The Phantom Yacht
by Carol Norton · English · Gutenberg #44401 · 325,646 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Phantom Yacht
Author: Carol Norton
Illustrator: D. Curley
Release date: December 9, 2013 [eBook #44401]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44401
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHANTOM YACHT ***
“_Look! Look!” he cried. “That’s what I was wantin’ to find._”
(_Page 101_) (_The Phantom Yacht_)
THE
PHANTOM YACHT
_By_ CAROL NORTON
Author of
“Bobs, A Girl Detective,” “The Seven Sleuths’ Club,” etc.
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Printed in U. S. A.
MYSTERY _and_ ADVENTURE SERIES _for_ GIRLS
12 TO 16 YEARS OF AGE
The Phantom Yacht, by Carol Norton.
Bobs, A Girl Detective, by Carol Norton.
The Seven Sleuths’ Club, by Carol Norton.
The Phantom Treasure, by Harriet Pyne Grove.
The Secret of Steeple Rocks, by Harriet Pyne Grove.
Copyright, 1928
By A. L. BURT COMPANY
CONTENTS
I. Friends Parted 3
II. Banishing Ghosts 13
III. A Lost Mother 21
IV. Seaward Bound 30
V. A New Experience 42
VI. A Light in the Dark 49
VII. The Phantom Yacht 56
VIII. What Happened 64
IX. A Mysterious Message 73
X. Sounds in the Loft 82
XI. A Querulous Old Aunt 88
XII. A Bleached Skeleton 96
XIII. Belling the Ghost 106
XIV. A Punt Ride 112
XV. A Gloomy Swamp 117
XVI. Out in the Dark 121
XVII. More Mysteries 127
XVIII. An Airplane Sighted 133
XIX. Two Boys Investigate 139
XX. One Mystery Solved 149
XXI. A channel in the Swamp 160
XXII. The Old Ruin at Midnight 170
XXIII. Letters of Importance 183
XXIV. A Surprising Revelation 193
XXV. Puzzled Again 205
XXVI. A Clue to the Old Ruin Mystery 214
XXVII. Ransacking the Old Ruin 224
XXVIII. The Best Surprise of All 239
THE PHANTOM YACHT
CHAPTER I.
FRIENDS PARTED
The face of Dories Moore was as dismal as the day was bright. It was
Indian summer and the maple trees under which she was hurrying were
joyfully arrayed in red and gold, while crimson, yellow and purple
flowers nodded at her from the gardens that she passed with unseeing
eyes. She was almost blinded with tears; her scarlet tam was awry, as
though she had put it on hurriedly, and her sweater coat, of the same
cheerful hue, was unbuttoned and flapping as she fairly ran down the
village street. In her hand was a note which had been the cause of the
tears and the haste. On it were a few penciled words:
“Dori dear, we are leaving sooner than we expected. I’m sending this to
you by little Johnnie-next-door. Do come right over and say good-bye to
someone who loves you best of all.
“Your sister-friend,
“Nann.”
At a large old colonial house at the edge of the town, just where the
meadows began, the girl turned in at a lilac-guarded gate and hurried up
the neatly graveled walk. Her eyes were again brimming with tears as she
glanced up at the curtainless windows that looked as dismal and deserted
as she felt. Hurrying up the steps, she lifted the quaintly carved old
iron knocker and shuddered as she heard the sound echoing uncannily
through the big unfurnished rooms. Her sensitive mouth quivered when she
heard the sound of running feet on bare floors and when the door was
flung open by another girl of about the same age, Dori leaped in and,
throwing her arms about her friend, she burst into tears.
“Why, Dories! Dear, dear Dori, don’t cry so hard.” There were sudden
tears in the warm brown eyes of Nann Sibbett, as for a moment she held
her friend tenderly close.
“One might think that I was going a million miles away.” She tried to
speak cheerfully. “Boston isn’t so very far from Elmwood and some day,
soon, I am sure that you will be coming to visit me.”
An April-like smile flickered tremulously on the lips of the younger girl
as she stepped back and straightened her tam. “Well, that is something to
look forward to,” she confessed. “It will be a little strip of silver
lining to as black a cloud as ever came into my life. Of course,” Dories
amended, “losing father was terrible, but I was too young to know the
loneliness of it, and being poor when we should be rich is awfully hard.
Sometimes I feel so rebellious, O, nobody knows how rebellious I feel.
But losing one’s money is nothing compared to losing one’s only friend.”
The other girl, who was taller by half a head, actually laughed. “Why,
Dories Moore, here you talk as though you would not have a single friend
left when I have moved away. There isn’t a girl at High who hasn’t been
green with envy because I have had the good fortune to be your best
friend ever since we were in kindergarten, and just as soon as I’m out of
town they’ll be swarming around you, each one aspiring to be your pal.”
There was a scornful curl on the sensitive lips of the listener. “As
though I would let anyone have your place, Nann Sibbett. Never, never,
never, not if I live to be a thousand years old.” Then with an appealing
upward glance, “But you’ll probably like some city girl heaps better than
you ever did me. I suppose you’ll forget all about me soon.”
“Silly!” Nann exclaimed brightly, giving her friend an impulsive hug.
“Don’t you remember when you were eleven and I was twelve, we had a
ceremony out in the meadow under the twin elms and we vowed, just as
solemnly as we knew how, that we would be adopted sisters and that real
born sisters could not be closer.”
Dories nodded, smiling again at the pleasant recollection. “Do you know,
Nann,” she put in, “I sort of feel that we were intended to be sisters
some way. It was such a strange coincidence that our birthdays happened
to fall on the same day, the third of September.”
“Maybe if they hadn’t,” Nann chimed in, “you and I wouldn’t have been
best friends at all, for, don’t you remember, way back in kindergarten
days, you were so shy you didn’t make friends with anyone, and when Miss
Sally wanted to find a seat for you that very first morning, she chose me
because it was our birthday. After that, since I was a year older, I felt
that I ought to look out for you just as a big sister really should.”
Dories nodded, then as she glanced into the bare library, in the wide
doorway of which they were standing, she said dismally, “O, Nann, what
good times we’ve had in this room. I can almost see now when we were very
little girls curled up on that window seat near the fireplace studying
our first primer, and on and on until last June when we were cramming for
our sophomore finals.”
“I know.” Nann looked wistfully toward the corner which Dories had
indicated. “I don’t believe we will either of us know how to study
alone.” Then, fearing that tears would come again, she caught her
friend’s hand as she exclaimed, “Dories dear, this room is too full of
ghosts of our past. Let’s go out in the garden. Dad had to go to the bank
to finish up some business, and I had to stay here to see that the last
load of furniture got off safely. It left just before you came. We’re
going to store it for a time and live in a very fine hotel in Boston.
Won’t that be a lark for a change?”
Dories spoke bitterly, “Well, for one thing I _am_ thankful, and that is
that your father didn’t lose his money the way my father did, though how
it happened I never knew and mother never told me.”
“Maybe it will all come back some time in a manner just as mysterious,”
her friend said cheerfully as she led her down the steps around the
house. Neither of the girls spoke of Nann’s dear mother, who had so
recently died, and whose passing had made life in the old house
unendurable to the daughter and her father, but they were both thinking
of her as they wandered into the garden which she had so loved. Nann
slipped an arm about her friend as she paused to look at the blossoms.
“Autumn flowers are always so bright and cheerful, aren’t they, Dori?”
She was determined to change the younger girl’s dismal trend of thought.
“That bed of scarlet salvia over by the evergreen hedge seems to be just
rejoicing about something, and the asters, of almost every color, look as
though they were dressed for a party. They’re happy, if we aren’t.”
“Stupid things!” Dories said petulantly. “They don’t know or care because
you, who have tended and watered and loved them, are going away forever
and ever.”
“Yes, they do know,” Nann said, smiling a bit tremulously, “for last
night when I came out to give them a drink, I told them all about it, but
they’re just trying to make the best of it. They know it’s as hard for me
to go away from my old home as it is for them to have me go, but they’re
trying to make it easier for me, I guess.”
Dories flashed a quick glance up at her companion. Then, impulsively,
“Oh, Nann, how selfish I always am! Of course it’s hard for you to leave
your old home and go among strangers. Here all the time I’ve just been
thinking how _hard_ it is for _me_ to have you go.” Then, making a little
bow toward the bed of radiant asters, the girl of many moods called to
them: “You’re setting a good example, you little plant folk in your
bright blossom tams. From now on I’ll be just as cheerful as ever I can.”
Smiling up at her companion, Dories exclaimed, “And all this time I’ve
had some news that I haven’t told you.” Answering verbally her friend’s
questioning look, she hurried on, “I’m going away myself for the month of
October. At least I suppose I am, and that’s one of the things that has
made me so dismally blue.” Nann stopped in the garden path which they had
been slowly circling and gazed into the pretty face of her friend, hardly
knowing whether to congratulate or condole. Instead of doing either, she
queried, “But why are you so dismal about it, Dori? I’ve often heard you
say that you did wish you could see something of the world beyond
Elmwood?”
“I know it and I still should wish it if you were going with me, but this
journey is anything but pleasant to anticipate.”
“Do tell me about it. I’m consumed with curiosity.” Nann drew her friend
to a garden seat and sat with an arm holding her close. “Now start at the
beginning. _Who_ are you going with, where and why?” The question, simple
as it seemed, brought tears with a rush to the violet-blue eyes of the
younger girl, but remembering her recent resolve, she sat up
ramrod-straight as she replied, making her mouth into as hard a line as
she could. “The one I am going with is an old crab of a great-aunt whom I
have never seen. I’m ever so sure she is a crab, although my angel mother
always smooths over that part of her nature when she’s telling me about
her. She’s rich as Crœsus, if that fabled person really was rich. I’m
never very sure about those things.”
Nann laughed. “He was! You’re safe in your comparison. But he got much of
his money by taking it away from other people with the cruel taxes he
levied.”
“Oh, well, of course my Great Aunt Jane isn’t so terribly rich,” Dories
modified, “but Mother said she had plenty for every comfort and luxury,
and what’s more, Mums _did_ agree with _me_ when I said that she must be
queer. That is, Mother said that even my father, who was Great-Aunt
Jane’s own nephew, couldn’t understand her ways.” Then, with eyes
solemn-wide, the narrator continued: “Nann Sibbett, as I’ve often told
you, I don’t understand in the least what became of our inheritance. If
Mother knows, she won’t tell, but I’m suspicious of that crabby old Aunt
Jane. I think she has it. There now, that’s what I think.”
Nann was interested and said so. “But, Dori dear, you’ve sidetracked. You
began by saying that you were going somewhere. I take it that your
Great-Aunt Jane has invited you to go somewhere with her. Is that right?”
“It is!” the other girl said glumly. “But, believe me, I don’t look
forward to the excursion with any great pleasure.” Then she hurried on.
“Think of it, Nann, that awful old lady has actually requested that I
spend the whole dismal month of October with her down on the beach at
some lonely isolated place called Siquaw Point.”
But if Dories expected sympathy, she was disappointed. “Oh, Dori!” was
the excited exclamation that she heard, “I know about Siquaw Point. An
aunt of mine went there one summer, and she just raved about the rocky
cliffs, the sand dunes and the sea. I’d love it, I know, even in the
middle of winter, and, dear, sometimes October is a beautiful month. You
may have a wonderful time.”
But Dories refused to see any hope of happiness ahead. “The Garden of
Eden would be a dismal place to me if I had to be alone in it with my
Great-Aunt Jane.”
Nann laughed, then hearing a siren calling from the front, she sprang up,
held out both hands to her friend as she exclaimed, “There’s my
chauffeur-dad waiting to bear me stationward, but, dear, I’ve thought of
one thing that will help some. To get to Siquaw Point you will have to go
through Boston. If you’ll let me know the day and the hour I’ll be at the
station to speed you on your way.”
How the younger girl’s face brightened. “Nann, darling,” she exclaimed,
“will you truly? Then that will give me a chance to see you again in just
a few weeks, maybe only two, for its nearly October now.”
“Righto!” was the cheerful reply. “There’s that siren again. I must go.
Will you come and say good-bye to Dad?”
But the other girl shook her head, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’d
rather not now. You tell him for me. I’m going home across lots. I don’t
want anyone to see how near I am to crying.” As she spoke two tears
splashed down her cheeks. Nann caught her in a close embrace. “Dear, dear
sister-friend,” she said, “I’m going to be just as lonely as you are.”
Then, stooping, she picked an aster and held it out, saying brightly,
“This golden aster wants to go with you to tell you that we’re going to
be as cheerful as we can, come what may. See you next month, Dori, sure
as sure.”
Nann turned at the corner of the house to wave, and then Dories walked
slowly across lots thinking over the conversation she had had with her
dearly loved friend. She paused a moment under the twin elms where, in
the long ago, they had vowed to be loyal as any two sisters could be.
Then, with a deep sigh, she went on to the cosy brown house under other
spreading elms that she called home.
CHAPTER II.
BANISHING GHOSTS
There was a cheerful bustle in the kitchen when Dories opened the side
door. Her mother was preparing the noon meal with her customary wordless
song, although now and then a merry message to the frail boy, who so
often sat in a low chair near the stove, was sung to the melody. Just
then the newcomer heard the lilted announcement: “Footsteps I hear, and
now will appear my very dear little daughter.”
Dories was repentant. “Oh, Mother, if I haven’t stayed out too late
again, and you’ve had to stop your sewing to get lunch.”
Little Peter paused in his whittling long enough to remark, “Dori, you’ve
been crying. What for?”
But a tactful mother shook her head quickly at the small boy, saying
brightly, “O, I was glad to stop sewing and stretch a bit. That brocade
dress is hard to work on. I don’t know how many machine needles it has
broken. But since it belongs to a rich person she won’t mind paying for
them.”
After putting the golden aster in a vase, Dories snatched her apron from
its hook in the closet and put it on with darkening looks. “Mother
Moore,” she threatened, “if you don’t go and lie down on the lounge until
lunch is ready, I’m not going to let you sew a single bit more today.
