadow of a man, slipping round the corner of the house. "There you are," the night air whispered. round me, "right again." A man! My heart beat like a cloistered maiden’s but for a different reason. A man! Rattling the pegs in our clothes basket and sneaking round our back porch, perhaps all set to pick our lock and murder us in our beds. Or, almost as bad, was he after our coal? In cold terror I crept downstairs to my brother and shook him for a long time till he woke. (My brother would sleep through a cyclone without murmuring.) Then together we peeped through windows and out of doors till I heard footsteps crunching down the street in the distance, "Good-night," said my brother, and went back to bed. I went back to bed too, but the ominous weight of the night pressed heavily round me. The curtain of silence rolled ponderously back and I lay till morning straining my ears for the squeak of a skeleton key. "To-night we'll set a burglar-trap," we decided in the morning. % * * ‘THAT day my brother conceived a very clever idea for a trap. All we needed to do, he explained, was to fix a bucket in such a position that at the slightest touch it would slip and strike (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) the side of the rubbish bin with an earsmashing clang. We would then wake up quickly, rush out to the front door and catch the burglar as he ran through the gate. It seemed simple enough-the only problem was to find a way ‘to fix the bucket. My brother stared at the bucket and the rubbish tin like a house-surgeon contemplating an operation. "Black cotton!" he rapped out. I brought it. "Knitting needle!" I brought two in case of accidents. "Thus and thus," he demonstrated, | and surely enough there evolved a most ingenious burglar-trap. The black cotton stretched across the path, over a post and round’ the knitting needle; the knitting needle slipped through the handle of the bucket, and the bucket dangled temptingly over the rubbish tin. I stared at my brother with amazement. Heath Robinson’s best effort was a feeble thing compared with this. Just let a burglar come now, we gloated, just let him come. * * * HAT night nobody slept. We were waiting for the ear-smashing clang. That night not a breath stirred, the silence was deeper than eternity, and next morning the black cotton was still stretched tautly and tauntingly across the path. Was the child of our fertile brain to become a dead pigeon? Next night we tried again, and the next. The night after that we set the trap more as a habit than anything else. The sleepless nights were wearing us down till we had become sunken-eyed and petulant. That night we fell asleep as soon as we crawled into bed. * * * [Tt was the dead of night, as the sensation stories say, and sleep hung over everybody. I was asleep too. In fact there was no reason to be awake, for everywhere was peace and quiet. Then like the crack of doom came an earsmashing clang. I leaped out of bed, snatched up my shoes and hurled them at the rubbish bin-and our cat went squealing round the corner of the house. As it streaked round the corner the street light caught its shadow with a curious twist, and there, etched on the pathway, was the long, thin shadow of a man, slipping round the corner of the

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