CHAPTER XIII
AMAZING NEWS
Two—three minutes passed. I could hear Scoop tiptoeing about the boat. He would take a few guarded steps, then pause. I could imagine that he was boring the darkness with his probing eyes and listening for sounds of the ghost. I, too, listened to see if I could hear the ghost. But no sounds came to my sharpened ears other than the stealthy movements of my chum.
The moon, in the time that we had made our way into the big wide waters, had vanished behind a breastwork of clouds. In landing on the island we had worked in darkness, except for the light of the flickering lantern. I realized now that my companion and I should have brought the lantern with us to the scow. It would have given us an advantage in enabling us to see what we were doing and what lay beyond our arm’s reach.
I wondered, in a scattered, uneasy way, at the now total absence of the moon. There was something ominous in the depth and silence of the darkness that engulfed us. And on the moment, keyed up and nervous, I had the crazy imaginative thought that the night was conspiring against us. It was on the ghost’s side. The darkness was intended to shield the ghostly intruder from our sight, enabling it to do its work unseen and unhampered.
Its work! I repeated the words in my pondering mind. What was its work? What could be its object in repeatedly coming to the scow? Was it indeed a man as we had thought? Or was it, after all, a spirit from another world?
“Jerry!”
Carried along by my thoughts of ghosts and spirits, I gurgled, startled, as my chum’s low sharp voice came out of the darkness a few feet away.
“Let’s get out of this,” I shivered.
“There’s no one here,” he declared, talking to me over the side of the scow.
“We heard some one.”
“Our ears must have tricked us.”
I was still shivering.
“Get in the boat,” I urged, “and we’ll row back to the island.”
“Huh! And what are we going to tell Red and Peg when they ask us where the food is?”
I saw what he meant. He didn’t want to go back to the island empty-handed, to be laughed at by our companions. Nor did I, for that matter. It isn’t any fun to be called a coward in front of a girl. So I sort of gritted my teeth in dogged courage and joined the other on board the scow.
“What’s that out there?” I pointed, breathless.
“Where?”
“Between here and the channel. Looks like a rowboat.”
“I see what you mean.… It isn’t moving.”
We strained our eyes at the vague black spot on the water’s surface.
“Must be a floating log,” Scoop concluded.
I didn’t believe that it was a log—I could think of nothing else but a passengerless rowboat. But I didn’t argue the matter. I was too anxious to complete our errand on board the scow so that we could get back to shore.
Upon our arrival at the island with the food, the girl sort of took charge of things, in the way women do at picnics. Building a roaring fire on the beach, we had toast and cocoa and fried-cakes and bananas. It was a swell feed.
Watching the others running here and there in the red light of the fire, one with a piece of toast and another with a fried-cake or a cup of cocoa, I was reminded of that part of the Robinson Crusoe book where the cannibals brought Friday to the island to make soup of him. They had built a fire, just as we had done, and had danced around the blaze while their soup was cooking. Robinson Crusoe, in watching them, had been filled with fear in their presence on the island. I wondered, in a whimsical turn of my thoughts, if, like the dancing cannibals, we were being covertly watched by eyes invisible to us in the darkness.
The sun came up in the time that we were washing the breakfast dishes. We could now see to have some fun. Borrowing the girl’s boat, Peg and Red went rowing. It was their plan, they told us, to make a circle of the island, keeping close to shore. There is always fun in doing that, for one can catch glimpses of interesting wild life at the water’s edge, beautiful spotted snakes and big bullfrogs and sometimes a long-legged heron or a mud hen.
Left alone, Scoop and I and the girl set out to explore the island afoot. Low and sandy in its western portion, a thicket of willows and scrub oaks, there was a sharp rise to the east, rocky and wooded.
A story is told about a strange hermit who had lived and died on the island, and in the course of our excursion, having climbed the rocky hill, jumping from one bowlder to another, we came to the cave where, if the hermit story is true, the island’s queer early occupant had made his home.
And to view the cave from the inside one could not doubt that it had been an early habitation, for it was not a natural cave, like many of the caves in our section, but had been chiseled out of the white sandstone with unending patience. I know something about caves, and I could imagine, as I stood in this roomy chamber, that its builder had worked many months to complete it to his satisfaction.
After an hour or two of rambling through the island’s hidden spots, the girl suggested that we go back to the shore. It wasn’t improbable, she explained, that her grandfather would appear at any moment.
