“All right, Rat. Good work! Here’s your breakfast.” Howe pressed a bill into the Rat’s paw-like hand.
At this instant there came a loud banging at the door.
With a startled glance the Rat sprang for a second door at the opposite end of the room. This door opened into Tom Howe’s tiny laboratory for the scientific study of crime. The window of this room looked out on the fire escape.
Neither Drew Lane nor Tom Howe paid the slightest attention to the Rat’s going. He was by nature what his name implied; a loud banging at any door found him seeking a hole through which he might escape.
“Who’s that at this hour of the morning?” Drew grumbled.
“Search me.” Tom Howe slipped a blue-barreled automatic into his coat pocket, gripped it firmly in his left hand, then threw the door wide, to exclaim:
“Oh! So it’s you!”
All his life Red Rodgers had been trained for action. In the steel mills there come times when men are divided into two classes, the quick and the dead. Red was not dead. The instant that piercing cry, coming from the opposite shore, reached his ears, he was alert, ready to act. His hand, already on the side of the rowboat, relaxed.
“Oars creak,” he murmured.
Across the dark pool rested a canoe. He was there in a flash, canoe in the water, paddle in place.
“But a weapon!”
He was, of course, unarmed. As his eyes roved about in that narrow space, they fell upon a pike pole. With a stout eight-foot handle and a steel point it was a weapon of a sort, spear or club, whichever he might choose. Reaching for this, he placed it without a sound in the canoe.
Then he slid out into the silent night. The wind, he found, was growing stronger. It chilled him through. “Be warm enough soon.” He set his teeth grimly.
Waves sweeping in from somewhere down the channel threatened to overturn his fragile craft. He handled it with skill. Great black banks of cloud came rolling across the sky. The darkness was intense; yet he knew his direction. He pressed forward—to what? He could not say.
“If it’s a fight, it will be a good one.” His hands grasped the paddle with a grip of steel. “God is on the side of the fellow who fights for the right. There’s nothing right about men who carry away innocent girls and then demand a reward for their return!”
He was sending the canoe forward with strong, sweeping strokes. Now he judged himself to be halfway across, now two-thirds. His pulse quickened. Had he heard a sound? Some one moving?
A question came suddenly into his mind. He ceased paddling. How should he come upon them? In the canoe? He’d be knocked into the water, first pop. Better to land below, then creep upon them.
“Six inches of moss everywhere. I’ll make no sound.”
He changed his course. The canoe shot away.
He beached his canoe among alder bushes, then, pike pole in hand, crept forward. Holding his breath he parted bushes here, crossed a log there, climbed over a moss-covered boulder, then paused to listen. No sound save the rush of water against rocky shores. Boo! How cold it was! How the clouds raced! Going to snow.
“Should be about there,” he told himself, and his pulse pounded.
Ten more steps on the yielding moss, and again he paused. “Just one or two more trees.” A black old spruce stood before him. “Just one or two, and then—”
But what was that? A voice? Some one humming low? Yes, there it was!
“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairee, where the coyotes howl ee-e—”
The song trailed off into nothing.
He stood there too astounded to move. The voice was that of a girl.
“It must be that girl, Berley Todd. But she—she screamed.”
Having regained his power of motion, he rounded the spruce tree’s spreading branches.
And then the moon rolled out from behind a cloud.
What he saw held him spellbound. There stood the girl, her graceful figure swathed in dew-drenched clothing, her face scanning the black waters as she still sang:
“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairee—”
A gasp of astonishment from his lips startled her. She turned with the suddenness of a frightened deer. Then, as she saw his figure outlined against the spruce tree, she cried:
“It is you! I’m glad. I’m drenched with the dews of Heaven. I’m frozen to a statue. Please, let’s hurry!”
Red said never a word. In response to her request he hurried. Five minutes had not passed when their canoe bumped on the other shore. They skirted the boat house, rounded a long low cabin and at last reached a door.
