“Spooky in here at night,” Pearl had said with a shudder. The sound of her voice awakened dead echoes and live bats.
Betty felt like turning back, but Ruth plodded on. Down a long, steep stairway, across a circular court, then into a narrow passage they went, until Ruth with a sudden pause whispered:
“There! There! I hear ’em.”
“Here,” she said, holding out her burning candle. “Get a light from this and shoot straight ahead.”
With trembling fingers Ruth lighted a Roman candle, watched the fuse sputter for a second, then jumped as pop-pop-pop, three balls of fire went shooting down between stone walls to send an astonishing number of rats scurrying for shelter.
It would be difficult indeed to find a more exciting game than the one that followed. And such a setting! An ancient and abandoned fort. Down these narrow passageways and resounding corridors had sounded the tramp-tramp-tramp of marching soldiers. Through long night watches in time of peace, in stress of war, weary night guards had patrolled their solemn beats. From these narrow windows eyes had scanned the bay, while like giant watch dogs, grim cannons loomed at the gunner’s side.
In this small room, where chains, lifted and dropped, give out a lugubrious sound, some prisoner has sat in solitary confinement to meditate upon his act of desertion or of treachery against the land that offered him food and shelter.
The three girls thought little of these things as they parted to go each her own way down separate corridors to meet sooner or later with screams of terror and laughter as one stealing a march upon another set balls of fire dancing about her feet.
A move in the dark or the slightest sound called forth a volley of red, blue, green and yellow fire. More often than not it was a rat or a bat that drew the fire, but there is quite as much sport in sending a huge rat scurrying for cover as in surprising a friendly enemy.
So the battle had gone merrily on until Ruth, finding herself alone in a remote corner of the fort and, hearing a sound, had fired a volley with the result we have already seen.
“And now, here I am all alone,” she told herself. “Wonder where the others are?”
“They are in there alone with that strange man,” she told herself. “How—how terrible!”
That she could do nothing about it she knew well enough, and was troubled about their safety.
“If anything serious should happen to them I never could forgive myself!” she thought with a little tightening at the throat. “They are such good pals. And it was I who proposed that we go on that wild chase, I who really insisted.”
She was beginning to feel very uncomfortable indeed about the whole affair.
She and Pearl had been pals for a long time. In the same Sunday School class and the same grade at school, they were always together. At the beach, swimming, boating and fishing in summer, tramping and skating in winter, they shared their joys and sorrows.
“And now,” she asked herself, “where is she? And where is Betty?”
Relighting her candle, she turned about to go inside and search for them.
“No use,” she told herself. “Place is a perfect labyrinth, passages running up and down, this way and that. Never would find them. Have to wait. Have—”
She broke short off. Had she caught some sound? Were they coming? Or, was it some other person, the man of the face in the fire? She shrank back against the wall, then called softly:
“Girls! Betty! Pearl! Are you there?” There came no answer. “Have to wait,” she told herself.
She fell to wondering about that mysterious face, and what in time she should do about it.
She and Pearl were fortunate in having as a day teacher a splendid patriotic woman. That very day they had come upon her sitting on the grassy bank of their island that overlooks Portland harbor. They had dropped to places beside her, and together for a time they had listened to thebang-bangof fireworks and theboom-boomof cannons, had watched flags on ships and forts and towers flapping in the breeze. Then Pearl, who was at times very thoughtful, had said:
“It makes me feel all thrilly inside and somehow I think we should be able to do something for our country, something as brave and useful as Betsy Ross, Martha Washington and Barbara Fletcher did.”
“You can,” the teacher had said quietly. “You can honor these by helping to make this the finest land in the world in which to live.
“One thing more you can do, wherever there is an old fort, a soldiers’ home, or a monument dedicated to our hallowed dead, you can help prevent their being defaced or defiled or used for any purpose that would bring a reproach upon the memory of those who lived and died that we might be free.”
“I wonder,” Ruth said to herself, “what sort of den I came upon just now in this grand old fort?”