It’s just terribly wicked, and all wrong somehow, that you have to make
dresses for other women to keep us alive when my very own father’s very
own Aunt Jane is simply rolling in wealth, and——”
“Tut! Tut! Little firefly!” Her mother laughingly shook a stirring spoon
in her direction. “If you had ever seen your stately old Aunt Jane, you
just couldn’t conceive of her rolling in anything. That would be much too
undignified.”
“But, Mother, you know I meant that figuratively, not literally. She is
rich and we are poor. Now I ask you what right has one member of a family
to have all that his heart desires and another to have to sew for a
living.”
Little Peter tittered: “It’s _her_ heart, if it’s Great-Aunt Jane you’re
talking about.” A sharp retort was on the girl’s lips when her mother
said cheerily, “Now, kiddies, let’s talk about something else. Mrs. Doran
sent us over a whole pint of cream. Shall we have it whipped on those
last blackberries that Peter found this morning out in Briary Meadow, or
shall I make a little biscuit shortcake?”
“Shortcake! Shortcake! I want shortcake!” Peter sang out.
“But, Mother, you’re too tired to make one,” Dories protested.
“Then you make it, Dori,” Peter pleaded.
“You know I couldn’t make a biscuit shortcake, Peter Moore, not if my
life depended on it.” The girl was in a self-accusing mood. “I never
learned how to do anything useful.” Dories was putting the pretty lunch
dishes on a small table in the kitchen corner breakfast-nook as she
talked.
The understanding mother, realizing the conflicting emotions that were
making her young daughter so unhappy, brought out the flour and other
ingredients as she said, “Never too late to learn, dear. Come and take
your first lesson in biscuit-making.”
Half an hour later, as they sat around the lunch table, Dories told as
much of her recent conversation with her best friend as she wished to
share. Then they had the blackberry shortcake and real cream, and even
Peter acknowledged that it was “most as good as Mother’s.”
When the kitchen had been tidied and Peter had gone to his little upper
room for the nap that was so necessary for the regaining of his health,
Dories went into the small sewing room which formerly had been her
father’s den and stood looking discontentedly out of the window. Her
mother had resumed sewing on the rich brocaded dress. When the hum of the
machine was stilled, she glanced at the pensive girl and said: “Dori
dear, this is the first afternoon that I can remember, almost, that you
have been at home with me. You and Nann always went somewhere or did
something. You are going to miss your best friend ever so much, I know,
but—” there was a break in the voice which caused the girl to turn and
look inquiringly at her mother, who was intently pressing a seam, and who
finished her sentence a bit pathetically, “it’s going to mean a good deal
to me, daughter, to have your companionship once in a while.”
With a little cry the girl sprang across the room and knelt at her
mother’s side, her arms about her. “O, Mumsie, was there ever a more
selfish girl? I don’t see how you have kept on loving me all these
years.” Then her pretty face flushed and she hesitated before confessing:
“I hate to say it, for it only shows how truly horrid I am, but I liked
to be over at Nann’s, where the furniture was so beautiful, not
threadbare like ours.” She was looking through the open door into the
living-room, where she could see the old couch with its worn covering. “I
ought to have stayed at home and helped you with your sewing, but I will
from now on.”
The mother, knowing that tears were near, put a finger beneath the girl’s
chin and looked deep into the repentant violet blue eyes. Kissing her
tenderly, she said merrily, “Very well, young lady, if you wish to punish
yourself for past neglects, sit over there in my low rocker and take the
bastings out of this skirt.”
Dories obeyed and was soon busy at the simple task. To change the
subject, her mother spoke of the planned trip. “It will be your very
first journey away from Elmwood, dear. At your age I would have been ever
so excited.”
The girl looked up from her work, a cloud of doubt in her eyes. “Oh,
Mother, do you really think that you would have been, if you were going
to a summer resort where the cottages were all shut up tight as clams,
boarded up, too, probably, and with such a queer, grumphy person as
Great-Aunt Jane for company?” The girl shuddered. “Every time I think of
it I feel the chills run down my back. I just know the place will be full
of ghosts. I won’t sleep a wink all the time I’m there. I’m convinced of
that.”
Her mother’s merry laugh was reassuring. “Ghosts, dearie?” she queried,
glancing up. “Surely you aren’t in earnest. You don’t believe in ghosts,
do you?”
“Well, maybe not, exactly, but there are the queerest stories told about
those lonely out-of-the-way places. You know that there are, Mother. I
don’t mean made-up stories in books. I mean real newspaper accounts.”
“But it doesn’t matter what kind of paper they’re printed on, Dori,” her
mother put in, more seriously, “nothing could make a ghost story true.
The only ghosts that haunt us, really, are the memories of loving words
left unsaid and loving deeds that were not done, and sometimes,” she
concluded sadly, “it is too late to ever banish those ghosts.” Then, not
wishing to depress her already heart-broken daughter, she said in a
lighter tone, “After all, why worry about your visit to Siquaw Point,
when, as yet, you haven’t heard that your Great-Aunt Jane has really
decided to go. I expected a letter every day last week, but none came, so
she may have given up the plan for this year.” Then, after glancing up at
the clock, she added, “Three, and almost time for the postman. I believe
I hear his whistle now.”
At that moment Peter bounded in, his face rosy from his nap. “Postman’s
coming,” he sang out. “Come on, Dori, I’ll beat you to the gate.”
The girl rose, saying gloomily, “This is probably the fatal day. I’m just
sure there’ll be a letter from Great-Aunt Jane. I don’t see why she chose
me when she’s never even seen me.”
When Dories reached the front door, she saw that Peter was already out in
the road, frantically beckoning to her. “Hurry along, Dori. The postman’s
just leaving Mrs. Doran’s,” he called; then as the mail wagon, drawn by a
lean white horse, approached, the small boy ran out in the road and waved
his arms.
Mr. Higgins, who had stopped at their door ever since Peter had been a
baby, beamed at him over his glasses. “Law sakes!” he exclaimed, “Do I
see a bandit? Guess you’ve been reading stories about ‘Dick Dead-shot’
holding up mail coaches in the Rockies. Sorry, but there ain’t nothin’
for you.” Then, smilingly, he addressed the girl. “Likely in a day or two
I’ll be fetchin’ you a letter, Dori, from your old friend Nann Sibbett.
It’ll be powerfully lonesome around here for you, I reckon, now she’s
gone.”
The girl nodded. “Just awfully lonesome, Mr. Higgins, and please do bring
me a letter soon.” Just then Johnnie Doran called for Peter to come over
and play, and the girl went slowly back to the house.
Her mother looked up inquiringly. “No letter at all,” Dories announced in
so disappointed a tone that she laughingly confessed, “Mother, I do
believe that I’m made up of the contrariest emotions. I do hate the
thought of spending that dismal month of October with Great-Aunt Jane at
Siquaw Point, but I hate even worse going back to High without Nann.”
“Dear girl,” the mother’s voice held a tenderly given rebuke, “you aren’t
thinking in the least of the pleasure your companionship might give your
Great-Aunt Jane. She was very fond of your father when he was a boy, and
he spent many a summer with her at Siquaw. That may be her reason for
inviting you. Your father seemed to be the only person for whom she
really cared.” Then, before the rather surprised girl could reply, the
mother continued, “I wish, dear, that you would hunt up your Aunt’s last
letter and answer it more fully. I was so busy when it came that I merely
sent a few lines, thanking her for the invitation.”
Dories sighed as she rose to obey, but turned back to listen when her
mother continued: “I know how hard it is going to be, dear girl, but I
have a reason, which I cannot explain just now, for very much wishing you
to go. Now write the letter and make it as interesting and newsy as you
can.”
Dories, from the door, dropped a curtsy. “Very well, Mrs. Moore,” she
said, “to please you I’ll write to the crabbedy old lady, but——” Her
mother merrily shook her finger at her. “I want you to withhold judgment,
daughter, until you have seen your Great-Aunt Jane.”
CHAPTER III.
A LOST MOTHER
A week passed, and though Dories received several picture postcards from
her best friend, not a line came from her Great-Aunt Jane.
“She has probably changed her mind about going to Siquaw, dear, and so
you would better prepare to start back to school on Monday. I had talked
the matter over with the principal, Mr. Setherly, and he told me that you
could easily make up October’s work, but, if you are not going away, it
will be better for you to begin the term with the others.”
They were at breakfast, and for a long, silent moment the girl sat gazing
out of the window at a garden that was beginning to look dry and sear.
When she turned back toward her mother, there were tears in her eyes.
The woman placed a hand on the one near her as she tenderly inquired,
“Are you disappointed because you’re not going, daughter?”
“No, no, not that, but you can’t know how I dread returning to High
without Nann. We had planned graduating together and after that going to
college together if only we could find a way.”
Her mother glanced up quickly as though there was something that she
wanted to say, then pressed her lips firmly as though to keep some secret
from being uttered. Dories listlessly continued eating. There was a
closer pressure of her mother’s hand. “It is hard, dear, I know,” the
understanding voice was saying. “Life brings many disappointments, but
there is always a compensation. You’ll see!” Then, glancing toward the
stair door, which was slowly opening, the mother called, “Hurry up, you
lazy Peterkins. Come and have your breakfast. I want you and Dories to go
to the village and match some silk for me as soon as you can.”
Then, when she served the little fellow, the loving woman returned to her
daily task and left a half self-pitying, half rebellious and wholly
dispirited girl to wash and put away the dishes. Then listlessly she
donned her scarlet tam and sweater coat and went into the sewing room to
get the samples that she was to match. Her mother smiled up into her
dismal face. “Dori, daughter, don’t gloom around so much,” she pleaded.
“I shall actually believe that you are disappointed because you are _not_
going to Siquaw. Now, here’s the silk to be matched and there’s Peterkins
waiting for you. Come back as soon as you can, won’t you?”
It was midmorning when Dories and the small boy returned from the
shopping expedition. They went at once to the sewing room, but their
mother was not there. They looked in the living room and in the kitchen.
“Mother, where are you?” they both called, but there was no reply.
“Maybe she’s upstairs,” Peter suggested.
“Of course. How stupid for me to forget that we have an upstairs to our
house.” Dories felt strangely excited as she ran up the circling front
stairway calling again and again, but still there was no reply. Down the
long upper corridor they went, opening one door and another, beginning to
feel almost frightened at the stillness.
Then Dories exclaimed, “Oh, maybe she’s gone over to Mrs. Doran’s for a
moment. I guess she couldn’t do any sewing until we came back with the
silk.” They were about to descend the back stairs when they heard a noise
in the garret overhead.
The frail boy caught his sister’s hand and held it tight. “Do you suppose
it’s ghosts,” he whispered.
“No, of course not,” the girl replied. The attic was a low, dark,
cobwebby place hardly high enough to stand in, and they never went there.
“There are no ghosts. Mother said so.”
“Then maybe it’s a rat scratching around,” the boy suggested, “or that
wild barn cat may have got in somehow. Do you dare open the door, Dori,
and call up?”
“Of course I do, but first I’ll creep up a little way and look.” Very
quietly Dories opened the door and stealthily ascended the dark, short
stairway. All was still in the dusky, musty attic. Then a light flashed
for a moment in a far corner. Truly frightened, Dories turned and hurried
down the stairs. Quick steps were heard above: then a familiar voice
called, “Dories, is that you, dear? Why are you stealing about in that
way? Come up a moment, daughter! I want you to help me drag this old
trunk out of the corner.”
Then, when the girl, with Peter following, appeared on the top step, the
mother explained: “I thought I’d be down before you could get back. I
have news for you, Dori. Just after you left, a night letter was
delivered. In it your Great-Aunt Jane said that she had entirely given up
her plan to spend a month at Siquaw Point until she received your letter.
She had decided that if you were so rude as to ignore her invitation, you
were not the kind of a girl she wished to know, even if you are her
niece, but your letter caused her to change her mind. She wishes you to
meet her this afternoon in Boston and go directly from there to Siquaw
Point.”
“O, Mother, how terrible!” Dories was truly dismayed. “I won’t have time
to let Nann know, and she was to meet me at the station. That was the one
redeeming feature about the whole thing.”
“Well, you can see her when you return, and maybe you can plan to stay a
day or two with her. Now help me with this little trunk, dear. We have
only two hours to prepare your clothes and pack.”
They carried the small steamer trunk down to Dories’ room and by noon it
was packed and locked, and, soon after, the expressman came to take both
the trunk and the girl to the station.
Dories’ face was flushed and tears were in her eyes when she said
good-bye. “I feel so strange and excited, Mother,” she confided, “going
out into the world for the very first time, and O, Mumsie, no one knows
how I dread being all alone in a boarded-up cottage at a deserted summer
resort with such a dreadful old woman.” Dories clung to her mother in
little girl fashion as though she hoped at the very last moment she might
be told that she need not go, but what she heard was: “Mr. Hanson is in a
hurry, dear. He has the trunk on his cart and he’s waiting to help you up
on the seat.”
Dories caught her breath in an effort not to cry, kissed her mother and
Peter hurriedly, picked up her hand-satchel and darted down the path.
From the high seat she waved and smiled. Then she called in an effort at
cheeriness. “Don’t forget, Mrs. Moore, that you promised to take October
for a real vacation and not sew a bit after you finish the silk dress.”
“I promise!” the mother called. “Peter and I will just play. Write to us
often.”
Mr. Hanson, finding that it was late, drove rapidly to the station, and
it was well that he did, for the train was just drawing in when they
arrived. Dories quickly purchased a ticket and checked her trunk with the
expressman’s help, then, climbing aboard, chose a seat near a window.
After all, she found herself quite pleasurably excited. It was such a new
experience to be traveling alone. Few of the passengers noticed her and
no one spoke. She was glad, as her mother had warned her not to enter
into conversation with strangers.