The door, which was fastened, yielded to Red’s sturdy shoulder. Then they were inside.
“Oh-o!” the girl breathed. “How warm it seems! As if there were a fire.”
“There will be soon.”
Red flashed his torch about the room. A large fireplace, built of channel rocks, was just before him. As if they had been expected, the fire was laid, and a box of safety matches lay on the rustic mantel.
A match flared, a slow yellow flame mounted higher and higher and filled the room with light.
“Oh!” the girl cried suddenly. “You are the Red Rover? I—I’m glad!”
“That’s what they call me.” Red did not smile. “I—I’m sorry.”
“Sorry! Why are you sorry?”
“Sorry that you know. I’d rather be plain Red Rodgers who works in a steel mill and has ambitions of his own to become a foreman or a steel tester, or something like that.”
She looked at him in a puzzled way. Then her mood changed.
“Do you know, I believe you’re wet. See! You are making puddles on the floor. And I—I’m sort of dampish myself.”
“We’ll have a look about,” said Red.
Fifteen minutes later they returned to the fire. The girl had garbed herself in patched knickers a size too large, and a flaming red jacket. Red wore a mechanic’s coveralls.
And now he said: “Perhaps you will tell me why you screamed.”
* * * * * * * *
But what of Drew Lane and Tom Howe? And who was the one who stood banging on their door at dawn?
You will be surprised when I tell you it was none other than our old friend, Johnny Thompson. Johnny was not in the habit of banging on doors at dawn. At this moment, however, his business was urgent.
“Just saw the Chief,” he panted. “He sent me over hot-foot with a message for you. He says you are to get those kidnapers without delay and return the Red Rover to his squad.”
“That right?” Drew Lane arched his brows. “Didn’t tell you where we’d be likely to find these kidnapers, did he?”
“He did, and he didn’t,” Johnny replied shortly. Being young and only an amateur detective, he held the Chief of Police in great respect. For that matter, so did Drew Lane.
“The Chief says,” Johnny went on after swallowing hard, “that ‘the public is already aroused. Why couldn’t they have snatched a senator or a governor instead of the greatest football star of the age?’ That’s what he said.
“There wasn’t much time for saying anything.” Johnny’s excitement grew. “Telephone jangling all the time. Newspaper men, university professors, rich graduates, and all the little fellows who’ve bought tickets for Soldiers’ Field to see the Red Rover rove—all calling at once and demanding that something be done!
“The Chief says you are to raid these places.” He passed a slip of paper to Drew. “Suspected of kidnaping—the gangs that hang out in these places.”
“Not without good reason,” Drew grumbled. “You’d think—”
The telephone rang. Drew snatched the receiver. “Sergeant Lane speaking.”
He listened a moment, then:
“No, Chief. Just got the message. We’ll get those raids off at once.... Yes, some evidence—a bed sheet....
“No—no marks. Bullet, and some shavings....
“Seize all guns, oh, sure! How about jack-knives?...
“Not customary? Not against the rules, is it?... A pocketknife is a weapon?... Thought so. All right, I’ll collect ’em.”
Johnny thought he heard the Chief grumble something about “fool college kids collecting pocket knives.” Then Drew hung up.
“Well,” Drew drawled, “time for a cup of coffee and a plate of hots; then we’ve got to get out and give the public a great thrill by bringing those kidnapers right in.”
“It won’t be as easy as that, will it?” Johnny asked.
“Not by a whole lot! The Red Rover must be in his place on the gridiron of Soldiers’ Field when the big game starts or the Police Department is forever disgraced.”
“It’s worse than that,” Johnny put in solemnly. “The Chief says it means his job and yours if we fail.”
“We? Are you with us?” Drew looked at the boy detective hopefully.
“To the bitter end!” Johny grinned. “Never had less of other things to do, and never wanted to do anything quite so much as to help find the Red Rover.
