um, the rattle and rub-a-dub-dub
broke out again, more loudly than before. The drum seemed to shake and
tremble, so hard was it beaten.

"Who is doing it?" cried Grandpa Ford.

Daddy Bunker quickly stepped over where he could see the other side of
the drum, which was in the dark. He leaned over, holding his flashlight
close, and then he suddenly lifted into view a large, battered alarm
clock, without a bell.

"This was beating the drum," he said.

"That?" cried Grandpa Ford. "How could that old alarm clock make it
sound as if soldiers were coming?"

"Very easily," answered Daddy Bunker. "See, the bell is off the clock,
and the hammer, or striker, sticks out. This is shaped like a little
ball, and it stood close against the head of the drum.

"I suppose the children wound the clock up when they were playing with
it up here and when it went off the striker beat against the head of the
drum and played a regular tattoo."

"Yes, I can see how that might happen," replied Grandpa Ford. "But what
made the drum beat sometimes and not at others. Why didn't the alarm
clock keep on tapping the drum all the while?"

"Because," said Daddy Bunker, as the clock began to shake and tremble in
his hand, "this is one of those alarm clocks that ring for a half
minute or so, and then stop, then, in a few minutes, ring again. That is
so when a person falls asleep, after the first or second alarm, the
third or fourth may awaken him.

"And that's what happened this time. The old alarm clock went off and
beat the drum. Then when we started to find out what it was all about,
the clock stopped. Then it went off again."

"Another time Mr. Ghost fooled us," said Grandma Ford, when her husband
and son came down from the attic.

"Did any of you children have the alarm clock?" asked Mother Bunker, for
the four oldest Bunkers were still awake.

"I was playing with it," said Russ. "I was going to make a toy
automobile out of it, but it wouldn't work."

"I had it after him, and I wound it up and left it by the drum," said
Laddie. "But I didn't think it would go off."

But that is just what happened. Laddie had set the clock to go off at a
certain hour, not knowing that he had done so. And he had put it down on
the attic floor so the bell-striker was against the head of the drum.

"Well, it's a good thing it didn't go off in the very middle of the
night, when we were all asleep," said Mother Bunker. "We surely would
have thought an army