As she watched the flying landscape the girl thought of something her
mother had said on the day that she had asked her to answer her
Great-Aunt Jane’s letter. “I have a reason, Dori, for really wishing you
to go to Siquaw with your aunt,” she had said. What could that reason be?
Not until Boston was neared did her speculation cease; then she became
conscious of but two emotions, curiosity about her Great-Aunt Jane and a
crushing disappointment because she had not been able to let Nann Sibbett
know when to meet her.
When the train finally stopped, Dories, feeling very young and very much
alone, followed the crowd of passengers into the huge station. She was to
meet her aunt in the woman’s waiting room, and she stopped a hurrying
porter to inquire where she would find it. Almost timidly she entered the
large, comfortably furnished room, then, seeing an elderly woman dressed
in black, who was sitting stiffly erect, the girl went toward her as she
said diffidently: “Pardon me, but are _you_ my Great-Aunt Jane?” The
woman threw back a heavy black crepe veil and her sharp gray eyes gazed
up at the girl penetratingly.
“Humph!” was the ungracious reply. “Well, at least you’ve got your
father’s eyes. That’s something to be thankful for, but I’ve no doubt
that you look like your mother otherwise.”
There was something about the tone in which this was said that put the
girl on the defensive.
“I certainly hope I do look like my darling mother,” she exclaimed, her
diffidence vanishing. The elderly woman seemed not to hear.
“Sit down, why don’t you?” she said in a querulous tone. “The train
doesn’t go for an hour yet.”
The girl sank into a comfortable chair which faced the one occupied by
her aunt; the back of which was toward the door.
For a moment neither spoke, then remembering the coaching she had
received, Dories said hesitatingly, “I want to thank you, Aunt Jane, for
having invited me to go with you. I am pleased to——”
A sniff preceded the remark that interrupted: “I know how pleased you are
to go with a fussy old woman to a deserted summer resort. About as
pleased as a cat is out in the rain.” Then, as though her interest in
Dories had ceased, the old woman drew the heavy crêpe veil down over her
face, but the girl was sure that she could see the sharp eyes peering
through it as though she were intently watching some object over Dori’s
shoulder.
The girl had expected her aunt to be queer, but this was far worse than
her most dismal anticipations. At last the girl became so nervous that
she glanced back of her to see what her aunt could be watching. She saw
only the open door that led into the main waiting room of the station.
Women were passing in and out, but that was nothing to stare at. Seeming,
at last, to recall her companion’s presence, the old woman addressed her:
“Dories, you wrote me that you had a girl friend here in Boston who would
come down to the train to see you off. Why doesn’t she come?”
“I didn’t have time to let her know, Aunt Jane,” was the dismal reply.
“I’m just ever so disappointed.”
The old woman nodded her head toward the door. “Is that her?” she asked.
“Is that your friend?”
Dories sprang to her feet and turned. A tall girl, carrying a suitcase,
was approaching them. With a cry of mingled amazement and joy, Dories ran
toward her and held out both hands. “Why, Nann, darling, it _can’t_ be
you.” The newcomer dropped her bag and they flew into each other’s arms.
Then, standing back, Dori asked, much mystified, “Why, are you going
somewhere Nann?”
It was the old woman who replied grimly: “She is! I invited her to go
with us. There now! Don’t try to thank me.” She held up a protesting hand
when Dori, flushed and happy, turned toward her. “I did it for myself, I
can assure you. I knew having you moping around for a month wouldn’t add
any to _my_ pleasure.”
An embarrassing moment was saved by a stentorian voice in the doorway
announcing: “All aboard for Siquaw Center and way stations.” A colored
porter appeared to carry the bags, and the old woman, leaning heavily on
her cane, limped after him, followed by the girls, in whose hearts there
were mingled emotions, but joy predominated, for, however terrible Dori’s
Great-Aunt Jane might be, at least they were to spend a whole long month
together.
CHAPTER IV.
SEAWARD BOUND
There were very few people on the seaward-bound train; indeed Miss Jane
Moore, Nann and Dories were the only occupants of the chair car. After
settling herself comfortably in the chair nearest the front, the old
woman, with a sweep of her arm toward the back, said almost petulantly:
“Sit as far away from me as you can. I may want to sleep, and I know
girls. They chatter, chatter, chatter, titter, titter, titter all about
nothing.”
Her companions were glad to obey, and when they were seated at the rear
end of the car, they kept their heads close together while they visited
that they might not disturb the elderly woman, who, to all appearances,
fell at once into a light doze.
As soon as the train was under way, Dories asked: “Now do tell me how
this perfectly, unbelievably wonderful thing has happened?”
Nann laughed happily. “Maybe your Great-Aunt Jane is a fairy godmother in
disguise,” she whispered. They both glanced at the far corner, but the
black veiled figure was much more suggestive of a witch than a good
fairy.
“The disguise surely is a complete one,” Dories said with a shudder. “My,
it gives me the chilly shivers when I think how I might be going to spend
a whole month alone with her. But now tell me, just what did happen?”
“Can’t you guess? You wrote your aunt a letter, didn’t you, telling all
about me and even giving the name of the hotel where Dad and I were
staying?”
Dories nodded, “Yes, that’s true. Mother wanted me to write to Aunt Jane
and I couldn’t think of a thing to tell her about, and so I wrote about
you.”
“Well,” Nann continued to enlighten her friend, “she must have written me
that very day inviting me to be her guest at Siquaw Point for the month
of October, but she asked me not to let you know. I sent the last picture
postcard, the one of our hotel, just after I had received her letter, and
you can imagine how wild I was to tell you. I hadn’t started going to the
Boston High. Dear old Dad said a month later wouldn’t matter, and so here
I am.” The girls clasped hands and beamed joyfully at each other.
Dories’ next glance toward the sleeping old woman was one of gratitude.
“I’m going to try hard to love her, that is, if she’ll let me.” Then,
after a thoughtful moment, Dories continued: “Great-Aunt Jane must have
been very different when Dad was a boy, for he cared a lot for her,
Mother said.” Then with one of her quick changes she exclaimed in a low
voice, “Nann Sibbett, I have lain awake nights dreading the dismal month
I was to spend at that forsaken summer resort. I just knew there’d be
ghosts in those boarded-up cottages, but now that you’re going to be with
me, I almost hope that something exciting will happen.”
“So do I!” Nann agreed.
It was four o’clock when the train, which consisted of an engine, two
coaches and a chair-car, stopped in what seemed at first to be but wide
stretches of meadows and marsh lands, but, peering ahead, the girls saw a
few wooden buildings and a platform. “Siquaw Center!” the brakeman opened
a door to announce. Miss Jane Moore sat up so suddenly, and when she
threw back her veil she seemed so very wide awake, the girls found
themselves wondering if she had really been asleep at all. The brakeman
assisted the old woman to alight and placed her bags on the platform,
then, hardly pausing, the train again was under way. Meadows and marshes
stretched in all directions, but about a mile to the east the girls could
see a wide expanse of gray-blue ocean.
“I guess the name means the center of the marshes,” Dori whispered,
making a wry face while her aunt was talking to the station-master, a
tall, lank, red-whiskered man in blue overalls who did not remove his cap
nor stop chewing what seemed to be a rather large quid.
“Yeah!” the girls heard his reply to the woman’s question. “Gib’ll fetch
the stage right over. Quare time o’ year for yo’ to be comin’ out, Mis’
Moore, ain’t it? Yeah! I got your letter this here mornin’. The supplies
ar’ all ready to tote over to yer cottage.”
The girls were wondering who Gib might be when they heard a rumbling
beyond the wooden building and saw a very old stage coach drawn by a
rather boney old white horse and driven by a tall, lank, red-headed boy.
A small girl, with curls of the same color, sat on the high seat at his
side. “Hurry up, thar, you Gib Strait!” the man, who was recognizable as
the boy’s father, called to him. “Come tote Mis’ Moore’s luggage.” Then
the man sauntered off, having not even glanced in the direction of the
two girls, but the rather ungainly boy who was hurrying toward them was
looking at them with but slightly concealed curiosity.
Miss Moore greeted him with, “How do you do, Gibralter Strait.” Upon
hearing this astonishing name, the two girls found it hard not to laugh,
but the lad, evidently understanding, smiled broadly and nodded awkwardly
as Miss Moore solemnly proceeded to introduce him.
To cover his embarrassment, the lad hastened to say. “Well, Miss Moore,
sort o’ surprisin’ to see yo’ hereabouts this time o’ year. Be yo’ goin’
to the Pint?”
The old woman looked at him scathingly. “Well, Gibralter, where in
heaven’s name would I be going? I’m not crazy enough yet to stay long in
the Center. Here, you take my bags; the girls can carry their own.”
“Yessum, Miss Moore,” the boy flushed up to the roots of his red hair. He
knew that he wasn’t making a very good impression on the young ladies. He
glanced at them furtively as they all walked toward the stage; then, when
he saw them smiling toward him, not critically but in a most friendly
fashion, there was merry response in his warm red-brown eyes. What he
said was: “If them bags are too hefty, set ’em down an’ I’ll come back
for ’em.”
“O, we can carry them easily,” Nann assured him.
The small girl on the high seat was staring down at them with eyes and
mouth open. She had on a nondescript dress which very evidently had been
made over from a garment meant for someone older. When the girls glanced
up, she smiled down at them, showing an open space where two front teeth
were missing.
“What’s your name, little one?” Nann called up to her. The lad was inside
the coach helping Miss Moore to settle among her bags.
The child’s grin grew wilder, but she did not reply. Nann turned toward
her brother, who was just emerging: “What is your little sister’s name?”
she asked.
The boy flushed. Nann and Dori decided that he was easily embarrassed or
that he was unused to girls of his own age. But they better understood
the flush when they heard the answer: “Her name’s Behring.” Then he
hurried on to explain: “I know our names are queer. It was Pa’s notion to
give us geography names, being as our last is Strait. That’s why mine’s
Gibralter. Yo’ kin laugh if yo’ want to,” he added good-naturedly. “I
would if ’twasn’t my name.” Then in a low voice, with a swift glance
toward the station, he confided, “I mean to change my name when I come of
age. I sure sartin do.”
The girls felt at once that they would like this boy whose sensitive face
expressed his every emotion and who had so evident a sense of humor. They
were about to climb inside of the coach with Miss Moore when a shrill,
querulous voice from a general store across from the station attracted
their attention. A tall, angular woman in a skimp calico dress stood
there. “Howdy, Miss Moore,” she called, then as though not expecting a
reply to her salutation, she continued: “Behring Strait, you come here
right this minute and mind the baby. What yo’ gallavantin’ off fer, and
me with the supper gettin’ to do?” Nann and Dori glanced at each other
merrily, each wondering which strait the baby was named after.
The small girl obeyed quickly. Mrs. Strait impressed the listeners as a
woman who demanded instant obedience. As soon as the three passengers
were settled inside, the coach started with a lurch. The sandy road wound
through the wide, swampy meadows. It was rough and rutty. Miss Moore sat
with closed eyes and, as she was wedged in between two heavy bags, she
was not jounced about as much as were the girls. They took it
good-naturedly, but Dories found it hard to imagine how she could have
endured the journey if she had been alone with her queer Aunt Jane. Nann
decided that the old woman feined sleep on all occasions to avoid the
necessity of talking to them.
At last, even above the rattle of the old coach, could be heard the
crashing surf on rocks, and the girls peered eagerly ahead. What they saw
was a wide strip of sand and a row of weather-beaten cottages, boarded
up, as Dori had prophesied, and beyond them white-crested, huge gray
breakers rushing and roaring up on the sand.
The boney white horse came to a sudden stop at the edge of the beach, nor
would it attempt to go any farther. The boy leaped over a wheel and threw
open the back door. “Guess you’ll have to walk a piece along the beach,
Miss Moore. The coach gets stuck so often in the sand ol’ Methuselah
ain’t takin’ no chances at tryin’ to haul it out,” he informed the
occupants.
The girls were almost surprised to find that the horse hadn’t been named
after a strait. Miss Moore threw back her veil and opened her eyes at
once. Upon hearing what the boy had to say, she leaned forward to gaze at
the largest cottage in the middle of the row. She spoke sharply:
“Gibralter, why didn’t your father carry out my orders? I wrote him
distinctly to open up the cottage and air it out. Why didn’t he do that
when he brought over the supplies, that’s what I’d like to know? I
declare to it, even if he is your father, I must say Simon Strait is a
most shiftless man.”
The boy said at once, as though in an effort to apologize: “Pa’s been
real sick all summer, Miss Moore, and like ’twas he fergot it, but I kin
open up easy, if I kin find suthin’ to pry off the boards with. I think
likely I’ll find an axe, anyhow, out in the back shed whar I used to chop
wood fer you. I’m most sure I will.”
Miss Moore sank back. “Well, hurry up about it, then. I’ll stay in the
coach till you get the windows uncovered.” When the boy was gone, the
woman turned toward her niece. “Open up that small black bag, Dories; the
one near you, and get out the back-door key. There’s a hammer just inside
on the kitchen table, if it’s where I left it.” She continued her
directions: “Give it to Gibralter and tell him, when he gets the boards
off the windows, to carry in some wood and make a fire. A fog is coming
in this minute and it’s as wet as rain.”
The key having been found, the girls ran gleefully around the cabin in
search of the boy. They found him emerging from a shed carrying a
hatchet. He grinned at them as though they were old friends. “Some
cheerful place, this!” he commented as he began ripping off the boards
from one of the kitchen windows. “You girls must o’ needed sea air a lot
to come to this place out o’ season like this with a—a—wall, with a old
lady like Miss Moore is.” Dories felt sure that the boy was thinking
something quite different, but was not saying it because it was a
relative of hers about whom he was talking. What she replied was: “I
can’t understand it myself. I mean why Great-Aunt Jane wanted to come to
this dismal place after everyone else has gone.”
They were up on the back porch and, as she looked out across the swampy
meadows over which a heavy fog was settling, then she continued, more to
Nann than to the boy: “I promised Mother I wouldn’t be afraid of ghosts,
but honestly I never saw a spookier place.”