“Think what it means!” he enthused. “Think what sort of fellow the Red Rover is. None of your rich man’s pampered sons! A steel mill worker, that’s what he was. But he’s a student as well as a star. Been leading his class in chemistry and math. Been working his way, too. They say Marmon, the big meat packer, offered to pay his way. He’s a graduate of Old Midway. But Red turned him down; said it wasn’t his idea of good sportsmanship, nor the idea of the Grand Old Man’s. Said he was going on his own.
“And he has. Three years. Steel mill worker in summer, hotel clerk in winter. Who wouldn’t hunt for a chap like that?
“Never had the swell-head either. Always pushing the other fellows ahead of himself when he could. They say he has practically refused to take a play through on more than one occasion when he considered the game won. Insisted on the other chaps having a chance at a touchdown. Went in for interference instead and did double duty. Who wouldn’t want to go out and help get some dirty crook who’s snatched a chap like that? What did they want him for? Revenge, or to get a wad of filthy greenbacks?”
“Bravo!” Quiet Tom Howe sprang to his feet and clapped his hands. “Bravo! That’s a grand oration! I could go to work now without my coffee.
“And, by George, I will! Come on in here, Johnny. I want you to help me try a thing out.” Tucking under his arm the bed sheet he had taken from the Red Rover’s car berth, he disappeared inside his cubby-hole of a laboratory. Johnny followed.
“I’ll bring up a can of coffee and some doughnuts,” Drew called.
“O. K.” was the muffled answer.
“I scream?” The girl in the patched knickers sitting before the roaring fire stared at Red Rodgers. “Why should I scream?”
“I don’t know.” Red was puzzled. “I only know I heard you.”
“But I did not scream.”
It was Red’s turn to start. He had heard a scream. No man, even in mortal agony, could scream in that manner. What did it mean? Who—?
His thoughts were broken off by a sudden burst of laughter. It was the mystery girl.
“That—that,” she stammered, with an effort at self control. “It was not I who screamed, but a loon, a silly old loon! Have you never heard a loon scream in the night?”
“Never.”
“Then you are to be forgiven. When a loon goes about the business of screaming in earnest, he can put a drowning woman to shame. We who have heard them often become so accustomed to them that we scarcely hear them at all.”
Red stared first at the girl, then at the fire. He was wondering in a vague sort of way just how much he had missed by living all his life within the confines of a city. He was to wonder this many times before this business of being kidnaped and carried to a deserted island was over.
“I wonder what that old loon is doing here?” the girl mused. “All his pals must have gone south by now. The gulls stay all winter. Some kinds of ducks, too, and the jays and the chickadees. It can’t be very lonely here even in winter. Wouldn’t it be thrilling if we had to stay here on and on?”
Red stared harder at the fire as he tried in vain to think what that would be like.
“You seem to know a lot about this island,” he blurted out quite suddenly. “How does it happen that kidnapers bring you to a place where you have been before? Seems a trifle mixed.”
“I’ve wondered about that.” Her big blue eyes were round and frank. “I think I’ve got it figured out. Do you believe in God?”
“Why, yes, I—I do. I’ve prayed about football sometimes; asked the One who gave me my body to help me keep it clean and fit; asked Him, too, to give me a clear brain and a sharp eye for every play.”
“Oh,” she breathed, dropping a hand gently on his arm, “I’m glad! Because I—I believe in God. I hope He outwits evil men. And I—I’ve sort of felt that He saw that those men were going to carry us off, you and me, so He sort of winked, don’t you know, like the man in the moon seems to do, and He said: ‘I’ll have those kidnapers take that boy and girl to the island where the girl has spent her summers as long as she can remember.’ And so, don’t you see? Here we are.”
“That,” said Red with conviction, “that’s great!”
Reaching for a large spruce log, he threw it on the fire. When the shower of sparks had subsided, he turned to her eagerly.
“What place is this? Tell me about it, all you can. We—we may be parted at any moment. And I—I need to know a lot. In the end they may get us, at least one of us, and the other must be able to make his way out, in the end, to see that justice is done.”