Peg and Red returned from their trip around the island, hilarious in the capture of an old gee-whacker of a snapping turtle. It was now bearing hard on nine o’clock, I noticed that the leader was moving restlessly up and down the sandy shore, looking at the anchored scow one moment and peering in the direction of the canal’s channel the next. At his signal I followed him into the thicket. Crossing the island to the north shore, we had a drink at the spring in the rocks, then seated ourselves on the trunk of a fallen tree at the water’s edge.
“It’s time for us to start,” he said, looking at me with a troubled face.
I saw what was on his mind. He didn’t like the idea of pulling out at nine o’clock, as we had planned to do, leaving the girl alone on the island.
“We might take her with us,” I suggested, hating the thought of giving up our proposed show.
He shook his head.
“I don’t believe she’d consent to that. I know I wouldn’t,” he waggled, “if I had been sent here on an errand such as hers. I’d feel that it was my duty, sort of, to stay close to the buried bonds.”
In our further talk it was made plain to us that we could do one of three things: Stay on the island with the girl until the grandfather came; proceed to Steam Corners at the time appointed, leaving her unattended on the island; or take her with us.
When we put the matter up to her she laughingly told us that we were making a mountain out of a molehill. Her grandfather, she declared, would soon put in an appearance. And until he came she was perfectly safe on the island. With a slightly clouded forehead and a determined set of her mouth she told us, in conclusion, that she would be both annoyed and provoked if we changed our plans on her account. It wasn’t to be thought of.
“And you’re dead sure,” Scoop hung on, wanting to do the right thing, “that you won’t be scared to stay here alone until your grandfather appears?”
“Scared?” She gave a scornful laugh and sort of boastingly squared her shoulders. “I should say not. What is there to be scared of? As I told you last night, I’ve been here dozens of times. I know where the spring is, so I won’t have to go thirsty. And if a shower comes up, I’ll run for the cave.”
“You haven’t anything to eat,” our leader reminded.
“Grandfather will bring something.”
“He might not get here for several hours.”
“Well,” the girl laughed, giving her curls a saucy toss in the persistent one’s face, “if you’re really afraid that I’ll starve, you can leave me a dill pickle and a toothpick.”
“There’s a chunk of boiled ham on the scow,” Scoop told her. “We’ll get it and you can make yourself some sandwiches.”
But Red couldn’t put his hands on the ham when he was sent after it.
“You fellows must have ate it,” he yipped to us across the water.
“If any one ate it you did,” Scoop yipped back. “It was there last night.”
The searcher disappeared for another moment or two.
“You’re crazy,” he yipped. “There isn’t any sign of a ham here. I’ve looked everywhere.”
“He’s the limit,” Scoop grumbled to us, showing his disgust of the other. “Honest to Peter, he wouldn’t be able to find his nose if it wasn’t hinged to the front of his freckled face. I could find the ham,” he boasted, “if I was there.”
“Here’s a glass of dried beef,” Red yipped from the scow. “I’ll bring that.”
Well, we left the girl a bottle of olives and some crackers in addition to the dried-beef sandwiches that she made for herself. Then we went on board the scow in her rowboat.
In saying good-by to us she told us that her name was Elizabeth Garber, and taking down our names on the back of her buried-treasure map she promised that her grandfather would write to us, thanking us for the help we had given her.
“And when you get home,” she concluded, pink spots showing in her cheeks at the suggestion, “you might write me a nice long letter telling me about your adventures and your wealth.”
“Sure thing we will,” Scoop promised. “How do you want us to address the letter,” he grinned, “ ‘Elizabeth’ or ‘Betty’ or just plain ‘Liz’?”
The questioned one matched the questioner’s grin.
“You can take your pick of the three names,” she laughed.
“We’ll make it ‘Liz,’ ” Scoop laughed.
It disgusted Red to think that we should thus talk to a girl. And to get rid of her he started the engine. When we had reached the channel, having passed through the piles, making a right-angle turn to the left, we could see her sitting in her green rowboat waving her handkerchief.
When we were well on our way the leader suddenly remembered about the misplaced ham and gave himself the job of finding it. But in this he was no more successful than Red had been. As a consequence his face was sheepish when he returned to us empty handed.