Then, very quietly, very solemnly, she made the resolve that, come what might, the whole affair should be gone into, the mystery solved.
“If only they would come!” she whispered impatiently.
“Ruth! Ruth! Is that you?” sounded out in a shrill whisper from the right.
“Yes! Yes! Here I am.”
“Shsh! Don’t talk,” she warned as Pearl began to babble excitedly. “We must get out of here at once.”
“Why? Wha—”
“Don’t talk. Come on!”
A moment later a punt with three dark forms in it crept away from the shadowy shore.
They rowed across the bay in awed silence. Having reached the shore of their own island, they breathed with greater freedom; but even here, as they climbed the steep board stairway that led from the beach to the street above, they found themselves casting apprehensive backward glances.
Once in the main street of their straggling village, with house lights blinking at them from here and there, they paused for a moment to whisper together, then to talk in low tones of the probable outcome of their recent mysterious adventure.
“I fully expected to see theBlack Gullgone when I looked out of the window this morning,” said Ruth. “But she wasn’t.”
“Still chafing at her chains. Poor oldBlack Gull!” Pearl always felt this way about the discarded ship of other days.
“What did you think?” said Ruth. “You wouldn’t expect the owner of the boat to steal it himself. And he was a member of that terrifying band.”
“But the old wood-hauling boat and the silks in her hold, (they were all sure the bolts of cloth were silk by this time) and the dory from her that passed us in the night,” said Betty. “They’re different.”
“And the face I saw in the fire,” said Ruth with a shudder. “Such a strange face it was, dark and hairy and eyes that gleamed sort of red and black. Oh! I tell you it was terrible! I am glad we’re all here!”
“You—you wouldn’t go back,” said Pearl. “Not for worlds.”
“Yes,” Ruth said slowly, “I think I would, but in the daytime. Daytime would be different. And someone should go. If that grand old fort is being used by rascals they should be found out.”
“And there’s beensomany whispers about smugglers this summer,” said Pearl. “Smuggling in goods and men, they say. All sorts of men that shouldn’t be allowed to come to America at all.”
“That’s it!” said Pearl excitedly. “That’s what he was! One of them, one of the men America don’t want.”
“Who?”
“That man, the face in the fire!”
“You can’t be sure,” said Betty.
“No,” said Ruth, “not until we go back there. Then perhaps we won’t.”
They parted a moment later, Ruth to go to her cottage on the slope, Pearl to her home on the water front, and Betty to the big summer cottage that tops the hill.
As Ruth lay in her bed by the window, looking out over the bay that night, she felt that the cozy and comfortable little world she knew, the bay, the cluster of little islands, the all enclosing sea, had suddenly become greatly agitated.
“It’s as if a great storm had come sweeping down upon us,” she told herself.
“Mystery, thrills, adventure,” she said a moment later. “I have always longed for these, but now they have begun to come I—I somehow feel that I should like to put out my two hands and push them away.”
With that she fell asleep.
The next afternoon Pearl Bracket went fishing. She felt the need of an opportunity for quiet thought. The events of the past few days had stirred her to the very depths. A quiet, dreamy girl, she was given to sitting across the prow of her brother’s fishing boat or the stern of her ancient dory as it drifted on a placid bay. But this day only Witches Cove would do.
To this imaginative girl Witches Cove had ever been a haunting place of many mysteries. A deep dark pool on three sides by the darkest of firs and hemlocks, on the north of the island where no sunbeams ever fell, it had always cast a spell of enchantment about her.
There, when the tide was coming in, water rushed over half submerged rocks to go booming against the granite wall, then to return murmuring and whispering of many things.
Pearl sat in the stern of her dory on this particular afternoon and recalled all the strange tales that had been woven about the cove.
At one time, so the story ran, it had been a smugglers’ cove. Here in the days of long ago, dark gray, low lying crafts came to anchor at dead of night to bring ashore cargoes of rich silks, tea, coffee and spices.
