Dale hurried Lawrence into his sneakers. He threw a clod . . . not a rock . . . and had the pleasure of watching Chuck Sperling have to duck.

Dirt clods and rocks were raining around them now, splashing in the shallow pool and kicking holes in the dunes of dirt behind them. The invaders had reached the far side of the quarry and were closing in from the north and south. But the woods started twenty feet beyond the quarry and went on for miles.

"Remember," said Mike, "if they get you they've got to actually hold you down before you're captured. You break away, you can keep going."

"Yeah," said Kevin, glancing toward the woods. "Let's go, huh?"

Mike grabbed the other boy's t-shirt. "But if they do get you, you don't tell them where the camps are or what the call signs are. Right?"

Kevin made a disgusted face. Jim Harlen had ratted them out once-they still couldn't use what had been Camp Five because of that-but none of the others had ever talked, even though it'd meant a fistfight once between Dale and Digger Taylor.

The attackers were close enough now to believe that their pincers movement might work. Clods whisked through the air and crashed into underbrush. Lawrence took aim, reared back, and fired a clod that hit Gerry Daysinger hard enough -even at thirty paces-to cause the older boy to sit down hard and let loose with a string of curses.

"Camp ThreeV shouted Mike, telling them where to try to meet up in thirty minutes after they lost the attackers. "Go!"

They went, Dale trying to keep Lawrence with him as they crashed through the underbrush into the dense woods, Kevin and Mike turning south toward Gypsy Lane and the ravine where Corpse Creek ran under the slate cliffs, Dale and his brother running hard toward the creek that ran north of the cemetery and the hidden pond that lay along the southern edge of their Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's property.

Behind them, the Fussner twins, McKown, and the others shouted and bayed like fox hounds on a hunt. But the forest had a lot of new growth here, saplings and shrubs and weeds and thickets and batches of poison ivy, and everyone was too busy running and hunting or running and eluding to take time to throw clods.

Running hard, occasionally tugging at Lawrence as they took a sharp turn off some old trail or up a hill, Dale tried to keep ahead of the pursuers while keeping a map in his mind, figuring out how to double back to Camp Three without running right into the band behind them.

The hills echoed to the shouts of capture and aggression.

The library at Bradley University wasn't the best-the school specialized in education, engineering, and business, after all-but Duane knew his way around it and soon found some information on the subject. He moved from card catalog to microfilm and back to stacks while Uncle Art sat in one of the easy chairs in the main lounge and caught up on two months' reading of various journals and papers.

There really wasn't that much prime stuff on the Borgias, and less about any bell. Duane had to skim through all the surface stuff before getting his first clue. It was a minor note in a long passage about the coronation of popes:

It was a shock to the Italians and a surprise to even his Spanish kinsmen when His Excellency Don Alonso y Borja, Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of Quattro Coronati, was elected Pope at the age of seventy-seven in the Conclave of 1455. Few disputed that the Cardinal's primary qualifications were his advanced age and obvious illness; the conclave had need for a caretaker pope and no one doubted that Borgia, as the Italians had civilized his rough Spanish name, would be just that.

As Pope Calixtus III, Borgia seemed to find renewed energy in his position and proceeded to consolidate Papal powers and to launch a new Crusade, the last as it turned out, against the Turks holding Constantinople.

To celebrate his papacy and the ascendancy of the House of Borgia, Calixtus commissioned a great bell to be cast from metal mined in the fabled hills of Aragon. The bell was eventually cast. Legend has it that the iron was culled from the famous Coronati Star Stone, possibly a meteorite but certainly a source of the highest quality material for Valencia and Toledo metalsmiths for some generations past. It was displayed in Valencia in 1457 and was sent to Rome in a stately procession which tarried for further exhibition in every major city in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Tarried for too long, as it turned out.

Calixtus's triumphant bell arrived in Rome on August 7,1458. The eighty-year-old Pope did not appreciate it; he had died in his shuttered rooms late the night before.

Duane searched the index and skimmed the rest of this particular book, but there was no further mention of Calixtus's bell. He made a quick trip to the card catalogue and returned with notes to find books that mentioned Pope Calixtus's nephew, Rodrigo.

There was ample information on Rodrigo. Duane scribbled quickly, glad that he'd brought along several of his small notebooks.

The twenty-seven-year-old Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had been the prime mover in the ensuing Conclave of 1458. Not even remotely a candidate for pope himself, the younger Borgia had cleverly brokered the election of the next pontiff by engineering support for Bishop Aeneas Silvius Picco-lomini, who emerged from the conclave as Pope Pius II. Pius did not forget the young cardinal's help in his time of need, and the former Piccolomini made sure that the next few years were fruitful for young Rodrigo Borgia.

But no mention of a bell. Duane speed-read two books and skimmed a third before he found the next clue.

It was a history written by Piccolomini himself. Pope Pius II appeared to have been a born chronicler, more historian than theologian. His notes of the Conclave of 1458-notes forbidden by rules and tradition-showed in great detail how he had urged Rodrigo Borgia to support him and how important that support had been. Then, in a passage covering Palm Sunday of 1462, four years later, Pius described a magnificent procession given in honor of the arrival of the head of St. Andrew in Rome. Duane smiled at that; a celebration for the arrival of a head.

The passage was chatty enough:

All the cardinals who lived along the route had decorated their houses magnificently . . . but all were outstripped in expense and effort and ingenuity by Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor. His huge, towering house, which he had built on the site of the old mint, was covered with rich and wonderful tapestries, and besides this he had raised a lofty canopy from which were suspended many and various marvels. Above the canopy, framed by elaborate and decorative woodwork, hung the great bell commissioned by the vice-chancellor's brother, Our predecessor. Despite its newness, the bell was said to have been the talisman and source of power for the House of Borgia.

The procession stopped before the vice-chancellor's fortress, a place of sweet songs and sounds, or a great palace gleaming with gold such as they say Nero's palace was. Rodrigo had decorated not only his own house for Our celebration but also those nearby, so that the square all about them seemed a kind of park full of the most riotous celebration. We offered to bless Rodrigo's home and grounds and bell, but the vice-chancellor attested that the bell had been consecrated in its own way two years before when the palace had been built. Bemused, we moved on with Our priceless relic through the reverent and celebrating streets.

Duane shook his head, pushed his glasses higher, and smiled. The thought that this bell was sitting, forgotten, in the boarded-up belfry of Old Central was beyond belief.

He checked his notes, wandered the stacks, pulled several more books from the shelves, and returned to his study carrel.

There was more.