The boy had been making so much noise ripping off boards that he had only
heard the last two words. “Spooks war yo’ speakin’ of?” he inquired.
“Well, I guess yo’ll think thar’s spooks enough along about the middle of
the night when the fog horn’s a moanin’ an’ the surf’s a crashin’ out on
the pint o’ rocks, an’ what’s more, thar _is_ folks at Siquaw Center as
says thar’s a sure enough spook livin’ over in the ruins that used to be
ol’ Colonel Wadbury’s place.”
The girls shuddered and Dories cast a “Didn’t I tell you so” glance at
her friend, but Nann, less fearful by nature, was interested and curious,
and after looking about in vain for the “ruin”, she inquired its
whereabouts.
Gibralter enlightened them. “O, ’tisn’t in sight,” he said, “that is, not
from here. It’s over beyant the rocky pint. From the highest rock thar
you kin see it plain.”
Then as he went on around the cottage taking off boards, the girls
followed to hear more of the interesting subject. “Fine house it used to
be when my Pa was a kid, but now thar’s nothing but stone walls a
standin’. A human bein’ couldn’t live in that ol’ shell, nohow. But—” the
boy could not resist the temptation to elaborate the theme when he saw
the wide eyes of his listeners, “’long about midnight folks at the Center
do say as how they’ve seen a light movin’ about in the old ruin. Nobody’s
dared to go near ’nuf to find out what ’tis. The swamps all about are
like quicksand. If you step in ’em, wall, golly gee, it’s good-bye fer
yo’. Leastwise that’s what ol’-timers say, an’ so the spook, if thar is
one over thar, is safe ’nuf from introosion.”
While the boy had been talking, he had removed all of the wooden blinds,
his listeners having followed him about the cabin. Dories had been so
interested that she had quite forgotten about the huge key that she had
been carrying. “O my!” she exclaimed, suddenly noticing it. “But then you
didn’t need the hammer after all. Now I’ll skip around and open the back
door, and, Gibralter, will you bring in some wood, Aunt Jane said, to
build us a fire?”
While the boy was gone, Nann confided merrily, “There now, Dories Moore,
you’ve been wishing for an adventure, and here is one all ready made and
waiting. Pray, what could be more thrilling than an old ruin surrounded
by an uncrossable swamp and a mysterious light which appears at
midnight?”
The boy returned with an armful of logs left over from the supply of a
previous summer. “Gib,” Nann addressed him in her friendliest fashion,
“may we call you that? Gibralter is _so_ long. I’d like to visit your
ruin and inspect the ghost in his lair. Really and truly, isn’t there any
way to reach the place?”
The boy looked as though he had a secret which he did not care to reveal.
“Well, maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t,” he said uncommittedly.
Then, with a brightening expression in his red-brown eyes, “Anyway, I’ll
show you the old ruin if yo’ll meet me at sun-up tomorrow mornin’ out at
the pint o’ rocks.”
“I’m game,” Nann said gleefully. “It sounds interesting to me all right.
How about you, Dori?”
“O, I’m quite willing to see the place from a distance,” the other
replied, “but nothing could induce me to go very near it.” Neither of the
girls thought of asking the advice of their elderly hostess, who, at that
very moment, appeared around a corner of the cabin to inquire why it was
taking such an endless time to open up the cottage. Luckily Gib had
started a fire in the kitchen stove, which partly mollified the woman’s
wrath. After bringing in the bags and supplies, the boy took his
departure, and they could hear him whistling as he drove away through the
fog.
CHAPTER V.
A NEW EXPERIENCE
With the closing in of the fog, twilight settled about the cabin. The old
woman, still in her black bonnet with the veil thrown back, drew a wooden
armed chair close to the stove and held her hands out toward the warmth.
“Open up the box of supplies, Dories,” she commanded, “and get out some
candles. Then you can fill a hot-water bottle for me and I’ll go right to
bed. No use making a fire in the front room until tomorrow. You girls are
to sleep upstairs. You’ll find bedding in a bureau up there. It may be
damp, but you’re young. It won’t hurt you any.”
Dories, having opened up the box of supplies, removed each article,
placing it on the table. At the very bottom she found a note scribbled on
a piece of wrapping paper: “Out of candles. Send some tomorrer.”
Miss Moore sat up ramrod-straight, her sharp gray eyes narrowing angrily.
“If that isn’t just like that shiftless, good-for-nothing Simon Strait.
How did he suppose we could get on without light? I wish now I had
ordered kerosene, but I thought, just at first, that candles would do.”
In the dusk Nann had been looking about the kitchen. On a shelf she saw a
lantern and two glass lamps. “O, Miss Moore!” she exclaimed, “Don’t you
think maybe there might be oil in one of those lamps?”
“No, I don’t,” the old woman replied. “I always had my maid empty them
the last thing for fear of fire.” Nann, standing on a chair, had taken
down the lantern. Her face brightened. “I hear a swish,” she said
hopefully, “and so it must be oil.” With a piece of wrapping paper she
wiped off the dust while Dories brought forth a box of matches.
A dim, sputtering light rewarded them. “It won’t last long,” Nann said as
she placed the lantern on the table, “So, Miss Moore, if you’ll tell us
what to do to make you comfortable, we’ll hurry around and do it.”
“Comfortable? Humph! We won’t any of us be very comfortable with such a
wet fog penetrating even into our bones.” The old woman complained so
bitterly that Dories found herself wondering why her Great-Aunt Jane had
come at all if she had known that she would be uncomfortable. But she had
no time to give the matter further thought, for Miss Moore was issuing
orders. “Dories, you work that pump-handle over there in the sink. If it
needs priming, we won’t get any water tonight. Well, thank goodness, it
doesn’t. That’s one thing that went right. Nann, you rinse out the tea
kettle, fill it and set it to boil. Now you girls take the lantern and go
to my bedroom. It’s just off the big front room, so you can’t miss it;
open up the bottom bureau drawer and fetch out my bedding. We’ll hang it
over chairs by the stove till the damp gets out of it.”
Nann took the sputtering lantern and, being the fearless one of the two,
she led the way into the big front room of the cabin. The furniture could
not be seen for the sheetlike coverings. In the dim light the girls could
see a few pictures turned face to the wall. “Oh-oo!” Dories shuddered.
“It’s clammily damp in here. Think of it, Nann, can you conceive _what_
it would have been like for _me_ if I had come all alone with Aunt Jane?
Well, I know just as well as I know anything that I would never have
lived through this first night.”
Nann laughed merrily. “O, Dori,” she exclaimed as she held the lantern
up, “Do look at this wonderful, huge stone fireplace. I’m sure we’re
going to enjoy it here when we get things straightened around and the sun
is shining. You see if we don’t.” Nann was opening a door which she
believed must lead into Miss Moore’s bedroom, and she was right. The dim,
flickering light revealed an old-fashioned hand-turned bed with four high
posts. Near was an antique bureau, and Dori quickly opened the bottom
drawer and took out the needed bedding. With her arms piled high, she
followed the lantern-bearer back to the kitchen. Miss Moore had evidently
not moved from her chair by the stove. “Put on another piece of wood,
Dori,” she commanded. “Now fetch all the chairs up and spread the bedding
on it.”
When this had been done, the teakettle was singing, and Nann said
brightly, “What a little optimist a teakettle is! It sings even when
things are darkest.”
“You mean when things are hottest,” Dori put in, actually laughing.
The old woman was still giving orders. “The dishes are in that cupboard
over the table,” she nodded in that direction. “Fetch out a cup and
saucer, Dories, wash them with some hot water and make me a cup of tea.
Then, while I drink it, you can both spread up my bed.”
Fifteen minutes later all these things had been accomplished. The old
woman acknowledged that she was as comfortable as possible in her warm
bed. When they had said good-night, she called, “Dories, I forgot to tell
you the stairway to your room leads up from the back porch.” Then she
added, as an afterthought, “You girls will want to eat something, but for
mercy sake, do close the living-room door so I won’t hear your clatter.”
Nann, whose enjoyment of the situation was real and not feined, placed
the sputtering lantern on the kitchen table while Dories softly closed
the door as she had been directed. Then they stood and gazed at the
supplies still in boxes and bundles on the oilcloth-covered table. “I
never was hungrier!” Dories announced. “But there isn’t time to really
cook anything before the light will go out. Oh-oo! Think how terrible it
would be to have to climb up that cold, wet outside stairway to a room in
the loft and get into cold, wet bedding, and all in the dark.”
Nann laughed. “Well, I’ll confess it _is_ rather spooky,” she agreed,
“and if I believed in ghosts I might be scared.” Then, as the lantern
gave a warning flicker, the older girl suggested: “What say to turning
out the light and make more fire in the stove? It really is quite bright
over in that corner.”
“I guess it’s the only thing to do,” Dori acknowledged dolefully. “O
goodie,” she added more cheerfully as she held up a box of crackers.
“These, with butter and some sardines, _ought_ to keep us from starving.”
“Great!” Nann seemed determined to be appreciative. “And for a drink
let’s have cambric tea with canned milk and sugar. Now the next thing,
where is a can opener?”
She opened a drawer in the kitchen table and squealed exultingly, “Dories
Moore, see what I’ve found.” She was holding something up. “It’s a little
candle end, but it will be just the thing if we need a light in the night
when our oil is gone.”
“Goodness!” Dories shuddered. “I hope we’ll sleep so tight we won’t know
it is night until after it’s over.”
Nann had also found a can opener and they were soon hungrily eating the
supper Dories had suggested. “I call this a great lark!” the older girl
said brightly. They were sitting on straight wooden chairs, drawn close
to the bright fire, and their viands were on another chair between them.
“The kitchen is so nice and warm now that I hate plunging out into the
fog to go upstairs,” Dori shudderingly remarked. “I presume that is where
Aunt Jane’s maid used to sleep. Mumsie said she had one named Maggie who
had been with her forever, almost. But she died last June. That must be
why Aunt Jane didn’t come here this summer.”
When the girls had eaten all of the sardines and crackers and had been
refreshed with cambric tea, they rose and looked at each other almost
tragically. Then Nann smiled. “Don’t let’s give ourselves time to think,”
she suggested. “Let’s take a box of matches. You get one while I relight
the lantern. I have the candle end in my pocket. Now, bolster up your
courage and open the door while I shelter our flickering flame from the
cold night air that might blow it out.”
Dories had her hand on the knob of the door which led out upon the back
porch, but before opening it, she whispered, “Nann, you don’t suppose
that ghost over in the ruin ever prowls around anywhere else, do you?”
“Of course not, silly!” Nann’s tone was reassuring. “There isn’t a ghost
in the old ruin, or anywhere else for that matter. Now open the door and
let’s ascend to our chamber.”
The fog on the back porch was so dense that it was difficult for the
girls to find the entrance to their boarded-in stairway. As they started
the ascent, Nann in the lead, they were both wondering what they would
find when they reached their loft bedroom.
CHAPTER VI.
A LIGHT IN THE DARK
The girls cautiously crept up the back stairway which was sheltered from
fog and wind only by rough boards between which were often wide cracks.
Time and again a puff of air threatened to put out the flickering flame
in the lantern. With one hand Nann guarded it, lest it suddenly sputter
out and leave them in darkness. There was a closed door at the top of the
stairs, and of course, it was locked, but the key was in it.
“Doesn’t that seem sort of queer?” Dories asked as her friend unlocked
the door, removed the key and placed it on the inside.
“Well, it does, sort of,” Nann had to acknowledge, “but I’m mighty glad
it was there, or how else could we have entered?”
Dories said nothing, but, deep in her heart, she was wishing that she and
Nann were safely back in Elmwood, where there were electric lights and
other comforts of civilization.
Holding the lantern high, the girls stood in the middle of the loft room
and looked around. It was unfinished after the fashion of attics, and
though it was quite high at the peak, the sloping roof made a tent-like
effect. There were two windows. One opened out toward the rocky point,
above which a continuous inward rush of white breakers could be seen, and
the other, at the opposite side, opened toward swampy meadows, a mile
across which on clear nights could be seen the lights of Siquaw Center.
A big, old-fashioned high posted bed, an equally old-fashioned mahogany
bureau and two chairs were all of the furnishings.
They found bedding in the bureau drawers, as Miss Moore had told them.
Placing the lantern on the bureau, Nann said: “If we wish to have light
on the subject, we’d better make the bed in a hurry. You take that side
and I’ll take this, and we’ll have these quilts spread in a twinkling.”
Dories did as she was told and the bed was soon ready for occupancy. Then
the girls scrambled out of their dresses, and, just as they leaped in
between the quilts, the flame in the lantern sputtered and went out.
Dories clutched her friend fearfully. “Oh, Nann,” she said, “we never
looked under the bed nor behind that curtained-off corner. I don’t dare
go to sleep unless I know what’s there.”
Her companion laughed. “What do you ’spose is there?” she inquired.
“How can I tell?” Dories retorted. “That’s why I wish we had looked and
then I would know.”
Her friend’s voice, merry even in the darkness, was reassuring. “I can
tell you just as well as if I had looked,” she announced with confidence.
“Back of these curtains, you would find nothing but a row of nails or
hooks on which to hang our garments when we unpack our suitcases, and
under the bed there is only dust in little rolled-up heaps—like as not.
Now, dear, let’s see who can go to sleep first, for you know we have an
engagement with our friend, Gibralter Strait, at sunrise tomorrow
morning.”
“You say that as though you were pleased with the prospect,” Dories
complained.
“Pleased fails to express the joy with which I anticipate the——” Nann
said no more, for Dories had clutched her, whispering excitedly, “Hark!
What was that noise? It sounds far off, maybe where the haunted ruin is.”
Nann listened and then calmly replied: “More than likely it’s the fog
horn about which Gib told us, and that other noise is the muffled roar of
the surf crashing over the rocks out on the point. If there are any more
noises that you wish me to explain, please produce them now. If not, I’m
going to sleep.”
