Mad Scientists' Club by Bertrand R. Brinley, Charles Geer Read Free Book Online Page A

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