At the thought of the kidnapers he strode to the door and opened it a crack.
“Safe enough for the present.” His tension relaxed. “It’s snowing, snowing hard. They’ll never find us here in a snowstorm.”
“You are right,” she replied quietly. Her eyes closed. They remained closed so long that Red thought her asleep. But again they opened. “You are right, they will not find us in the snow. You should know about this place. I will tell you all I can. And then—then we must rest, for long, hard hours are before us. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to escape from this place in November. But we must try.”
“What place is this?” the boy asked once more.
“What? You don’t know our island?” The girl’s eyes opened wide. “This,” her tone became impressive, “this is Isle Royale!”
“She expects me to be greatly surprised,” Red said to himself. Out of respect for her desire he did his best to show great astonishment. The truth was that the part of social science that deals with the world we live in had interested him very little. He was all for chemistry, physics, mathematics. He had no more notion where Isle Royale was than the Little Diomede Island, or King William’s Land. He had never heard of it. “But she evidently thinks it a great place,” he told himself, “so great it shall be.”
“Tell me more about it,” he demanded at last. He was truly interested. If he was to escape from this island, wild and uninhabited as it appeared to be, he must at least know his way about.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime, Tom Howe, in his box-like laboratory, had revealed to Johnny Thompson’s astonished eyes a bit of scientific crime detection that for sheer cunning would have put any ancient astrologer or alchemist to shame.
Having spread the bed sheet taken from Red Rodger’s berth out on a small table, he had switched on a 200-watt lamp and had proceeded to examine it inch by inch as he slid it across the table.
“Not a mark,” Johnny commented, as the examination was completed.
“I’m not so sure,” Howe drawled. “A man stepped on that sheet, a very heavy man. He left a deep dent in the mattress and bedding. It’s hard to step on anything as clean as a sheet without leaving some sort of mark.
“Let’s see.” He drew the sheet endwise until the very center rested on the smooth top of the table. “It would be about there.”
He turned off the powerful light. At once the room was plunged in utter darkness.
Then, while Johnny waited as breathless as a child at his first picture show, a curious violet light pervaded the room.
“Look!” Tom Howe whispered, pointing to the center of the sheet.
Johnny did look, and there, to his vast astonishment, he beheld quite clearly outlined the footprint of a man.
“The sole of a heavy shoe!” He was dumbfounded. “It was not there before! And see! There are the marks of the nails; a heavy workman’s shoe. You could count those nails. And a heel of some hard, prepared stuff with the maker’s name wrong way over.”
“Yes,” Howe added quietly, “and a deep, jagged cut across the sole. Slipped on some sharp stone perhaps, when the sole was wet. That marks the shoe. It’s not like any other shoe in the world. Find that shoe, find the man who wears it, and we have made a discovery of great importance.”
“But I don’t understand!” Johnny was puzzled. “That mark was not there a moment ago.”
“Nor is it now.” Tom Howe chuckled. The violet light faded; the brilliant white light flashed on. The footprint was gone.
“Magic!” Johnny murmured. “Some form of magic. You can’t convict a man with magic.”
“Not magic, but science!” Howe’s tone was impressive. “Crooks are learning to use science as an aid in committing crimes. We must use science to detect crimes.”
Once again the white light was gone; the violet light returned and with it that mysterious vanishing footprint.
“You see,” Howe explained, “when that fellow entered the car to assist in carrying the famous football star away, he had been walking over a surface that contained some chemical solution. If he had passed over damp coffee grounds, or through a forest where rank vegetable matter rotted, the effect would have been as you see it now. His foot would have left a mark invisible in white light, but quite clearly outlined when subjected to the rays of an ultra-violet lamp.
