The Annex Gang Assembles

      The mysterious affair of the disappearing dogs, which startled a city when its story was finally told, had its beginning inside number 13A Bedford Road, Toronto.

      Number 13A was derelict: a huge, rambling old house of dark red stone, standing on a corner lot in a large, overgrown garden. The iron fence around the garden was rusty, its black paint peeling off, and parts of it were broken and held together with wire. Inside the fence, top-heavy, ragged evergreen bushes leaned down toward huge, towering weeds. The windows of the house were boarded, their glass gone, and the door was sealed—nailed up against intruders.

      It was a dead house, filled with ghosts of the past, its blank eyes looking somberly out at the signs of progress around it: the sleek automobiles, cruising past on their way to the expensive residential areas to the north; the rising yellow-brick apartment buildings on all sides; the glistening station of a newly-constituted subway down the street.

      Yet its appearance of lifelessness and desolation, of waiting for the wrecker’s hammer, was not altogether accurate. In one part of the house, below ground level, behind the boarded-up, sunken windows of the basement, some figures who were anything but ghosts were moving about. They moved furtively, so as not to attract attention from outside, by the light of a guttering candle stuck in a bottle.

      Another figure, hurrying along the street outside, paused by the house and looked around him quickly. Then he ducked into the garden through a gap in the fence and made his way urgently through the waist-high grass and weeds to a door at one side of the house, out of sight from the street. It was dusk of a late summer’s evening and the smell of fall was already in the air.

      The hurrying figure looked around him again, then went quickly down four steps to the basement door and knocked three times. He waited, then knocked three times again.

      There was a movement inside, the sound of feet coming to the inside of the door. Then, from near the keyhole, a voice spoke.

      “Password?”

      The figure on the steps outside knocked on the door again impatiently and bent down to the keyhole himself.

      “Come on, Fatty,” he said. “Open up! It’s me. Something’s happened.”

      The door didn’t budge. “Password?” the voice said again.

      “For Pete’s sake!” the figure outside said irritably. “All right! Number Thirteen!”

      “Lucky for some,” the voice inside whispered.

      “Bingo!” the boy outside answered back. “Now open the door, huh?”

      The door was slowly opened and quickly closed again as the figure on the steps slipped in. He was a young teenager, wearing jeans and a windbreaker over a plaid shirt. He was wearing glasses, too, with one of the lenses darkened because of a weakness in that eye. From this fact he had been given the name Black-eye, now shortened to Blackie, alias Pete Snow, Official Mascot-Keeper and one of the leaders of the Annex Gang, whose secret headquarters he had just entered. The Annex Gang was named after the area of the city they all lived in, north of the university.

      The one who had let him in was Fatty, otherwise known (especially to his parents) as Mike Gzowski, Official Doorkeeper of the gang. He shook his head at Blackie and clicked his tongue. “You know you gotta give the password,” he said. “How am I to know who’s out there? It might be one of that Spadina mob.”

      All round the basement room that Blackie had just entered were huge piles of old magazines and comic books that the gang had salvaged from beside the garbage cans in its area of the city. Sitting on one of these piles, over by the candle, looking at one of the evening papers which he had brought in with him from his paper route, was the organizer and democratically elected leader of the gang, the Professor, otherwise known as Tony Felucci. He had been nicknamed because of his ability to get straight A grades in school without even seeming to try, though in fact he studied hard at home.

      He looked up as Blackie came in. “That’s right,” he said. “You know the rules. No one comes in without the password.”

      Close by the Professor, whittling a piece of wood with a clasp knife, sat Red, the War Chief of the gang, a first-class athlete who could out-wrestle, out-box, outrun and out-climb practically every other kid within blocks. His nickname came from his cropped head of brilliant red hair, a sign of his Scots ancestry. His real name was Andy MacVicar.

      Across the room from him, cooking something in a tin can at the fireplace was the only girl who was one of the leaders of the gang, Mary MacVicar, usually known simply as Red’s Sister. She had become a leader not only because she was a famous tomboy, who at one time or another had beaten up practically every girl—and some of the boys—in the neighbourhood, but also because Red’s parents had told him that he had to keep an eye on her, to keep her out of trouble. So Red wanted her along, and what Red wanted he could usually get.

      The Professor folded his newspaper and looked up at the swirling blue smoke in the room, then at Red’s Sister’s back.

      “What the heck are you doing, anyhow?” he said. “Trying to choke us or something?”

      “I’m cooking some french fries,” she said without looking up. “Only I don’t have any fat, so I’ve got to boil ’em in water. I’ve got a wiener to eat with them.”

      “Listen,” Blackie said impatiently, breaking in. “Something’s happened. I think somebody’s . . .”

      “Just a minute, just a minute! Hold it!” the Professor said, putting his newspaper down and interrupting him. “You know the rules, Blackie. Everybody’s here now, so let’s run the meeting properly. We’ve only been waiting for you. Minutes of the last meeting first, then any new business.”

      The Professor had once been to a Rotary Club meeting with his father and he tried to run the Annex Gang along the same, business-like lines. He had done a great job of organizing the gang, too, including collecting a subscription from every kid in the neighbourhood who wanted to join. But some of the gang sometimes thought that he carried things a bit too far, including Blackie.

      “But this is urgent!” Blackie said. “It’s about Sput! Somebody’s . . .”

      He was cut off by the Professor again. “You heard me. Minutes first, then any new business. There’s a place on the agenda for talking about Sput.”

      Sput was the gang’s Official Mascot, a large black and white mongrel dog which went everywhere with the leaders of the gang and stood guard for them outside their headquarters when they were having a meeting. There were several other dogs attached to the gang, too, but Sput was the champion of them: bigger, stronger, faster, and, what was very important for any dog that wanted to go around with the Annex Gang, more patient than the rest. He had originally been called Spot, but later had been renamed in honour of the first dog in space, Sput being short for Sputnik. He officially belonged to Blackie, but his licence fee and dog tag were paid for with money out of the gang’s treasury and right now he was being trained as the gang’s official entry in the annual Dog Derby at the Canadian National Exhibition. The race