Macdonald Hall #3: Beware the Fish!

Operation popcan

Friday night after lights-out, few students were in bed. The woods behind Macdonald Hall were crawling with boys, all setting out on the great pop-can round-up. Most of the boys had had the same idea—to take to the woods until they were out of sight of the school and then cut over to the highway for the long walk to Chutney.

Bruno and Boots trudged along behind Larry and Sidney.

"How come you're going, Larry?" asked Bruno. "What if The Fish needs a messenger tomorrow and you're not back yet?"

"I'm just going as far as the drive-in movie outside Chutney," Larry replied. "Pete and Wilbur are already there. Sidney'll go on with them, and I'll go home with the cans from the drive-in." He squinted in the dark. "Say, where's Elmer?"

"He's staying home," explained Boots. "He said something about a remote-control thingamajig he's working on."

"Where are you guys going?" asked Sidney.

"Oh, we're going to Toronto," Bruno said airily.

Boots was worried. "Bruno, Toronto is awfully far. I thought we'd just sort of hang around Chutney."

"If everyone just sort of hangs around Chutney," pointed out Bruno, "we won't get enough cans, will we?"

Boots fell silent. He had decided quite a while earlier that the entire pop-can project was ridiculous and rather out of reach, but from long experience he knew there was no point in telling this to Bruno Walton, who had his heart and mind set on it. Boots found himself wondering what Mr. Sturgeon would do if he discovered that ninety percent of his students had walked out in the middle of the night.

His thoughts were shared by many of the boys who trudged north on Highway 48 that night. They walked, for the most part, in silence.

* * *

"Hey, look at this!" exclaimed Rob Adams as he and his companion, Marvin Trimble, boarded the 10 P.M. bus for Richmond Hill. "A pop can right under my seat! This is going to be easier than we thought!" He unfolded a green garbage bag and tossed the can in. "One," he counted.

"We're really on our way," commented Marvin dryly as the bus pulled out.

* * *

Sergeant Harold P. Featherstone, Junior, reclined in the front seat of his old Volkswagen Beetle, sipping the last few drops of a can of ginger ale and watching the late-night movie at the drive-in. His stomach rumbled loudly as he got out of the car and headed for the snack bar.

From out of the darkness Pete Anderson appeared. He reached up for Featherstone's pop can, shook it, and finding it empty, tossed it into his bag. It clanked against many others.

Five minutes later Featherstone returned, carrying a hot dog and another drink. He noticed two things: his pop can had disappeared and the man in the car directly behind him, though disguised in a trench coat, a hat and dark glasses, was unmistakably the mysterious man from room 14. Featherstone was now sure that the long-nosed man was working for the Fish and that Operation Pop-can, whatever it was, had already begun.

* * *

"Nothing in here," echoed Perry Elbert's voice from the depths of a garbage can.

"Don't we have enough?" complained his roommate, Mortimer Day. "Between the two of us, we must have fifty of them."

"Bruno said he wants us to get at least sixty each," said Perry. "That's a hundred and twenty. We're short, but it's early yet."

"Do you mean to tell me that we're going into every garbage can in Chutney?" asked Mort indignantly.