Saturday Action Matinee

Scouts to the Rescue (1939), Chapter 9: “The Fire God Strikes”

The Resolution: Happenstance doesn’t make so satisfying a resolution to a cliffhanger, you know? Bruce falls into the path of the stampeding horses; he covers his head; the horses pass around him and courteously decline to step on him. After they’re gone, Marvin rides in on his own horse and remarks on how lucky Bruce is (I believe this is known as “lampshading”). No one inquires as to the whereabouts or condition of Scout, Bruce’s horse that threw him in the first place.

By the way, according to the summary crawl for this chapter, it was the Indians who started the stampede to wipe out the boy scout camp, a fact which was not in evidence. This is why Mom always told you to pay attention to the preamble, kids!

The Narrative: While all of the scouts are distracted by the horse, juvenile delinquent Rip skips out of camp, his supposedly “broken” leg giving him as much trouble as a small pebble in his show. Scanlon sees him leaves, goes after him, and tries to persuade him to return to clear Scanlon’s name, but only gets an elbow in the gut for his trouble. And that isn’t all; as he’s trying to get back to camp, the Indians surround him and hustle him back to their caves as a prisoner! Rip, seeing the Indians and Scanlon, follows along until he knows exactly where Scanlon is.

Seeing that both Rip and Scanlon are missing, Bruce musters the scouts to search for them (assuming rightly that Scanlon went after Rip). They split up to track, and naturally it’s Bruce and Skeets who discover the trail of Scanlon and the Indians. Bruce sends Skeets back to get Marvin while he goes on alone.

Rip, meanwhile, gets to Ghost Town and tells the two thugs hanging out there that Scanlon has been taken to the Indian cave. Still hot to get Scanlon to engrave the counterfeit plates for them, the two follow Rip’s directions, creep into the cave, see Scanlon locked in a wooden cage, and also see something that piques their interest even more: the shaman of the tribe treating an injured Indian by chanting and waving his spear above him, a spear he dips in something that sparks and glows every time he touches it. It must be radium! That must explain why the Indians are all sterile and died out several generations back! Wait…

The two thugs get back to head thug Turk and tell him about the radium, which is worth more than Scanlon will ever produce for them. Turk decides to go up in the plane and drop some hand grenades to lure the Indians out of their cave; meanwhile, these two thugs can plant a charge from their inexhaustible supply of dynamite to blow up the cave, scaring the Indians away and leaving the radium for them. (I guess when the only tool you have is dynamite, every problem looks like… something that should be blown up, I guess.)

The Cliffhanger: Bruce makes it to the cave and tries to rescue Scanlon, but instead gets captured and put in the cage with him. Turk’s plan works, oddly enough; the grenades lure the Indians outside, and the other thugs sneak into the cave and plant the dynamite right beside the carved stone idol of the Indians (explaining, sort of, the title of the chapter). But Bruce and Scanlon are still inside when its explodes! How many explosions can one junior assistant scoutmaster escape in one day?

Next Week: “The Battle at Ghost Town”