Still farther back it had been a pirates’ retreat. Even the renowned Captain Kidd had been associated with the place.
“On a very still day,” Uncle Jermy Trott had told her once in deepest secrecy, “you can still see a spar lyin’ amongst the rocks. That spar came from a Spanish Gallion. I’ve seen it. I know. An’ I’ve always held that a treasure chest were lashed to it an’ that it were left there as a markin’ thing, like skulls and cross-bones were on land.”
Pearl had never seen the spar. But more than once her fish-hook had snagged on something down there that was soft like wood and she had lost the hook and part of her line.
To-day, however, she thought little of the spar at the bottom of the cove. She thought instead of the strange doings aboard theBlack Gulland of Ruth’s face in the fire.
“I’m going back to the old fort,” she told herself stoutly. “There’s more to that than we think.”
“And still,” she thought, as she dragged a larger cunner from the water, “that’s Ruth’s discovery. It’s only fair to let her go to the bottom of it. Nothing important ever happens to me. I—”
She paused to look at the cunner she had caught. Its coloring was curious, all red, blue, green and purple.
“Like he’d been dipped in burning sulphur,” she told herself. “Nothing in Witches Cove is the same as anywhere else. They say it’s the three gray witches. Tom McTag saw ’em once, three gray witches coming up out of the water behind the fog. Boo! It’s spooky here even in daytime. Seems like eyes were peering at you. Seems—”
Her glance strayed to the bank. Then she did receive a shock. Eyes were staring at her, two pairs of glaring red eyes.
For a full moment she sat there petrified. Then, as her senses returned to her, she made out the figures of two huge black cats half hidden in the green shrubs that capped the rocky wall of Witches Cove.
“They’re not real,” she told herself. “They’re witches’ cats.”
To prove this, she caught up the blue, green, purple cunner and sent it flying toward the cats.
That settled it. Growling, snarling, sending fur flying, they were upon the fish and at one another, tooth and nail in an instant.
“Here, you greedy things!” she exclaimed. “Stop that! Here’s another and yet another!” Two cunners followed the first.
It was just as the cats settled down to their feast that her ear caught a movement farther up the bank and a quick look showed her a very small man, wearing great horn rimmed glasses. Squatting there on the steep bank, he was staring at her, then at the cats. For a moment he remained there. The next he turned and disappeared.
“Someone living in the old Hornaby Place,” she told herself with a quick intake of breath. “Must be. Cats wouldn’t be here. Nobody’s been there for more than six years, and it’s the only place on the island. I wonder—”
She wondered many things before she was through. And in the meantime she caught some fish; not the sort she had hoped to catch, however. Pearl, as has been said, was a dreamer. One often dreams of bigger and better things. It was so with her fishing.
Then, of a sudden, she caught her breath and set her teeth hard as she tugged at the stout codfish line.
“It’s a big one,” she told herself as the look of determination on her round freckled face deepened. “A big cod, or maybe a chicken halibut. If only I can land him!”
Two fathoms of line shot through her fingers, cutting them till they bled.
“Can’t hold him—but I’ve got to!” she told herself as, wrapping the line about her hands, she braced herself against the gunwale, tipping her dory to a rakish angle.
“I’ll land him,” she avowed through tight set teeth. “Don won’t laugh at me to-night.”
Like many another girl born and bred on the rugged coast of Maine, Pearl was fond of hand-line fishing. Time and again she had begged her big brother, Don, to take her deep-sea fishing in his sloop.
“Why, little girl,” he would laugh, “look at you! You’re no bigger than a fair-sized beefsteak cod yourself. If you got one on a line he’d pull you overboard. Then we’d have an awful time telling which was you and which the fish, one or t’other. You just stay and wash your dishes, sister. We’ll catch the fish.”
Pearl did wash her dishes. She did a great many other things besides. But when the work was done and the tide was right, she would dig a pail of clams for bait and go rowing away to the Witches Cove.
Usually she returned with a string of cunners and shiny polloks.