“This lamp,” he went on, “has detected the secret writing of many a spy and jailbird. A spy, wishing to forward a secret report, dips his pen into a liquid made by soaking a few quinine pills in water. This writing will not show in white light until it has been treated. He writes some commonplace letter over this message and sends it forth. Our Secret service men seize it, put it under the ultra-violet lamp, and there it is; you can read every word. The moment the lamp is snapped off the message is gone.
“A criminal may dip the corner of his jacket in coffee, return to his cell, wring out the coffee and write with the coffee a secret message to some one who plots his deliverance. He, too, may be caught by this ultra-violet lamp.
“So now,” he concluded, “we have only to find the man who wears this shoe. Very simple in a city of three million.” He smiled a slow smile. “All the same, it’s a step.”
“An invisible step,” Johnny chuckled.
When a person is thrown with a stranger in an empty land he is sure to learn much of that other’s ways. It was so with Red Rodgers. He was destined to learn much regarding the true nature of that mysterious young person who called herself Berley Todd. One fact he learned at once: that she was fond of doing things in a dramatic manner. In her own mind she was ever on the stage. Red had asked her to tell of her beloved Isle Royale. She was weary, had been awake all night. She had been cold and wet. She was hungry. Surely this was no time for telling of a place she loved.
“A cabin,” she recited, “a fireplace, chairs, blankets. We have all these. And now for the last of all—things to eat.”
Lighting a candle that stood on a ledge beside the fireplace, she went into the kitchen of the cabin. Soon she was calling to Red.
Together they carried in two large tin boxes of what were quite evidently left-overs of the party camping there that summer.
“Crackers, dried beans, oatmeal, a little rice.” The girl named the packages as she drew them forth. “Tea, coffee. Hurrah! Some coffee and prepared pancake flour. Hotcakes at dawn!” She tossed the package to the ceiling and caught it as it came down. “What could be better than hot cakes and coffee at dawn?”
Glancing toward the window, Red discovered that she was right; dawn was breaking. But to his relief he saw that snow was still falling fast.
“If those fellows get on our trail,” he thought with a shudder, “they’ll keep on it until they get us. They’ve got to.”
Red brewed the coffee. The girl mixed the batter and fried the cakes.
The meal was eaten in silence. Red found himself in no mood for talk; nor did the girl.
“It—it’s like a communion,” he told himself with a gulp. He was sobered by the thought of the future that lay just before them.
“You know,” said the girl, as the last cup was drained, “since this thing had to happen, I am glad you are you.” A curious smile overspread her face.
“Thank—er—thanks,” Red stammered. “I’ll do my best to be myself.”
“And now,” said the girl, leading him to a place beside her on a rug near the hearth, “I’ll show you about Isle Royale.”
Dragging a quantity of ashes out on the smooth hearth, she busied herself for some time smoothing them out, drawing her finger through them here and dropping a pinch of them there.
“Now,” she sighed at last, “ashes are land, bare spaces are water. See this little pile here? That’s the island we are on. See, it’s in a narrow stretch of water. That’s Tobin’s Harbor. It’s about three miles long. See this one over to the right? That’s Rock Harbor. It’s much longer. Off to the left of Tobin’s Harbor is Duncan’s Bay. It may not matter. And it may. You can’t tell where we’ll end up.
“See that bit of a pile here? That’s Passage Island. There’s a lighthouse out there with people in it, a big light and a foghorn. Listen, you can hear that horn now.”
Red listened and to his waiting ears came the distant hoot of a giant foghorn.
“How simple it all is!” He heaved a sigh of relief. “All we have to do is to get out to the lighthouse before those fellows catch up to us.”
“Yes,” she sighed, “that’s all. But it’s four miles out there. This is the stormy season of the year. We have only a rowboat. And remember this—” Her tone was as solemn as a parson’s at a funeral. “Remember this: ‘Superior never gives up her dead!’”
“Is all that water you’ve left there Lake Superior?” Red was truly impressed.
“Yes, and a great deal more. Miles and miles and miles. Isle Royale is nearer Canada than the United States. It is not near enough to any place to do us much good in November. The lighthouse is our hope. But after the snow it will blow. I am almost sure of that. So, you see, that which was begun to-night may not be finished at once, my friend the Red Rover.