After that Dories lay very still for a time, confident that she wouldn’t
sleep a wink. Nann, however, was soon deep in slumber and Dories soon
followed her example. It was midnight when she awakened with a start, sat
up and looked about her. She felt sure that a light had awakened her. At
first she couldn’t recall where she was. She turned toward the window.
The fog had lifted and the night was clear. For a moment she sat watching
the white, rushing line of the surf, then, farther along, she saw a dark
looming object.
Suddenly she clutched her companion. “Nann,” she whispered dramatically,
“there it is! There’s a light moving over by the point. Do you suppose
that’s the ghost from the old ruin?”
“The what?” Nann sat up, dazed from being so suddenly awakened. Then,
when Dories repeated her remark, her companion gazed out of the window
toward the point.
“H’m-m!” she said, “It’s a light all right. A lantern, I should say, and
its moving slowly along as though it were being carried by someone who is
searching for something among the rocks.”
Dori’s hold on her friend’s arm became tighter. “It’s coming this way!
I’m just ever so sure that it is. Oh, Nann, why did we come to this
dreadful place? What if that light came right up to this cottage and saw
that it wasn’t boarded up and knew someone was here and——”
Nann chuckled. “Aren’t you getting rather mixed in your figures of
speech?” she teased. “A lantern can’t see or know, but of course I
understand that you mean the-well-er-person carrying the lantern. I
suppose you will agree that it is a person, for ghosts don’t have to
carry lanterns, you know.”
“How do you know so much about ghosts, since you say there are no such
things?” Dori flared.
“Well, nothing can’t carry a lantern, can it?” was the unruffled reply.
Then the two girls were silent, watching the light which seemed now and
then to be held high as though whoever carried it paused at times to look
about him and then continued to search on the rocks.
Slowly, slowly the light approached the row of boarded-up cabins. The
girls crept from bed and knelt at the window on the seaward side. Nann,
because she was interested, and Dori because she did not want to be left
alone.
“Do you think it’s coming this far?” came the anxious whisper. Nann shook
her head. “No,” she said, “it’s going back toward the point and so I’m
going back to bed. I’m chilled through as it is.”
They were soon under the covers and when they again glanced toward the
window the light had disappeared. “Seems to have been swallowed up,” Nann
remarked.
“Maybe it’s fallen over the cliff. I almost hope that it has, and been
swept out to sea.”
“Meaning the lantern, I suppose, or do you mean the carrier thereof?”
“Nann Sibbett, I don’t see how you can help being just as afraid of
whatever it is, or, rather of whoever it is, as I am.”
“Because I am convinced that since it, or he, doesn’t know of my
existence, I am not the object of the search, so why should I be afraid?
Now, Miss Dories Moore, if you wish to stay awake speculating as to what
became of that light, you may, but I’m going to sleep, and, if this loft
bedroom of ours is just swarming with ghosts and mysterious lights, don’t
you waken me to look at them until morning.”
So saying, Nann curled up and went to sleep. Dories, fearing that she
would again be awakened by a light, drew the quilt up over her head so
that she could not see it.
Although she was nearly smothered, like an ostrich, she felt safer, and
in time she too slept, but she dreamed of headless horsemen and
hollow-eyed skeletons that walked out on the rocky point at midnight
carrying lanterns.
It was nearing dawn when a low whistle outside awakened the girls.
“It’s Gibralter Strait, I do believe,” Nann declared, at once alert.
Then, as she sprang up, she whispered, “Do hurry, Dori. I feel ever so
sure that we are this day starting on a thrilling adventure.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE PHANTOM YACHT
The girls dressed hurriedly and silently, then crept down the boarded-in
stairway and emerged upon the back porch of the cottage. It was not yet
dawn, but a rosy glow in the east assured them that the day was near.
The waiting lad knew that the girls had something to tell, nor was he
wrong.
“Oh, Gibralter, what do you think?” Dories began at once in an excited
whisper that they might not disturb Great-Aunt Jane, who, without doubt,
was still asleep.
“I dunno. What?” the boy was frankly curious.
“We saw it last night. We saw it with our very own eyes! Didn’t we,
Nann?” The other maiden agreed.
“You saw what?” asked the mystified boy, looking from one to the other.
Then, comprehendingly, he added: “Gee, you don’ mean as you saw the spook
from the old ruin, do you?”
Dories nodded, but Nann modified: “Not that, Gibralter. Since there is no
such thing as a ghost, how could we see it? But we did see the light you
were telling about. Someone was walking along the rocks out on the point
carrying a lighted lantern.”
“Wall,” the boy announced triumphantly, “that proves ’twas a spook,
’cause human beings couldn’t get a foothold out there, the rocks are so
jagged and irregular like. But come along, maybe we can find footprints
or suthin’.”
The sun was just rising out of the sea when the three young people stole
back of the boarded-up cottages that stood in a silent row, and emerged
upon the wide stretch of sandy beach that led toward the point.
The tide was low and the waves small and far out. The wet sand glistened
with myriad colors as the sun rose higher. The air was tinglingly cold
and, once out of hearing of the aunt, the girls, no longer fearful, ran
along on the hard sand, laughing and shouting joyfully, while the boy, to
express the exuberance of his feelings, occasionally turned a hand-spring
just ahead of them.
“Oh, what a wonderful morning!” Nann exclaimed, throwing out her arms
toward the sea and taking a deep breath. “It’s good just to be alive.”
Dories agreed. “It’s hard to believe in ghosts on a day like this,” she
declared.
“Then why try?” Nan merrily questioned.
They had reached the high headland of jagged rocks that stretched out
into the sea, and Gibralter, bounding ahead, climbed from one rock to
another, sure-footed as a goat but the girls remained on the sand.
When he turned, they called up to him: “Do you see anything suspicious
looking?”
“Nixy!” was the boy’s reply. Then anxiously: “D’ye think yo’ girls can
climb on the tip-top rock?” Then, noting Dories’ anxious expression as
she viewed the jagged cliff-like mass ahead of her, he concluded with.
“O, course yo’ can’t. Hold on, I’ll give yo’ a hand.”
Very carefully the boy selected crevices that made stairs on which to
climb, and the girls, delighted with the adventure, soon arrived on the
highest rock, which they were glad to find was so huge and flat that they
could all stand there without fear of falling.
“This is a dizzy height,” Dories said, looking down at the waves that
were lazily breaking on the lowest rocks. “But there’s one thing that
puzzles me and makes me think more than ever that what we saw last night
was a ghost.”
“I know,” Nann put in. “I believe I am thinking the same thing. _How_
could a man walk back and forth on these jagged rocks carrying a
lantern?”
“Huh,” their companion remarked, “Spooks kin walk anywhar’s they choose.”
“Why, Gibralter Strait, I do believe that you think there is a ghost in—”
She paused and turned to look in the direction that the boy was pointing.
On the other side of the point, below them, was a swamp, dense with high
rattling tullies and cat-tails. It looked dark and treacherous, for, as
yet, the sunlight had not reached it. About two hundred feet back from
the sea stood the forlorn ruin of what had once been, apparently, a fine
stone mansion.
Two stained white pillars, standing in front, were like ghostly sentinels
telling where the spacious porch had been. Behind them were jagged heaps
of crumbling rock, all that remained of the front and side walls. The
wall in the rear was still standing, and from it the roof, having lost
its support in front, pitched forward with great yawning gaps in it,
where chimneys had been.
Dories unconsciously clung to her friend as they stood gazing down at the
old ruin. “Poor, poor thing,” Nann said, “how sad and lonely it must be,
for, I suppose, once upon a time it was very fine home filled with love
and happiness. Wasn’t it, Gibralter? If you know the story of the old
house, please tell it to us?”
The boy cast a quick glance at the timid Dories. “I dunno as I’d ought
to. She scares so easy,” he told them.
“I’ll promise not to scare this time,” Dories hastened to say. “Honest,
Gib, I am as eager to hear the story as Nann is, so please tell it.”
Thus urged, the boy began. He did not speak, however, in his usual merry,
bantering voice, but in a hollow whisper which he believed better fitted
to the tale he had to tell.
“Wall,” he said, as he seated himself on a rock, motioning the girls to
do likewise, “I might as well start way back at the beginnin’. Pa says
that this here house was built nigh thirty year ago by a fine upstandin’
man as called himself Colonel Wadbury and gave out that he’d come from
Virginia for his gal’s health. Pa said the gal was a sad-lookin’ creature
as ever he’d set eyes on, an’ bye an’ bye ’twas rumored around Siquaw
that she was in love an’ wantin’ to marry some furreigner, an’ that the
old Colonel had fetched her to this out-o’-the-way place so that he could
keep watch on her. He sure sartin built her a fine mansion to live in.
“Pa said ’twas filled with paintin’s of ancestors, and books an’ queer
furreign rugs a hangin’ on the walls, though thar was plenty beside on
the floor. Pa’d been to a museum up to Boston onct, an’ he said as ’twas
purty much like that inside the place.
“Wall, when ’twas all finished, the two tuk to livin’ in it with a man
servant an’ an old woman to keep an eye on the gal, seemed like.
“’Twan’t swamp around here in those days, ’twas sand, and the Colonel had
a plant put in that grew all over—sand verbeny he called it, but folks in
Siquaw Center shook their heads, knowin’ as how the day would come when
the old sea would rise up an’ claim its own, bein’ as that had all been
ocean onct on a time.
“Pa says as how he tol’ the Colonel that he was takin’ big chances,
buildin’ a house as hefty as that thar one, on nothin’ but sand, but that
wan’t all he built either. Furst off ’twas a high sea wall to keep the
ocean back off his place, then ’twas a pier wi’ lights along it, and then
he fetched a yacht from somewhere.
“Pa says he’d never seen a craft like it, an’ he’d been a sea-farin’ man
ever since the North Star tuk to shinin’, or a powerful long time,
anyhow. That yacht, Pa says, was the whitest, mos’ glistenin’ thing he’d
ever sot eyes on. An’ graceful! When the sailors, as wore white clothes,
tuk to sailin’ it up and down, Pa says folks from Siquaw Center tuk a
holiday just to come down to the shore to watch the craft. It slid along
so silent and was so all-over white, Gus Pilsley, him as was school
teacher days and kep’ the poolhall nights, said it looked like a ‘phantom
yacht,’ an’ that’s what folks got to callin’ it.
“Pa says it was well named, for, if ever a ghost rode on it, ’twas the
gal who went out sailin’ every day. Sometimes the Colonel was with her,
but most times ’twas the old woman, but she never was let to go alone.
The Colonel’s orders was that the sailors shouldn’t go beyond the three
miles that was American. He wasn’t goin’ to have his gal sailin’ in
waters that was shared by no furreigners, him bein’ that sot agin them,
like as not because the gal wanted to marry one of ’em. So day arter day,
early and late, Pa says, she sailed on her ‘Phantom Yacht’ up and down
but keepin’ well this side o’ the island over yonder.”
Gibralter had risen and was pointing out to sea. The girls stood at his
side shading their eyes. “That’s it!” he told them. “That’s the island.
It’s on the three-mile line, but Pa says it’s the mos’ treacherous island
on this here coast, bein’ as thar’s hidden shoals fer half a mile all
around it, an’ thar’s many a whitenin’ skeleton out thar of fishin’ boats
that went too close.” The lad reseated himself and the girls did
likewise. Then he resumed the tale. “Wall, so it went on all summer long.
Pa says if you’d look out at sunrise like’s not thar’d be that yacht
slidin’ silent-like up and down. Pa says it got to hauntin’ him. He’d
even come down here on moonlit nights an’, sure nuf, thar’d be that
Phantom Yacht glidin’ around, but one night suthin’ happened as Pa says
he’ll never forget if he lives to be as old as Methusalah’s grandfather.”
“W-what happened?” the girls leaned forward. “Did the yacht run on the
shoals?” Nann asked eagerly.
CHAPTER VIII.
WHAT HAPPENED
Gibralter was thoroughly enjoying their suspense. “Wall,” he drawled,
making the moment as dramatic as possible, “’long about midnight, once,
Pa heard a gallopin’ horse comin’ along the road from the sea. Pa knew
thar wan’t no one as rode horseback but the old Colonel himself, an’,
bein’ as he’d been gettin’ gouty, he hadn’t been doin’ much ridin’ of
late days, Pa said, but thar was somethin’ about the way the horse was
gallopin’ that made Pa sit right up in bed. He an’ Ma’d jest been married
an’ started keepin’ house in the store right whar we live now. Pa woke up
and they both listened. Then they heard someone hollerin’ an’ Pa knew
’twas the old Colonel’s voice, an’ Ma said, ‘Like’s not someone’s sick
over to the mansion!’ Pa got into his clothes fast as greased lightnin’,
took a lantern and went down to the porch, and thar was the ol’ Colonel
wi’out any hat on. His gray hair was all rumped up and his eyes was
wild-like. Pa said the ol’ Colonel was brown as leather most times, but
that night he was white as sheets.
“As soon as the Colonel saw Pa, he hollered, ‘Whar kin I get a steam
launch? I wanta foller my daughter. She an’ the woman that takes keer o’
her is plumb gone, an’, what’s more, my yacht’s gone too. They’ve made
off wi’ it. That scalawag of a furriner that’s been wantin’ to marry her
has kidnapped ’em all. She’s only seventeen, my daughter is, an’ I’ll
have the law on him.’
“Pa said when he got up clost to the horse the Colonel was ridin’, he
could see the old man was shakin’ like he had the palsy. Pa didn’t know
no place at all whar a steam launch could be had, leastwise not near enuf
to Siquaw to help any, so the old Colonel said he’d take the train an’ go
up the coast to a town whar he could get a launch an’ he’d chase arter
that slow-sailin’ yacht an’ he’d have the law on whoever was kidnappin’
his daughter.