That there were some wary old rock cod hiding away in the secret watery recesses at the bottom of Witches Cove she had always known. That a halibut weighing fifty pounds had once been caught there she knew also.
So to-night, with hopes high and nerves all a-tingle, she tugged at the line.
“Tire him out,” she told herself grimly. She threw her shoulders back and gave a tremendous tug. Without warning the line went dead slack.
“Lost him,” she all but sobbed.
“But no.” As she reeled rapidly in, there came another tug. Not so strong now. She had no difficulty pulling the catch toward her.
“Tangled round some kelp before,” she told herself disappointedly. “Only a small one after all.”
That she was partly wrong, she knew in a moment. A broad spot of white appeared in the dark waters beneath her, and a moment later she was landing a halibut weighing perhaps twenty-five pounds.
“Oh, you beauty!” she exclaimed. “Now they can’t say I’m not a fisherman!”
The two kinds of fish most relished by the coast of Maine people are sword fish and young halibut. Pearl’s mother would be delighted. Don and some of the other boys were off on a long fishing cruise. There had been no really fine fish in the house for more than a week.
For some little time, while she regained her poise, Pearl sat admiring her catch.
“I got you,” she said at last.
Then of a sudden her face clouded. “After all,” she told herself, “it’s nothing, catching a fish. The grand old times are gone. Nothing ever really happens. If only I’d lived in the days of great, great, great grandfather Josia Bracket. Those were the brave days!”
As she closed her eyes she seemed to see Casco Bay as it had been in the pioneer times when the first Bracket landed there.
“No houses, no stores, no steamships,” she told herself. “No city of Portland, no summer tourists, no ferry boats. Only a cabin here, another there, woods and water and skulking Indians, and the whole wide world to live and fight in. What wonderful days!”
As she opened her eyes she started. As if willing to conform to her wishes, nature had blotted out the present as far as that might be done. A heavy fog drifting silently in from the sea had hidden the wharves and storage houses in Portland Harbor, and the homes that line the shore of Peak’s Island. Even the cliffs that formed Witches Cove were growing shadowy and unreal.
A fog, however, be it ever so dense, cannot shut out all signs of progress. A moment had passed when the ding-dong of a bell reached her ears.
“There!” she exclaimed, shaking her fist at the bell buoy which, however invisible through the fog, kept up its steady ding-dong. “There now! You’ve gone and spoiled it all. I’d like to tie my sweater about your noisy tongue!
“But of course that won’t do. The boat from Booth Bay Harbor will be passing in an hour or two. If this fog keeps up, the pilot will need your noisy voice to guide him through.”
“Oh, well,” she sighed, “what’s the use of fussing? Fish a little longer, then go home.”
She settled back in the bow of her light dory, with the prow tilting at a rakish angle, baited her hook and cast the line overboard.
Fishing wasn’t likely to be over exciting now. She had made her record catch. Never before had she landed one so large and fine. What she wanted most of all was to sit and dream a while, to dream of the brave deeds of long ago.
And such a time to dream! Even the cliffs twenty yards away were lost to her sight now. A ring of white fog, her boat and her own little self, that was all there was to her present world.
“Indians over there on Peak’s Island,” she told herself, still dreaming. “Indians and some French. Settlers on Portland Head all crowded into the stockade. Going to be a battle. Some soldiers in a big ship anchored far out. They don’t know. A message is needed. I’ll go in my little dory.
“Will you please be still!” she exclaimed as the bell buoy clanged louder than ever as a great swell came sweeping in from the sea.
The bell did not keep still.Ding-dong, Ding-dong, Ding-dong, it spoke of cliffs and shallows and of a channel between that was safe, wide and deep.
The girl gave her attention to fishing. Cunners took her bait. She caught a small one, but threw him back. A great old cod, red with iodine from the kelp, gave her a thrill. He snapped at her bait, snagged on the hook, then shook himself free.