“And now—” Her eyes closed for a moment. “Now I would be glad to tell you of my island home. I love it as I do no other home. If danger did not threaten, I should dearly love to remain here, even now when everyone is gone.”
“Everyone?”
“There may be fishermen staying at the other end of the island. But that is forty-five miles away. Forty-five miles of wilderness, do you understand?”
“I understand,” said Red Rodgers. A new note had crept into his voice. He was beginning to sense the brave part this girl was playing.
“And now you must rest.”
He set about preparing a place for her on a broad seat before the fire.
“But you—” she protested.
“Oh, I’ll sleep with one eye open, here in a chair. As long as snow continues to fall, we are safe.”
“And when the sky clears you will call me?”
“Never fear.”
“While I sleep I will dream what we are to do next.”
“Success to your dreams.”
Turning his back on her, Red busied himself by drawing a crude map of the island modeled after her relief map of ashes.
“Going to be tough,” he whispered with a sigh. “Tough for both of us. But somehow we’ll make it. We’ve got to!”
After another look at the falling snow, he curled up for three winks. He slept them through, all unconscious of the commotion his disappearance had stirred up. The hundreds of columns printed about him in the papers all over the land, the scores of detectives on the trail of the kidnapers, the thousands of earnest persons in all walks of life who had volunteered to do all in their power to help bring him back—all this he would have found, had he known it, a matter for surprise and great bewilderment. For the Red Rover was, above all, a very humble and modest young man who loved doing things for their own sake, and who thought little of honor or great reward. That the world at large had been so greatly stirred by his disappearance he did not dream.
That day Johnny Thompson, in quite an accidental manner, came into possession of certain facts that, while increasing his perplexity at the time, were destined in the end to go far toward solving a great mystery.
These facts were discovered as he went about the business of purchasing a large bouquet of chrysanthemums. No, Johnny had not gone soft. He was not buying flowers for a cigar clerk nor a telephone operator. Far from that. There was a school for crippled children just around the corner from his lodging. He had come to know many of these children. They loved flowers, as all right-minded children do. He was sending them a bouquet. Drew Lane and Tom Howe had gone about the business of conducting a raid which, they assured him, would be quite a tame affair.
“They’ll be expecting us,” Drew grinned. “There’s never a big bank robbery pulled but next day all the successful bank robbers are called on by the police. It’s the same with kidnapers.”
“If you know they’re bank robbers or kidnapers, why don’t you just send them down to State’s Prison and have it over with?” Johnny asked.
“That would be neat and quite simple.” Drew smiled a broad smile. “But the Constitution grants every man a trial. You’ve got to prove what down deep in your heart you know, so you have to go out and get the facts.”
“And we’ll get some facts to-day, whether they realize it or not,” Tom Howe put in. “Drew’s going to collect a gallon of pocket knives. That’s something.”
“It may be a lot,” said Drew soberly.
So Johnny went to the shop at the foot of the river bridge to buy flowers. He liked this shop and its dark-skinned proprietor. The man’s name was Angelo Piccalo.
“Hello, Johnny!” Piccalo welcomed him. “Some flowers to-day?”
“Yes. Big yellow ones for the kids—crippled kids.”
“Crippled keeds.” The flower merchant grinned a broad grin. “The biggest, the ver’ best!”
The flowers had been boxed and paid for, the proprietor stood in his doorway bidding Johnny good-bye, when a motor horn sounded close at hand. Johnny started. He believed it a car. To his surprise, though he looked up and down the street, there was no car near enough to have produced that sound.
“Speed boat.” Angelo Piccalo grinned once more. “My boy. Name Angelo. See! Fine boy, that one. No cripple heem!”
The boy who grinned up at them from the river was surely no cripple. Some eighteen years of age, he was the picture of perfect youth.