“The ol’ Colonel was in an awful state, Pa said. He went into the store
part o’ our house and paced up an’ down, an’ up an’ down, an’ up an’
down, till Pa thought he must be goin’ crazy, an’ every onct in a while
he’d mutter, like ’twas just for himself to hear, ‘She’ll pay fer this,
Darlina will!’”
The boy looked up and smiled at his listeners. “Queer name, wasn’t it?”
he queried. “Most as funny as my name, but I guess likely ’taint quite.”
“I suppose they wanted to call her something that meant darling,” Dories
began, but Nann put in eagerly with, “Oh, Gib, do go on. What happened
next? Did the old Colonel go somewhere and get a fast boat and overtake
the yacht. I do hope that he didn’t.”
“Wall, than yo’ get what yer hopin’ fer, all right. About a week arter
he’d took the early mornin’ train along back came the ol’ Colonel, Pa
said, an’ he looked ten year older. He didn’t s’plain nothin’, but gave
Pa some money fer takin’ keer o’ his horse while he’d been gone, an’ then
back he came here to his house an’ lived shut in all by himself an’ his
man-servant for nigh ten year, Pa said. Nobody ever set eyes on him; his
man-servant bein’ the only one who came to the store for mail an’
supplies, an’ he never said nuthin’, tho Pa said now an’ then he’d ask if
Darlina’d been heard from. He knew when he’d ask, Pa said, as how he
wouldn’t get any answer, but he couldn’t help askin’; he was that
interested. But arter a time folks around here began to think morne’n
like the Phantom Yacht, as Pa’d called it, had gone to the bottom before
it reached wherever ’twas they’d been headin’ fer, when all of a sudden
somethin’ happened. Gee, but Pa said he’d never been so excited before in
all his days as he was the day that somethin’ happened. It was ten year
ago an’ Pa’d jest had a letter from yer aunt—” the boy leaned over to nod
at Dori, “askin’ him to go to the Point an’ open up her cottage as she’d
built the summer before. Thar was only two cottages on the shore then;
hers an’ the Burtons’, that’s nearest the point. Pa said as how he
thought he’d get down thar before sun up, so’s he could get back in time
to open up the store, bein’ as Ma wan’t well, an’ so he set off to walk
to the beach.
“Pa said he was up on the roof of the front porch takin’ the blind off
thet little front window in the loft whar yo’ girls sleep when the gray
dawn over to the east sort o’ got pink. Pa said ’twas such a purty sight
he turned ’round to watch it a spell when, all of a sudden sailin’ right
around that long, rocky island out thar, _what_ should he see but the
Phantom Yacht, her white sails glistening as the sun rose up out o’ the
water. Pa said he had to hold on, he was so sure it was a spook boat. He
couldn’t no-how believe ’twas real, but thar came up a spry wind wi’ the
sun an’ that yacht sailed as purty as could be right up to the long dock
whar the sailors tied it. Wall, Pa said he was so flabbergasted that he
fergot all about the blind he was to take off an’ slid right down the
roof and made fer a place as near the long dock as he could an’ hid
behind some rocks an’ waited. Pa said nothin’ happened fer two hours, or
seemed that long to him; then out of that yacht stepped the mos’
beautiful young woman as Pa’d ever set eyes on. He knew at onct ’twas the
ol’ Colonel’s daughter growed up. She was dressed all in white jest like
she’d used to be, but what was different was the two kids she had holdin’
on to her hands. One was a boy, Pa said, about nine year old, dressed in
black velvet wi’ a white lace color. Pa said he was a handsome little
fellar, but ’twas the wee girl, Pa said, that looked like a gold and
white angel wi’ long yellow curls. She was younger’n the boy by nigh two
year, Pa reckoned. Their ma’s face was pale and looked like sufferin’, Pa
said, as she an’ her children walked up to the sea wall and went up over
the stone steps thar was then to climb over it. Pa knew they was goin’ on
up to the house, but from whar he hid he couldn’t see no more, an’ so
bein’ as he had to go on back to open up the store, he didn’t see what
the meetin’ between the ol’ Colonel an’ his daughter was like.
How-some-ever it couldn’t o’ been very pleasant, fer along about noon, Pa
said he recollected as how he had fergot to take off the blind on yer
aunt’s cottage, an’ knowin’ how mad she’d be, he locked up the store an’
went back down to the beach, an’ the first thing he saw was that
glistenin’ white yacht a-sailin’ away. The wind had been gettin’ stiffer
all the mornin’ an’ Pa said as he watched the yacht roundin’ the island,
it looked to him like it was bound to go on the shoals an’ be wrecked on
the rocks. Whoever was steerin’ Pa said, didn’t seem to know nothin’
about the reefs. Pa stood starin’ till the yacht was out of sight, an’
then he heard a hollerin’ an’ yellin’ down the beach, an’ thar come the
ol’ man-servant runnin’ an’ stumblin’ an’ shoutin’ to Pa to come quick.
“‘Colonel Wadbury’s took a stroke!’ was what he was hollerin’, an’ so Pa
follered arter him as fast as he could an’ when they got into the big
library-room, whar all the books an’ pictures was, Pa saw the ol’ Colonel
on the floor an’ his face was all drawed up somethin’ awful. Pa helped
the man-servant get him to bed, and fer onct the man-servant was willin’
to talk. He told Pa all that had happened. He said how Darlina’s furrin
husband had died an’ how she wanted to come back to America to live. She
didn’t ask to live wi’ her Pa, but she did want him to give her the deed
to a country place near Boston. It ’pears her ma had left it for her to
have when she got to be eighteen, but the ol’ Colonel wouldn’t give her
the papers, though they was hers by rights, an’ he wouldn’t even look at
the two children; he jest turned ’em all right out, and then as soon as
they was gone, he tuk a stroke. ’Twan’t likely, so Pa said, he’d ever be
able to speak again. The man-servant said as the last words the ol’
Colonel spoke was to call a curse down on his daughter’s head.
“Wall, the curse come all right,” Gibralter nodded in the direction of
the crumbling ruin, “but ’twas himself as it hit.
“You’ll recollect awhile back I was mentionin’ that folks in Siquaw
Center had warned ol’ Colonel Wadbury not to build a hefty house on
shiftin’ sand that was lower’n the sea. Thar was nothin’ keepin’ the
water back but a wall o’ rocks. But the Colonel sort o’ dared Fate to do
its worst, and Fate tuk the dare.
“When November set in, Pa says, folks in town began to take in reefs, so
to speak; shuttin’ the blinds over their windows and boltin’ ’em on to
the inside. Gettin’ ready for the nor’easter that usually came at that
time o’ year, sort o’ headin’ the procession o’ winter storms. Wall, it
came all right; an’ though ’twas allays purty lively, Pa says that one
beat all former records, and was a howlin’ hurricane. Folks didn’t put
their heads out o’ doors, day or night, while it lasted, an’ some of ’em
camped in their cellars. That thar storm had all the accompaniments. Thar
was hail beatin’ down as big and hard as marbles, but the windows, havin’
blinds on ’em, didn’t get smashed. Then it warmed up some, and how it
rained! Pa says Noah’s flood was a dribble beside it, he’s sure sartin.
Then the wind tuk a turn, and how it howled and blustered. All the
outbuildin’s toppled right over; but the houses in Siquaw Center was
built to stand, and they stood. Then on the third night, Pa says, ’long
about midnight, thar was a roarin’ noise, louder’n wind or rain. It was
kinder far off at first, but seemed like ’twas comin’ nearer. ‘That thar
stone wall’s broke down,’ Pa told Ma, ‘an’ the sea’s coverin’ the
lowland.’
“Wall, Pa was right. The tide had never risen so high in the memory of
Ol’ Timer as had been around these parts nigh a hundred years. The waves
had banged agin that wall till it went down; then they swirled around the
house till they dug the sand out an’ the walls fell jest like yo’ see ’em
now.
“The next mornin’ the sky was clear an’ smilin’, as though nothin’ had
happened, or else as though ’twas pleased with its work. Pa and Gus
Pilsley an’ some other Siquaw men made for the coast to see what the
damage had been, but they couldn’t get within half a mile, bein’ as the
road was under water. How-some-ever, ’bout a week later, the road, bein’
higher, dried; but the water never left the lowlands, an’ that’s how the
swamp come all about the old ruin—reeds and things grew up, just like
’tis today.
“Pa and Gus come up to this here point an’ looked down at what was left
of the fine stone house. ‘’Pears like it served him right,’ was what the
two of ’em said. Then they went away, and the ol’ place was left alone.
Folks never tried to get to the ruin, sayin’ as the marsh around it was
oozy, and would draw a body right in.”
“But what became of old Colonel Wadbury and the man-servant?” Dories
inquired.
“Dunno,” the boy replied, laconically. “Some thar be as guess one thing,
and some another. Ol’ Timer said as how he’d seen two men board the train
that passes through Siquaw Center ’long ’bout two in the mornin’, but Pa
says the storm was fiercest then, and no trains went through for three
days; and who’d be out to see, if it had? Pa thinks they tried to get
away an’ was washed out to sea an’ drowned, an’ I guess likely that’s
what happened, all right.”
Dories rose. “We ought to be getting back.” She glanced at the sun as she
spoke. “Aunt Jane may be needing us.” The other two stood up and for a
moment Nann gazed down at the ruin; then she called to it: “Some day I am
coming to visit you, old house, and find out the secret that you hold.”
Dories shuddered and seemed glad to climb down on the side of the rocks
where the sun was shining so brightly and from where one could not see
the dismal swamp and the crumbling old ruin.
CHAPTER IX.
A MYSTERIOUS MESSAGE
As they walked along the hard, glistening beach, Nann glanced over the
shimmering water at the gray, forbidding-looking island in the distance,
almost as though she thought that the Phantom Yacht might again be seen
sailing toward the place where the dock had been. “Poor Darlina,” she
said turning toward the others, “how I do hope that she is happy now.”
“Cain’t no one tell as to that, I reckon,” Gib commented, when Dories
asked: “Gibralter, how long ago did all this happen? How old would that
girl and boy be now?”
“Pa was speakin’ o’ that ’long about last week,” was the reply. “He
reckoned ’twas ten year since the Phantom Yacht sailed off agin with the
mother and the two little uns. That’d make the boy, Pa said, about
nineteen year old he cal’lated, an’ the wee girl about fifteen.”
“Then little Darlina would be about our age,” Dories commented.
“Why do you think that her name would be the same as her mother’s?” Nann
queried.
“O, just because it is odd and pretty,” was Dories’ reason. Then,
stepping more spryly, she said: “I do hope Aunt Jane has not been awake
long, fretting for her breakfast. We’ve been gone over two hours I do
believe.”
“Gee!” Gib exclaimed, looking around for his horse. “I’ll have ter gallop
as fast as the ol’ colonel did that thar night I was tellin’ yo’ about or
Pa’ll be in my wool. I’d ought to’ve had the milkin’ done this hour past.
So long!” he added, bolting suddenly between two of the boarded-up
cottages they were passing. “Thar’s my ol’ steed out by the marsh,” he
called back to them.
The girls entered the kitchen very quietly and tiptoed through the
living-room hoping that their elderly hostess had not yet awakened, but a
querulous voice was calling: “Dories, is that you? Why can’t you be more
quiet? I’ve heard you prowling around this house for the past hour. Going
up and down those outside stairs. I should think you would know that I
want quiet. I came here to rest my nerves. Bring my coffee at once.”
“Yes, Aunt Jane,” the girl meekly replied. Then, darting back to the
kitchen, she whispered, her eyes wide and startled, “Nann, somebody has
been in this house while we’ve been away. I do believe it was that—that
person we saw at midnight carrying a lantern. Aunt Jane has heard
footsteps creaking up and down the stairs to our room.”
Nann’s expression was very strange. Instead of replying she held out a
small piece of crumpled paper. “I just ran up to the loft to get my
apron,” she said, “and I found this lying in the middle of our bed.”
On the paper was written in small red letters: “In thirteen days you
shall know all.”
“I have nine minds to tell Aunt Jane that the cabin must be haunted and
that we ought to leave for Boston this very day,” Dories said, but her
companion detained her.
“Don’t, Dori,” she implored. “I’m sure that there is nothing that will
harm us, for pray, why should anyone want to? And I’m simply wild to
know, well, just ever so many things. Who prowls about at midnight
carrying a lighted lantern, what he is hunting for, who left this
crumpled paper on our bed, and what we are to know in thirteen days; but,
first of all, I want to find a way to enter that old ruin.”
Dories sank down on a kitchen chair. “Nann Sibbett,” she gasped, “I
believe that you are absolutely the only girl in this whole world who is
without fear. Well,” more resignedly, “if you aren’t afraid, I’ll try not
to be.” Then, springing up, she added, for the querulous voice had again
called: “Yes, Aunt Jane, I’ll bring your coffee soon.” Turning to Nann,
she added: “We ought to have a calendar so that we could count the days.”
“I guess we won’t need to.” Nann was making a fire in the stove as she
spoke. “More than likely the spook will count them for us. There, isn’t
that a jolly fire? Polly, put the kettle on, and we’ll soon have coffee.”
Dories, being the “Polly” her friend was addressing, announced that she
was ravenously hungry after their long walk and climb and that she was
going to have bacon and eggs. Nann said merrily, “Double the order.”
Then, while Dories was preparing the menu, she said softly: “Nann,
doesn’t it seem queer to you that Great-Aunt Jane can live on nothing but
toast and tea? Of course,” she amended, “this morning she wishes toast
and coffee, but she surely ought to eat more than that, shouldn’t you
think?”
“She would if she got out in this bracing sea air, but lying abed is
different. One doesn’t get so hungry.” Nann was setting the kitchen table
for two as she talked. After the old woman’s tray had been carried to her
bedside, Dories and Nann ate ravenously of the plain, but tempting, fare
which they had cooked for themselves. Nann laughed merrily. “This
certainly is a lark,” she exclaimed. “I never before had such a good
time. I’ve always been crazy to read mystery stories and here we are
living one.”