“Go it!” she exclaimed. “What’s cod beside chicken halibut? Wouldn’t—”
She broke short off. The ding-dong of that buoy bell never had sounded so near before.
Ding-dong, Ding-dong.It seemed to be at her very side. She gave a pull at her anchor line.
“Fast enough,” she told herself. “Not drifting toward the buoy. Besides, wouldn’t drift that way. Tide’s setting out.”
The big red cod or another of his sort claimed her attention. She teased him by bobbing bait up and down. She loaded the hook with juicy clams and tried again. This time it seemed that success must crown her efforts. The fish was hooked. She began reeling in.
“A beauty!” she whispered as a great red head appeared close to the surface. And then, with a last mighty effort, the fish tore himself free.
“Oh!” she cried, “You—”
Ding-dong, Ding-dong.
She started, looked about, then stood straight up to stare open mouthed at what she saw.
And at that moment, faint and from far away there came the hoarse hoot of the fog horn on the steamer from Booth Bay Harbor.
“A hundred passengers on that boat,” she thought as her heart stood still, “perhaps two hundred, three hundred people, men, women and children, many little children coming home from a joyous vacation.”
She looked again at the thing she had seen and could scarcely believe her eyes.
Dim, indistinct but unmistakable, had appeared the outline of a steel frame, and at its center a large bell.
“Like a ghost,” she told herself.
“But it’s no ghost!” Instantly she sprang into action. Cutting her fish line, she allowed it to drift. Dragging up her dripping anchor, she dropped it into the boat. Then, gripping the oars, she put all her strength into a dozen strokes that brought her with a bump against the side of the steel frame from which the bell hung suspended.
The next thing she did was strange, indeed. Having removed her heavy wool sweater, she wrapped it tightly about the clapper of the bell, then tied it securely there with a stout cod line.
“There now,” she said, breathing heavily as she sank to a sitting position on one of the hollow steel floats that prevented the bell and its frame from sinking. “Now, perhaps you will keep still and let me dream.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, suddenly attempting to stand up. “The dory’s gone!”
It was true. In her haste to muffle the bell, she had failed to tie her painter securely. Now it had drifted away into the fog.
“Time to dream now,” she told herself ruefully. “May never do anything else.”
To one who knows little of the ways of boats and buoys and other things belonging to the sea, the girl’s acts might seem madness.
They were not. By some mischance, the chain fastened to a huge rock at the bottom of the channel, which held the bell buoy to its place, had given way. The bell buoy still clanging its message, now a false message indeed, was drifting out to sea. If the S. S. Standish, the Booth Bay Harbor steamer, were guided by this false message catastrophe would befall her. With all on board she would go crashing into a cliff or be piled upon some rocky shoal.
Pearl could see it all, just as it would happen. A terrible crash, then unutterable confusion. Men shouting, children crying, women praying, seamen struggling and the black sea closing down upon a sinking ship.
“But now, thank God,” she said fervently, “it shall not be. Not hearing the bell, having no sure guide, they will stand away till the fog lifts.”
Then of a sudden her heart went cold and beads of perspiration started out on her forehead. What was to come of her? With her dory gone, she was going straight out to sea on the frame of a drifting buoy. What chance could there be?
A moment of calm thought, a whispered prayer, and she shut the thought from her mind. She was doing her plain duty. She was in God’s care. That was enough.
The hoot of the steamer’s fog horn sounded louder. Nearer and nearer they came. They had passed the Witch Rock bell in safety. There was need of Pearl’s bell buoy now.
Of a sudden she caught the clang of the bell, the pilot’s signal for half speed.
“He’s missed the bell. They are safe. They’ll lay outside until the fog lifts. Thank-thank God!”
Still she drifted out to sea. But her own peril was lost in great joy because of the safety of others.
Another jangling of bells. Quarter speed.
A thought struck her all of a heap. Hastily unwrapping the bell clapper of the buoy, she struck the bell a sharp tap. Again, again and yet again this strange signal sounded. It was the pilot’s signal for half speed.