“Go to college next year,” Piccalo confided. “Beeg gentleman some time, my boy!”
Johnny will never know why he went down the iron steps that led to the landing place where the speed boat rested. There were times when he almost regretted having done so.
“Hello, Angelo!” he greeted. “That’s a fine boat.”
“Not so bad.” The younger Angelo’s eyes took him in at a glance. “Not much speed. Trade it in for a better one soon.”
“This flower business must pay very well,” Johnny told himself. “Bet he’s got a car, a fast one. Going to college, too.”
Angelo had bent over to lift up the rear seat of his boat. He was looking for something. Plainly it was not there. Another object was there that apparently annoyed him.
“Who’s been making my boat into a junk wagon?” He lifted out a bent iron bar and was about to drop it in the river, when Johnny stopped him.
“Hey! Don’t do that!”
“Why not? You want it? All right. Here it is.” The boy tossed the bar to Johnny’s feet. It fell with a noisy jangle.
Thinking he had caught some sound from above, Johnny looked up in time to surprise a black look on the older Piccalo’s usually smiling face. One moment it was there. The next it was gone.
“Strange!” Johnny thought. “I must have been mistaken.” Yet he knew he had not been, and found himself disturbed by that insistent question, “Why?”
“That’s a curious band you have for your wrist watch,” he said to the boy in the speed boat. “All green.”
“Made of green stones,” Angelo explained. “Got ’em on Isle Royale last summer. Fine place, Isle Royale. Plenty big fish, wild moose. Plenty pretty girls.” He grinned broadly. “Found these stones on the beach up there.”
Johnny picked up the iron bar, climbed the stairs and walked away. This bar might at one time have been used by a merchant for opening boxes and at another by some gentleman of evil intentions in opening the window of some other person’s home. It is, I believe, known in some circles as a “jimmy.”
Feeling a little foolish walking down the street, he wondered why he had saved the bar at all.
“Hate to see the work of some man’s hands wasted,” he told himself. “Many a poor shopkeeper on Maxwell Street would be glad to own it.”
At that he wrapped it in his morning paper and at last deposited it in back of a small desk in Drew Lane’s room. There it was to remain until the time appointed. Then it was to offer its bit of evidence regarding certain dark deeds committed on a night in November of that same year.
* * * * * * * *
The snow that had fallen steadily since the hour before dawn upon that tiny island in Tobin’s Harbor of Isle Royale ceased at ten o’clock.
Standing before the window, Red Rodgers watched a scene of matchless beauty unfold before him. Dark, unruffled waters widened moment by moment until at last trees, great dark giant spruce and slender ghosts of birches, began appearing.
When at last the snow fog had vanished altogether he saw on the not-too-distant shore spruce and balsam standing like rows of tall tents of the Indians.
And even as he stood there some dark object moved amongst the birch trees.
“A moose!” he exclaimed under his breath. Then again he wondered that the girl had shown no fear at their encounter with an antlered monarch back there on the trail.
“Life,” he told himself, as he watched the great sleek creature on the opposite shore step out to stand ankle deep in water, head high, antlers gleaming, “Life is strange! Here I have lived all my life in a city. Never would have known of this other world but for the work of these outlaws who carried me away. And now—”
He paused. Well, what of now? He could form no answer.
He turned about to look long and steadily at the sleeping girl.
Yes, life surely was strange. Nothing like this had come to him before. As he looked at the perfect repose of that face, something welled up within him.
“She trusts me,” he whispered. Until this moment he had not known that such perfect trust existed in the world. “She trusts me. She believes in me. Her father may be rich. That does not matter. I will neither desert nor betray her. We shall fight it out together, to the bitter end.”
To this serious-minded boy who until this moment had known little of life as it is lived save on the gridiron and in the steel mills, this was a solemn covenant never to be broken.
“But now,” he asked himself, “what is to be done now?”