Dories shrugged. “I’m inclined to think that I’d rather read about spooks
than meet them,” she remarked as she rose and prepared to wash the
dishes.
When the kitchen had been tidied, the two girls went into the sun-flooded
living-room, and began to make it look more homelike. The dust covers
were removed from the comfortable wicker chairs and the pictures, that
had been turned to face the walls while the cabin was unoccupied, were
dusted and straightened.
“Now, let’s take a run along the beach and gather a nice lot of drift
wood,” Nann suggested. “You know Gibralter told us that this is the time
of year when the first winter storm is likely to arrive.”
Dories shuddered. “I hope it won’t be like the one that wrecked Colonel
Wadbury’s house eight years ago. If it were, it might undermine all of
these cabins, and, how pray, could we escape if the road was under
water?”
“Oh, that isn’t likely to happen,” Nann said comfortingly. “Our beach is
higher than that lowland. It it does, we’d find a way out, but, Dories,
please don’t be imagining things. We have enough mystery to puzzle us
without conjuring up frightful catastrophes that probably never will
happen.”
Dories stopped at her aunt’s door to tell her their plans, but the old
woman was either asleep or feined slumber, and so, tiptoeing that she
might not disturb her, the girl went out on the beach, where Nann awaited
her. They were hatless, and as the sun had mounted higher, even the
bright colored sweater-coats had been discarded.
“It’s such a perfect Indian summer day,” Nann said. “I don’t even see a
tiny, misty cloud.” As she spoke, she shaded her eyes with one hand and
scanned the horizon.
“Isn’t the island clear? Even that fog bank that we saw early this
morning has melted away.” Then, whirling about, Dories inquired, “Nann,
if we should see something white coming around that bleak gray island,
what do you think it would be?”
“Why, the Phantom Yacht, of course.”
“What would you do, if it were?”
“I don’t know, Dori. I hadn’t even thought of the coming of that boat as
a possibility, and yet—” Nann turned a glowing face, “I don’t know why it
might not happen. That little woman, for the sake of her children, might
try a second time to win her father’s forgiveness. If she came, what a
desolate homecoming it would be; the old house in ruin and the fate of
her father unknown.”
For a moment the two girls stood silent. A gentle sea breeze blew their
sport skirts about them. They watched the island with shaded eyes as
though they really expected the yacht to appear. Then Nann laughed, and
leaping along the beach, she confessed: “I know that I’ll keep watching
for the return of the Phantom Yacht just all of the while. The first
thing in the morning and the last thing at night.” Then, as she picked up
a piece of whitening driftwood, she asked, “Dori, would you rather have
the glistening white yacht appear in the sunrise or in the moonlight?”
Dories had darted for another piece of wood higher up the warm beach,
but, on returning, she replied: “Oh, I don’t know; either way would make
a beautiful picture, I should think.” Then, after picking up another
piece, she added: “I’d like to meet that pretty gold and white girl,
wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe we will,” Nann commented, then sang out: “Do look, Dori, over by
the point of rocks, there is ever so much driftwood. I believe that will
be enough to fill our wood shed if we carry it all in. I’ve always heard
that there are such pretty colors in the flames when driftwood burns.”
The girls worked for a while carrying the wood to the shed; then they
climbed up on the rocks to rest, but not high enough to see the old ruin.
When at length the sun was at the zenith, they went indoors to prepare
lunch, and again the old woman asked only for toast and tea.
After a leisurely noon hour, the girls returned to their task; there
really being nothing else that they wanted to do, and, as Nann suggested,
if the rains came they would be well prepared. For a time they rested,
lying full length on the warm sand, and so it was not until late
afternoon that they had carried in all of the driftwood they could find.
“Goodness!” Dories exclaimed, shudderingly, as she looked down at her
last armful. “Doesn’t it make you feel queer to know that this wood is
probably the broken-up skeleton of a ship that has been wrecked at sea?”
“I suppose that is true,” was the thoughtful response. They had started
for the cabin, and a late afternoon fog was drifting in.
Suddenly Nann paused and stared at the one window in the loft that faced
the sea. Her expression was more puzzled than fearful. For one brief
second she had seen a white object pass that window. Dories turned to ask
why her friend had delayed. Nann, not wishing to frighten the more timid
girl, stooped to pick up a piece of driftwood that had slipped from her
arms.
“I’m coming, dear,” she said.
On reaching the cabin, Nann went at once to the room of the elderly
woman, who had told them in the morning that she intended to remain in
bed for one week and be waited on. There she was, her deeply-set dark
eyes watching the door when Nann opened it and instantly she began to
complain: “I do wish you girls wouldn’t go up and down those outside
stairs any oftener than you have to. They creaked so about ten minutes
ago, they woke me right up.” Then she added, “Please tell Dories to bring
me my tea at once.”
Nann returned to the kitchen truly puzzled. It was always when they were
away from the cabin that the aunt heard someone going up and down the
outside stairway. What could it mean? To Dories she said, in so calm a
voice that suspicion was not aroused in the heart of her friend, “While
you prepare the tea for your aunt, I’ll go up to the loft room and make
our bed before dark.”
Dories had said truly, Nann Sibbett seemed to be a girl without fear.
CHAPTER X.
SOUNDS IN THE LOFT
Nann half believed that the white object she had seen at the loft window
was but a flashing ray of the setting sun reflected from the opposite
window which faced the west, and yet, curiosity prompted her to go to the
loft and be sure that it was unoccupied. This resolution was strengthened
when, upon reaching the cabin, she heard Miss Moore’s querulous voice
complaining that the outer stairs leading to the room above had been
creaking constantly, and she requested the girls not to go up and down so
often while she was trying to sleep. Nann, knowing that they had not been
to their bedroom since morning, was a little puzzled by this, and so,
bidding Dories prepare tea for her great-aunt, she went out on the back
porch and started to ascend the stairway. When the top was reached, she
discovered that the door was locked. For a puzzled moment the girl
believed that the key was on the inside, but, stopping, she found that
she could see through the keyhole. Although it was dusk, the window in
the loft room, which opened toward the sea, was opposite and showed a
faint reflection of the setting sun. Nann was relieved but still puzzled,
when a whispered voice at the foot of the stairway called to her.
Turning, Nann saw Dories standing in the dim light below, holding up the
key. “Did you forget that we brought it down?” she inquired.
As Nann hurriedly descended, she noticed that the stairs did not creak,
nor indeed could they, for each step was one solid board firmly wedged in
grooves at the sides.
“I believe that we are all of us allowing our imaginations to run away
with us, Miss Moore included,” Nann said as she returned to the kitchen.
Then added, “Instead of making our bed now, I will clean the glass lamps
and fill them with the oil that Gibralter brought while it is still
twilighty.”
This she did, setting briskly to work and humming a gay little tune.
It never would do for Nann Sibbett, the fearless, to allow her
imagination to run riot.
Before the lamps were ready to be lighted, the fog, which stole in every
night from the sea, had settled about the cabin and the fog horn out
beyond the rocky point had started its constantly recurring, long
drawn-out wail.
“Goodness!” Dories said, shudderingly, “listen to that!”
“I’m listening!” Nann replied briskly. “I rather like it. It’s so sort of
appropriate. You know, at the movies, when the Indians come on, the weird
Indian music always begins. Now, that’s the way with the fog.”
She paused to scratch a match, applied the flame to the oil-saturated
wick of a small glass lamp and stood back admiringly. “There, friend o’
mine,” she exclaimed, “isn’t that cheerful?”
Dories, instead of looking at the circle of light about the lamp, looked
at the wavering shadows in the corners, then at the heavy gray fog which
hung like curtains at the windows. She huddled closer to the stove. “If
this place spells cheerfulness to you,” she remarked, “I’d like to know
what would be dismal.”
Nann whirled about and faced her friend and for a moment she was serious.
“I’m going to preach,” she threatened, “so be prepared. I haven’t the
least bit of use in this world for people who are mercurial. What right
have we to mope about and create a dismal atmosphere in our homes, just
because we can’t see the sunshine. We know positively that it is shining
somewhere, and we also know that the clouds never last long. I call it
superlative selfishness to be variable in disposition. Pray, why should
we impose our doleful moods on our friends?”
Then, noting the downcast expression of her friend, Nann put her arms
about her as she said penitently, “Forgive me, dear, if I hurt your
feelings. Of course it is dismal here and we could be just miserable if
we wanted to be, but isn’t it far better to think of it all as an
adventure, a merry lark? We know perfectly well that there is no such
thing as a ghost, but the setting for one is so perfect we just can’t
resist the temptation to pretend that——”
Nann said no more for something had suddenly banged in the loft room over
their heads.
Dories sat up with a start, but Nann laughed gleefully. “You see, even
the ghost knows his cue,” she declared. “He came into the story just at
the right moment. He can’t scare me, however,” Nann continued, “for I
know exactly what made the bang. When I was upstairs I noticed that the
blind to the front window had come unfastened, and now that the night
wind is rising, the two conspired to make us think a ghost had invaded
our chamber.” Then, having placed a lighted lamp on the kitchen table and
another on a shelf near the stove, the optimistic girl whirled and with
arms akimbo she exclaimed, “Mistress Dori, what will we have for supper?
You forage in the supply cupboard and bring forth your choice. I vote for
hot chocolate!”
“How would asparagus tips do on toast?” This doubtfully from the girl
peering into a closet where stood row after row of bags and cans.
“Great!” was the merry reply. “And we’ll have canned raspberries and
wafers for desert.”
It was seven when the meal was finished and nearly eight when the kitchen
was tidied. Nann noticed that Dories seemed intentionally slow and that
every now and then she seemed to be listening for sounds from above.
Ignoring it, however, Nann put out the light in one lamp and, taking the
other, she exclaimed, “The earlier we go to bed, the earlier we can get
up, and I’m heaps more interested in being awake by day than by night,
aren’t you, Dori? Are you all ready?”
Dories nodded, preparing to follow her friend out into the fog that hung
like a damp, dense mantle on the back porch. But, as soon as the door was
opened, a cold, penetrating wind blew out the flame. “How stupid of me!”
Nann exclaimed, backing into the kitchen and closing the door. “I should
have lighted the lantern. Now stand still where you are, Dori, and I’ll
grope around and find where I left it after I filled it. Didn’t you think
I hung it on the nail in the corner? Well, if I did, it isn’t there. Get
the matches, dear, will you, and strike one so that I can see.”
But that did not prove to be necessary, as a sudden flaming-up of the
dying fire in the stove revealed the lantern standing on the floor near
the oil can. Nann pounced on it, found a match before the glow was gone,
and then, when the lantern sent forth its rather faint illumination, they
again ventured out into the fog.
All the way up the back stairway Dories expected to hear a bang in the
room overhead, but there was no sound. She peered over Nann’s shoulder
when the door was opened and the faint light penetrated the darkness.
“See, I was right!” Nann whispered triumphantly. “The blind blew shut and
the hook caught it. That’s why we didn’t hear it again.”
“Let’s leave it shut,” Dories suggested, “then we won’t be able to see
the lantern out on the point of rocks if it moves about at midnight.”
Nann, realizing that her companion really was excitedly fearful, thought
best to comply with her request, and, as there was plenty of air entering
the loft room through innumerable cracks, she knew they would not
smother.
Too, Dories wanted the lantern left burning, but as soon as Nann was sure
that her companion was asleep, she stealthily rose and blew out the
flickering flame.
CHAPTER XI.
A QUERULOUS OLD AUNT
It was daylight when the girls awakened and the sun was streaming into
their bedroom. Nann leaped to her feet. “It must be late,” she declared
as she felt under her pillow for her wristwatch. She drew it forth, but
with it came a piece of crumpled yellow paper on which in small red
letters was written, “In twelve days you shall know all.”
Dories luckily had not as yet opened her eyes and Nann was sitting on the
edge of the bed with her back toward her companion. For a moment she
looked into space meditatively. Should she keep all knowledge of that bit
of paper to herself? She decided that she would, and slipping it into the
pocket of her sweater-coat, which hung on a chair, she rose and walked
across the room to gaze at the door. She remembered distinctly that she
had locked it. How could anyone have entered? Not for one moment did the
girl believe that their visitor had been a ghostly apparition that could
pass through walls and locked doors.
“Hmm! I see,” she concluded after a second’s scrutiny. “I did lock the
door, but I removed the key and put it on the table. A pass-key evidently
admitted our visitor.” Then, while dressing, Nann continued to
soliloquize. “I wonder if the person who walks the cliff carrying the
lantern was our visitor. Perhaps it’s the old Colonel himself or his
man-servant who hides during the day under the leaning part of the roof,
but who walks forth at night for exercise and air, although surely there
must be air enough in a house that has only one wall.”
Having completed her toilet, she shook her friend. “If you don’t wake up
soon, you won’t be downstairs in time for breakfast,” she exclaimed.
Dories sat up with a startled cry. “Oh, Nann,” she pleaded. “Don’t go
down and leave me up here alone, please don’t! I’ll be dressed before you
can say Jack Robinson, if only you will wait.”
“Well, I’ll be opening this window. I want to see the ocean.” As Nann
spoke, she lifted the hook and swung out the blind, then exclaimed:
“How wonderfully blue the water is! Oho, someone is out in the cove with
a flat-bottomed boat. Why, I do believe it is our friend Gibralter. Come
to think of it, he did say that he had been saving his money for ever so
long to buy what he calls a sailing punt.”
Nann leaned out of the open window and waved her handkerchief. Then she
turned back to smile at her friend. “It is Gib and he’s sailing toward
shore. Do hurry, Dori, let’s run down to the beach and call to him.”
Tiptoeing down the flight of stairs, the two girls, taking hands,
scrambled over the bank to the hard sand that was glistening in the sun.
The boy, having seen them, turned his boat toward shore, and, as there
was very little wind, he let the sail flap and began rowing.
The tide was low and there was almost no surf.
“Want to come out?” he called as soon as he was within hailing distance.