“Honest, fellows, don’t you know where the ham is?”
Peg and I and Red shook our heads.
“It was under the engine deck last night,” the defeated one told us. “But it isn’t there now.”
That a thief had been on board the boat we could not doubt. And in the thought the leader gave me a queer look.
“Evidently, Jerry, our ‘friendly ghost’ has sticky fingers.”
“What do you mean?” Peg inquired quickly.
Scoop told the other two about the scare that he and I had had before daylight.
“And you think it was the ghost who stole the ham?”
“Who else could it have been?”
A hungry ghost! There was humor in the thought. But our laughter was touched with uneasiness. For the ghost’s repeated visits to the boat was fast putting an edge on our nerves.
Peg had held to the troubled thought that we might have some difficulty in steering the Sally Ann through the Steam Corners lock. But we didn’t. It was as easy as pie. The lock tender, a stoop-shouldered, talkative old man, saw us coming and had the gate open. We ran into the lock under slow power and were quickly raised to the canal’s higher level.
Just before we got to Steam Corners Red discovered that he had used up the last of the engine oil, so when we drew up at the town dock, close to the bridge, he went in search of a garage.
The rest of us busied ourselves preparing dinner. But before the meal was half ready the freckled one came into sight on the run, with a look on his spotted face that almost scared the wits out of us.
He had his can of oil in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He had picked up the newspaper in the garage where he bought the oil, he panted, pointing to a heading on the front page.
GRANDDAUGHTER COMES UP MISSING WITH VALUABLE BONDS
Aged Relative in Hospital With Head Wound
Well, our hearts were in our throats, sort of, as we read the astonishing newspaper article. Steven Garber, the article stated, a retired banker, had been mysteriously assaulted in his summer home near Ashton, Illinois. The gardener, summoned to the house in the middle of the night by the aged man’s granddaughter, had found his employer in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, near to death from a vicious head wound. It was known that the attacked financier had been keeping a large sum in Liberty Bonds in the house, and as the bonds had disappeared it was the theory of the police that the valuable certificates had been stolen by the granddaughter, Elizabeth Garber, who was being sought in the belief that she held the key to the mystery of the attempted murder. It was the twelve-year-old granddaughter who had awakened the gardener in his sleeping quarters in a detached garage, begging him to go immediately to the house, where, so he was told, he was needed by his employer. It was upon the gardener’s entrance into the house a few minutes later that the unconscious form on the kitchen floor had been discovered. The granddaughter, carrying a brass box in which it was believed that she had placed the missing Liberty Bonds, had escaped in the night in a rowboat. The police were bending every effort to apprehend her. In the meantime the assaulted grandparent was being cared for in the Ashton hospital. The man’s head wound, the article concluded, was not essentially serious.
Having read the article to its completion, we stared at one another in amazement. We knew, of course, who had struck the blow that had sent the grandfather to the floor unconscious. Without a doubt it was the rascally brother. Yet no mention of the brother and his warty-nosed companion was given in the article. It would almost seem that aside from us and the girl and the unconscious man in the hospital that no one knew that the two men had been in the house.
“What are we going to do?” Peg cried, bewildered.
“I think we ought to go back to the island,” Scoop said, as dizzy looking as the other. “The girl should be told of what has happened to her grandfather. Otherwise she may wait at the island for him for several days. Besides, the bonds are in danger. She’ll need our help to get them safely into a bank.”
The danger to the bonds, the leader then explained, lay in the possibility of the rascally uncle getting to the island ahead of us. No doubt the evil-minded one had found out about the bonds before he had struck his brother down; he might even have compelled the helpless brother to disclose the vanished granddaughter’s intended destination.
Yes, it was to be a race to see who could get to the island first—and we thrilled in the thought of the probable adventure that lay ahead of us. If we could get our hands on the brass box, we were confident that we would be able to keep any one from getting it away from us. Our great fear lay in the thought that we would get to the island too late.
In the time that we had been excitedly talking back and forth, a uniformed policeman had come onto the canal bridge, stopping to give us a curious questioning eye. Of course he didn’t know our secret, else he would have straightway arrested us. At least that was our frightened thought. And fearful that we might be questioned, we quickly loosened the boat’s tie rope and cranked the engine.
Backing up until we came to a small wide waters on the edge of the town, we turned the scow around, then headed for the island under an open throttle.