This problem he thought through with care. “They’re likely to be looking for us,” he told himself. “Yes, their search will be rather a wild one, when they know.” He put a hand to his pocket. Then his face sobered. Had he made a mistake?
“If only we can make a clean get-away they are sunk!” he muttered, clenching his fists. “I am not sorry I took the chance.”
Once again his thoughts returned to the problem at hand. “A step in the snow will betray us,” he told himself. “Now the unmarked snow says we are not here. Better to wait for darkness.”
Having come to this conclusion, he sank deep in his chair and fell fast asleep.
He awoke some hours later to be greeted by the faint aroma of tea brewing and biscuits baking on the hearth.
“It’s dark now,” a voice whispered in his ear. “We must be moving soon. But first we must eat.”
Red ate that meal in silence. He was thinking hard. “The game for to-day is over,” he told himself. “We have won. No radio must tell me that. They didn’t need me to-day. Probably the Grand Old Man would not have put me in to-day at all; save me for Saturday’s game. He said I was getting slow on my feet. Well, probably I was. Tired, that’s what I was. Football takes it out of a fellow.
“Saving me.” He grinned in spite of himself. “I was saved all right; put away for the winter, like as not; pickled like a cucumber in a jar.”
Without really thinking what he was doing, he rose and began pacing the floor.
“Worried?” The girl smiled up at him.
“Yep, quite a little. About Saturday’s game.” He dropped into a chair. “You see, our coach, the Grand Old Man, we call him, is getting along in years. This may be his last season. Who knows? It’s almost sure to be his last winning team. Five of our best men graduate this year. Breaks up the line. And, well, you know, the coach is such a square shooter, he’s so human and kind, seems to love his boys so, that you just naturally want to do things for him.”
“Yes, I know,” said the girl quietly. “And I know the success of the team depends on you, Red Rover. Read all about it in the papers. You’re going to play on Saturday. And I’ll be cheering on the side lines.”
Red flashed her a grateful smile. “That’s right, keep on kidding me. It all helps.”
“I’m not kidding. We will get away.”
“But tell me more about this island. Well, no, perhaps we had better be on our way.”
Rising, they went to the window. A large silver moon was tipping every wave with a point of light.
“We can’t go to the lighthouse to-night.” There was a note of finality in the girl’s voice. “The waves out there are as high as a house.
“And we’d better not venture out just now, either. The moon’s too bright. In an hour or two there may be clouds. See, they are coming in from the north.”
“And where shall we go when the clouds are here?”
“Home.” The girl whispered the word softly. “To my island home.”
“My island home,” the girl said musingly. “How can I tell you about it so that you will love it as I do?
“This is Isle Royale.” She spread her arms wide as if to gather its miles of wide expanse into one embrace. “Beautiful bays and tiny lakes where the loon and the wild duck come to build their nests.
“A hundred enchanted islands where gulls soar and scream at sundown, where the sea hawk soars above you to complain in his shrill voice of your intrusion.
“Deep dark pools beside the shelving rocks where black shadows play and spotted trout dart away.
“This is Isle Royale.” Her eyes were dreamy as she stared at the fire, that petite, vivacious little lady, Berley Todd. “This is the place where I have always played my summer away.
“And to think—” Her tone changed. “To think that those men might have killed me. Then I would have played no more.
“To think,” she mused, “never again to feel the lift of my boat as I danced along in Tobin’s Harbor or out on the open lake. Never again to skim along before a gentle gale. Never to climb the low mountains and look away, away, away to where the blue begins!
“You know,” her tone became confidential, “we were always children on this island. Sometimes we’d take blankets and a grub box, boys and girls together, four, six, ten, a dozen of us, and tramp away to the top of Mount Franklin. There, beside a fire on the rocks, we watched the twilight fade and counted the stars as they came out one by one.
“Then, rolling up in our blankets, we slept beneath those stars. Playing all summer long. Don’t you love to play?”
“I don’t know,” said Red slowly.
“But you have played! Football. You play football. That’s a game.”