Three times she repeated it. Then came the ship’s bell with the same signal.
“They heard,” she whispered tensely.
Then, with a throbbing heart, she sent out in Morse signals the call for help, S. O. S.
There sounded the rattle of chains. They were lowering a boat.
Moments of silence followed, then from out the fog there came,
“Ahoy there!”
Sweeter words were never heard by any girl.
“Ahoy there!” she called back.
A moment more, and four astonished seamen stared at a girl riding a drifting buoy.
* * * * * * * *
“What you doing on the buoy?” said the kind-hearted and grateful captain as Pearl climbed aboard the steamer and was surrounded by curious passengers.
“Why I—I was fishing. I caught a chicken halibut and——”
Of a sudden her eyes went wide; her dory and chicken halibut were gone.
“Yes, yes, go on,” said the eager members of the group. She succeeded in finishing her story, but all through the telling there flashed into her mind the picture of her dory and the only chicken halibut she had ever caught, drifting out to sea.
All up and down the deck, as they waited for the fog to lift, grateful passengers and crew repeated the girl’s story. And always at the end they added, “Lost her fish. Lost her dory. Too bad!”
“Well, young lady,” a gruff Irish voice said as Pearl spun round to listen, “you seem born to adventure.”
The girl found herself looking into the eyes of Captain Patrick O’Connor, he of the pirate crew of theBlack Gull.
“Yes, I do,” she replied in uncertain tones.
“Lay by this, young lady,” the Captain went on, “that buoy chain was cut.”
“Cut?”
“Certain was. Them buoys are inspected regular. Look! They’ve brought the buoy alongside. They’re hoistin’ her on board. Mark my word, the chain’s not worn much, not enough to cause her to break.”
It was not. As they examined the end of the chain, they found no marks of hammer, file or hack-saw, but the last link was nearly as perfect as when first forged.
“Of course, they wouldn’t leave the cut link to tell on ’em,” O’Connor leaned over to whisper in the girl’s ear. “They’re told on sure enough, all the same.”
“But-but—” the girl stammered, trying in vain to understand, “if I hadn’t found it, if I hadn’t silenced its lying tongue, you’d have gone on the rocks.”
“So we would, young lady. And there’s them hidin’ away along these here waters as would have been glad to see it. There’s twenty-four men aboard this ship, that’s hated worse than death by some.
“Come over here in the corner,” he bent low to whisper in her ear, “an’ I’ll tell you a few things. You’re old enough to know ’em, old enough and wise enough to help some, I’ll be bound.”
The story he told her was one of smugglers uncaught, of goods brought in without duty, and of men refused right of entry into the United States who, nevertheless, were here.
“They land from somewhere, somehow, in Portland Harbor, or in Casco Bay,” he added. “It’s our duty, the duty of every good American, to find out how and where they come from.
“I suppose your cousin Ruth told you about seeing us pirates the other night?” he said, leaning close.
“Yes.” The girl’s heart leaped. Was a secret to be told? Yes, here it came.
“We wasn’t real pirates; you guessed that. It was only a blind, a masquerade party, but a party with as firm a purpose as ever American patriot ever held. We’re bound together, us twenty-four, in a solemn vow to rid Casco Bay of this menace to our land. And you can help, for a girl sees things sometimes that men never get near.”
“Yes,” said Pearl.
She wanted to tell of the bolts of cloth on the wood schooner, of the dory in the night and the face in the fire. “But those,” she told herself, “are more Ruth’s secrets than mine. I’ll wait and ask her first.”
Meanwhile the fog was clearing. The rocks of Cushing’s Island and the shore line of Peak’s Island were showing through. Very soon they were moving slowly forward. Before Pearl knew it, they were at the dock in Portland Harbor.
“Young lady,” said the Captain of theStandish, “we’d like a few facts to enter in our log. Will you please come to my cabin?”
Very much confused at being the guest of so great a man, Pearl found it hard to answer questions intelligently.
When at last the ordeal was over, the Captain led her to the steamer’s side.
“Look down there,” he said, smiling.
“A new dory, all green and red!” said Pearl.
“And a halibut,” said the Captain. “You lost a halibut, didn’t you say?”
“Why yes, I——”
“The dory and fish are yours,” he said gruffly. “Present from passengers and crew. Little token of—of—Oh, hang it, girl! Climb down and show us you can row her.”
Pearl went down a rope ladder like a monkey. A moment later, waving a joyous, tearful farewell to her new friends, she turned the shining dory’s prow toward home and rowed away.
Pearl returned home that evening to find a door to new and strange adventure standing wide open before her.
Donald, her brother, was seated before a small fire in the low old-fashioned fireplace at the back of their living room.
“Don!” she cried joyously. “You home?”
“Yep.” Big, broad shouldered, sea tanned, Don turned to smile at her.
“Don, I caught a halibut, a twenty-five pounder!”
“No?”
“I did.”
“Let’s see it.”
“I—I can’t. It went out to sea in my dory. But Don! I’ve got a new dory and a bigger halibut.”
“No?” Don rose.
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
“That,” said Don after inspecting the dory fore and aft, and listening to her story, “is a right fine dory, staunch and seaworthy. I’d like to take it to Monhegan.”
“Monhegan?” Pearl’s heart gave a great leap. Monhegan! The dream island of every coast child’s heart. Don was going there.
“Yes,” said Don. “Swordfishing is played out, and the canners have all the horse mackeral they can use this season. I’ve decided to pack my lobster traps on the sloop and go up about there somewhere, mebby only Booth Bay Harbor. All depends. They say lobster catches are fine on the shoals up there.”
“But Don,” Pearl’s eyes shone with a new hope, “if you take my dory, you’ll take me. You won’t spend all your time tending lobster pots. There’s fine fishing up there. I caught a halibut. You’ll take me, won’t you?”
“Well,” said Don, thoughtfully, “I might. You’d get lonesome, though. Nobody but me and you and the sea; that is, nobody that we know.”
“Take Ruth, too,” Pearl said quickly. “You should have heard her talk about Monhegan over there by the old fort. She’ll be wild to go. And she is considerable of a fisherman, good as most men.”
Don considered the proposition. Ruth was his cousin. They had been much together on the sea. Unlike his dreamy little sister, she had always been able and practical.
“Why, yes,” he said at last, “I don’t see why she shouldn’t go, if she wants to.”
Ruth was overjoyed at the prospect. She had no trouble in obtaining permission to go, for, though Don had barely turned twenty, he was known as one of the ablest seamen on all Casco Bay, and no one feared to sail with him.
So, one day when the sky was clear and the water a sheet of blue, they rounded the island and went scudding away toward the island of many dreams.
As old Fort Skammel faded from their sight, Ruth thought of the unsolved mystery hidden there and resolved to delve more deeply into it as soon as she returned from this trip.
Someone has said that all of life is closely interwoven, that warp and woof, it is all one. Certainly this at times appears to be true. There was that lurking in the immediate future which was to connect experiences at Monhegan with the old fort’s hidden secret. But this for a time was hidden by the veil of the future which ever hangs like a fog just before us.
It was strange. As Donald Bracket shaded his eyes to peer into the driving fog he seemed to see a face. The muscles of that face were twisted into a smile. Not a pleasant smile, it came near being a leer.
Of course, there was no face; only an after image that had somehow crept up from the shadowy recesses of his brain. A very vivid image, it remained there against the fog for many seconds before it slowly faded.
“Peter Tomingo,” he said to himself. “It’s fairly spooky, as if he had sent us out to get into this mess, knowing we’d fall into it.
“But then,” he thought a moment later as he steered his sloop square into the heart of a great wave, “he didn’t know. No one could foretell such a storm four days in advance. Besides, he couldn’t count on my coming out this very day.”
“Whew!” He caught his breath. Cutting its way through the crest of the wave, his twenty-foot fishing boat went plunging down the other side. For a matter of seconds the air about him was all white spray. This passed, but the driving fog remained.
“Good thing the canvas is there.” He tightened a rope that held a protecting canvas across the prow of his boat. “Be dangerous to get one’s motor wet in such a blow. Might be fatal.”
Once more, wrinkling his brow, he stared into the fog. “Wish I could sight Monhegan. Wish——”
An exclamation escaped his lips. He drew his hands hastily across his eyes. The face, the crafty smile, were there again. The lips appeared to move. They seemed to be saying:
“The shoal is just there. Plenty da lobsters. Plenty big. Wanta go. Boat too small, mine. Too far froma da shore. Plenty da lobster. Get reech queek.”
“Well, anyway, he told the truth,” Don said to himself. “There are lobsters aplenty.” He glanced down at a crate where a mass of legs, eyes and great green pinchers squirmed and twisted while the boat, worried by the ever increasing storm, rolled and pitched like a bit of drift in a mountain cataract.
He threw a look at the two water drenched girls, Pearl and Ruth, who sat huddled in the prow, and his brow wrinkled.
“Have to get out of this,” he told himself, taking a fresh grip on his steering stick. “Only question is, where?”
That indeed was the question. Fifteen miles to the westward was the mainland and rocky shores little known to him. He was far from his usual fishing ground. Somewhere out there in the fog, perhaps very near, scarcely a mile long, a mere granite boulder jutting out of the sea, was the island called Monhegan. Smaller rocks jutting up from the sea formed a safe harbor for this island. Once there he could weather the storm in safety. Again he shaded his eyes to peer into the fog.
For a full moment, with straining eyes, he stood there motionless. Then of a sudden a sigh of satisfaction escaped his lips. Towering a hundred or more feet above the sea, a bold headline loomed before him.
“Black Head,” he whispered. “That’s better.”
Touching his lever, he set his boat at a slight angle to the rushing waves, then took a deep breath. The battle was begun, not finished. The channel that led to Monhegan’s cozy harbor was narrow. It was guarded by nature’s sentinels—black and frowning rocks on one side, reefs booming and white on the other. Many a stauncher boat than his had turned back before these perils. The rocky shore of Monhegan has taken its toll of lives all down the years.
“It is to be a battle,” he exulted, “and I shall win!”
In the meantime, while his immediate attention was devoted to the present struggle, the questions regarding Tomingo and the lobster industry were revolving themselves in the back of his mind.
They, the three of them, Don, Ruth and Pearl, had reached the mainland nearest to the island of Monhegan, Booth Bay Harbor, in safety. There they had taken up their abode in an abandoned fisherman’s shack. Shortly after that Don had met Tomingo.
To Tomingo he had confided his plans for lobster trapping. Tomingo had told him of the reef far out from the mainland, but near Monhegan, where the lobster fishing was unusually good. Without thinking much about it, he had followed the tip. The weather had been fine. Having piled his motor boat high with lobster pots, he had gone pop-popping away toward Monhegan.
He had experienced no difficulty in finding the long sunken reef Tomingo had pointed out on the chart. He had baited his pots with codfish heads, then dropped them one by one along the reef. After adjusting the bright red floats, each marked with his initials, he had cast an appraising eye along the tossing string of them, then turned his boat’s prow toward his shack.
“Fifteen miles is a long way to come for lobsters,” he had thought to himself. “But the reefs close in are fished out. If the catch is good I’ll do well enough.”
A two days’ storm had kept him from his traps. The morning of this, the third day, had promised fair weather; so with his sister and cousin on board, he had ventured out. Nature had kept but half her promise. Fair weather had continued while he was visiting the shoal. The work of lifting the traps had been particularly difficult. Ruth had given him a ready hand at this. Six traps were fairly loaded with lobsters. A seventh had been torn in pieces by a fifteen pound codfish that had blundered into it. Another trap had been demolished by a dogfish. All the other traps had yielded a fair harvest.