“Oh, how I wish we could,” Nann, the fearless, replied, “but we have
duties to attend to first. Come back in about an hour and maybe we’ll be
ready to go.”
“All right-ho!” the sea breeze brought to them, then the lad turned into
the rising wind, pulled in the sheet and scudded away from the shore.
“That surely looks like jolly sport,” Nann declared as, with arms locked,
the two girls stood on a boulder, watching for a moment. Then, “We ought
to go in, for Great-Aunt Jane may have awakened,” Dories said.
When the girls tiptoed to the chamber on the lower floor, they found Miss
Moore unusually fretful. “What a noisy night it was,” she declared,
peevishly. “I came to this place for a complete rest and I just couldn’t
sleep a wink. I don’t see why you girls have to walk around in the night.
Don’t you know that you are right over my head and every noise you make
sounds as though it were right in this very room?”
“I’m sorry you were disturbed, Aunt Jane,” Dories said, but she was
indeed puzzled. Neither she nor Nann had awakened from the hour that they
retired until sunrise.
When the girls were in the kitchen preparing breakfast, Dories asked,
“Nann, do you think that Great-Aunt Jane may be—I don’t like to say it,
but you know how elderly people do, sometimes, wander mentally.”
“No, dear,” the other replied, “I do not think that is true of your
aunt.” Then chancing to put her hand in the pocket of her sweater-coat,
and feeling there the crumpled paper, Nann drew it out and handed it to
Dories.
“Why, where did you find it?” that astonished maiden inquired when she
had read the finely written words, “In twelve days you shall know all.”
“Under my pillow,” was the reply, “and so you see who ever leaves these
messages has no desire to harm us, hence there is no reason for us to be
afraid. At first I thought that I would not tell you, but I want you to
understand that your Great Aunt Jane may have heard footsteps over her
head last night, even though we did not awaken.”
“Well, if you are not afraid, I’ll try not to be,” Dories assured her
friend, but in her heart she knew that she would be glad indeed when the
twelve days were over.
Later when Dories went into her aunt’s room to remove the breakfast tray,
she bent over the bed to arrange the pillows more comfortably. Then she
tripped about, tidying the room. Chancing to turn, she found the dark,
deeply sunken eyes of the elderly woman watching her with an expression
that was hard to define. Jane Moore smiled faintly at the girl, and there
was a tone of wistfulness in her voice as she said, “I suppose you and
Nann will be away all day again.”
“Why, Aunt Jane,” Dories heard herself saying as she went to the bedside,
“were you lonely? Would you like to have me stay for a while this morning
and read to you?”
Even as she spoke she seemed to see her mother’s smiling face and hear
her say, “The only ghosts that haunt us are the memories of loving deeds
left undone and kind words that might have been spoken.” As yet Dories
had not even thought of trying to do anything to add to her aunt’s
pleasure. She was gratified to see the brightening expression. “Well,
that would be nice! If you will read to me until I fall asleep, I shall
indeed be glad.”
Nann, who had come to the door, had heard, and, as the girls left the
room, she slipped an arm about her friend, saying, “That was mighty nice
of you, Dori, for I know how much pleasanter it would be for you to go
for a boat ride with Gibralter. I’ll stay with you if you wish.”
“No, indeed, Nann. You go and see if you can’t find another clue to the
mystery.”
“I feel in my bones that we will,” that maiden replied as she poured hot
water over the few breakfast dishes. “It would be rather a good joke
on—well—on the ghost, if we solved the mystery sooner than twelve days.
Don’t you think so?”
“But there are so many things that puzzle us,” Dories protested. “I wish
we might catch whoever it is leaving those messages. That, at least,
would be one mystery solved.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Nann said brightly. “Let’s put on our thinking caps
and try to find some way to trap the ghost tonight. Well, good-bye for
now! Gib and I will be back soon, I am sure. I’m just wild to go for a
little sail with him in his queer punt boat.”
Dories stood in the open front door watching as her friend ran lightly
across the hard sand, climbed to a boulder and beckoned to the boy who
was not far away.
With a half sigh Dories went into her aunt’s room. Catching a glimpse of
her own reflection in a mirror she was surprised to behold a fretful
expression which plainly told that she was doing something that she did
not want to do in the least. She smiled, and then turning toward the bed,
she asked, “What shall I read, Aunt Jane?”
“Are there any books in the living room?” the elderly woman inquired. The
girl shook her head. “There are shelves, but the books have been
removed.”
There was a sudden brightening of the deeply sunken eyes. “I recall now,”
the older woman said, “the books were packed in a box and taken up to the
loft. Suppose you go up there and select any book that you would like to
read.”
For one panicky moment Dories felt that she must refuse to go alone to
that loft room which she believed was haunted. She had never been up
there without Nann.
“Well, are you going?” The inquiry was not impatient, but it was puzzled.
“Yes, Aunt Jane, I’ll go at once.” There was nothing for the girl to do
but go. Taking the key from its place in the kitchen, she began to ascend
the outdoor stairway. How she did wish that she were as fearless as Nann.
The door opened when the key turned, and Dories stood looking about her
as though she half believed that someone would appear, either from under
the bed or from behind the curtains that sheltered one corner.
There was no sound, and, moreover, the loft room was flooded with
sunlight. The box, holding the books, was readily found. Dories
approached it, lifted the cover and was about to search for an
interesting title when a mouse leaped out, scattering gnawed bits of
paper. Seizing the book on top, Dories fled.
“What is the matter?” her aunt inquired when, almost breathless, the girl
entered her room.
“Oh—I—I thought it was—but it wasn’t—it was only a mouse.”
“Of course it was only a mouse,” Miss Moore said. “I sincerely hope that
a niece of mine is not a coward.”
“I hope not, Aunt Jane.” Then the girl for the first time glanced at the
book she held. The title was “Famous Ghost Stories of England and
Ireland.”
“Very entertaining, indeed,” the elderly woman remarked, as she settled
back among the pillows, and there was nothing for Dories to do but read
one hair-raising tale after another. Often she glanced at her
wrist-watch. It was almost noon. Why didn’t Nann come?
CHAPTER XII.
A BLEACHED SKELETON
When Gibralter saw Nann crossing the wide beach that was shimmering in
the light of the early morning sun, he turned the punt boat and sailed as
close to the point of rocks as he dared go. Then, letting the sail flap,
he took the oars and was soon alongside a large flat boulder which, at
low tide, was uncovered, although an occasional wave did wash over it.
“Quick! Watch whar ye step,” he cautioned. “Thar now. Here’s yer chance.
Heave ho.” Then he added admiringly as the girl stepped into the middle
of the punt without losing her balance, “Bully fer you. That’s as steady
as a boy could have done it. Whar’s the other gal? Was she skeered to
come?”
Nann seated herself on the wide stern seat of the flat-bottomed boat
before she replied. “Dori wanted to come just ever so much, but she
thought that she ought to stay at home this morning and read to her
Great-Aunt Jane.”
“Wall, I don’t envy her none,” the lad said as he stood up to push the
boat away from the rocks. “That ol’ Miss Moore is sure sartin the
crabbiest sort o’ a person seems like to me.” Then as he sat on the
gunnel and pulled on the sheet, he added, beaming at the girl, “Say, Miss
Nann, are ye game to sail over clost to the island yonder? Like’s not
we’d find the skeleton o’ The Phantom Yacht if it got wrecked thar, as Pa
thinks mabbe it did.”
“Oh, Gib,” the girl’s voice expressed real concern, “I do hope that
beautiful snow-white yacht was not wrecked. I don’t believe that it was.
I feel sure that those sailors took it safely back across the sea with
that poor heart-broken mother and the boy who was such a handsome little
chap, and the wee gold and white girl whom your daddy said looked like a
lily. Honestly, Gib, I’d almost rather not sail over to that cruel island
where so many boats have gone down. If the Phantom Yacht is there, I’d
rather not know it. I’d heaps rather believe that it is still sailing,
perhaps on the blue, blue waters of the Mediterranean.”
The boy looked his disappointment. “I say, Miss Nann,” he pleaded, “come
on, say you’ll go, just this onct. I’m powerful curious to see what the
shoals look like. I’ve been savin’ and savin’ for ever so long to buy
this here punt boat jest so’s I could cruise around over thar. Miss Nann,
won’t you go?”
The girl laughed. “Gibralter, you look the picture of distress. I just
can’t be hard-hearted enough to disappoint you. If you’ll promise not to
wreck me, I’ll consent to go at least near enough to see just what the
island looks like.”
With that promise the boy had to be content. A brisk breeze was blowing
from the land and so, before very long, the two and a half miles that lay
between the shore and the outer shoals were covered and the long gaunt
island of jagged gray rocks loomed large before them.
“The shoals’ll come up, sudden-like, clost to the top of the water, most
any time now,” Gib said, “so keep watchin’ ahead. If you see a place whar
the color’s different, sort o’ shallow lookin’, jest sing out an’ I’ll
pull away.”
Nann, thrilling with the excitement of a new adventure, looked over the
side of the punt and into water so deep and dark green that it seemed
bottomless, but all at once they sailed right over a sharp-pointed rock.
Then another appeared, and another.
“Gib!” the girl’s cry was startled, “you’d better stop sailing now and
take the oars, slowly, for if we hit a rock, way out here, and capsize,
pray, who would there be to save us?”
Nann shuddered as she gazed ahead at the gray, grim island. A flock of
long-legged, long-beaked and altogether ungainly looking seabirds arose
from the rocks with shrill, unearthly screams, and, after circling
overhead for a moment they landed a safe distance away. There was no
other sign of life.
Gibralter let the sail flap at the girl’s suggestion and began to row
slowly along on the sheltered side of the island.
“Hark!” Nann said, lifting one hand. “Just hear how the surf is pounding
on the outer coast. Don’t go too far, Gib; see how the water swirls
around the rocks where they jut out into the sea.”
As he rowed slowly along, the boy kept a keen-eyed watch along the shore.
“Thar’d ought to be a place whar a body could land safely,” he said at
last. Then added excitedly as he pointed: “Look’et; thar’s a big flat
shoal that goes way up to the island, an’ I’m sure as anything this here
punt could slide right up over it an’ never touch bottom. Are ye game to
try it, Miss Nann? Say, are ye?”
The girl looked at the wide, flat shoal that was about two feet under
water and which was evidently connected with the island. Then she looked
at the eager face of the boy. “I dare, if you dare,” she said with a
bright smile.
Gibralter managed to row the punt boat within a length of the island over
the submerged shoal, and then it stuck.
“Well,” Nann remarked, “I suppose we will have to stay here until the
rising tide lifts us off.”
“Nary a bit of it,” the boy replied as he stripped off his shoes and
stockings. This done he stepped over the side of the boat, which,
lightened of his weight, again floated.
Taking the rope at the bow, the lad pulled and tugged until the punt was
high and dry, then Nann leaped out. Standing on a rock, she shaded her
eyes and gazed back across the three miles of sparkling blue waters. She
could see the eight cottages in a row on the sandy shore. How strange it
seemed to be looking at them from the island.
“We mustn’t stay long, Gib,” she said to the lad who was examining the
rocks with interest. “When the tide rises the waves will be higher and
that punt boat of yours may not be very seaworthy.”
“Thar’s nothin’ onusual on this here side,” the boy soon reported.
“’Twon’t take long to climb up top and see what’s on the other side.” As
he spoke, he began to climb over the rocks, holding out his hand to
assist the sure-footed girl in the ascent.
“There doesn’t seem to be a green thing growing anywhere,” Nann remarked
as she looked about curiously, “even in the crevices there is nothing but
a silvery gray moss.” Then she inquired, “Are there any serpents on this
island, Gib?”
The boy shook his head. “Never heard tell of anything hereabouts, ’cept
just an octopus. Pa says onct a fisherman’s boat was pulled under by one
of them critters with a lot of arms sort o’ like snakes.”
Nann stood still and stared at the boy. “Gibralter Strait,” she cried,
“if I thought there was one of those terrible sea-serpents about here,
I’d go right home this very instant. Why, I’d rather meet a dozen ghosts
than one octopus.”
“I guess ’twant nothin’ but a story,” the boy said, sorry that he had
happened to mention it. “Guess likely that was all.” Then, as they had
reached the top of the rocks that were piled high, they stood for a
moment side by side gazing down to the rugged shore far below.
The boy suddenly caught the girl’s arm. “Look! Look!” he cried. “That’s
what I was wantin’ to find.” He pointed toward a whitening skeleton of a
boat that was high on the rocks well out of reach of the surf and about
two hundred feet to the left of where they were standing. “Like as not
that wreck’s been thar nigh unto ten year, shouldn’t you say? An’ if so,
why mightn’t it be ‘The Phantom Yacht’ as well as any other? I should
think it might, shouldn’t you, Miss Nann?”
“I suppose so,” the girl faltered. “But oh, how I do hope that it isn’t.
I want to believe that the mother with her boy and girl are safe,
somewhere.” Then pleadingly, “Don’t you think we’d better start for home
now, Gib? I do want to get away before the tide turns, and even if that
old skeleton should be ‘The Phantom Yacht,’ there would be no way for us
to prove it. You never did know the real name of the boat, did you?”
“No.” the boy confessed, “I never did. Sort o’ got to thinkin’ ‘Phantom
Yacht’ was its name, but like’s not ’twasn’t.”
The bleached skeleton of the boat was soon reached and the lad, leaving
Nann standing on a broad flat rock, scrambled down nearer and began
searching for something that might identify it as the craft which, many
years before, had sailed, white and graceful, to and fro in the sheltered
waters of the bay, and which had been called “The Phantom Yacht.”
Half an hour passed, but search as he might, the disappointed boy found
nothing that could identify the boat. The storms of many winters had
stripped it, leaving but a whitened skeleton and, before long, even that
would be broken up and washed on the shore where the cottages were, to be
gathered and burned as driftwood.
It was with real regret that Gibralter at last left the wrecked boat and
returned to the side of the girl. He found her gazing into the swirling
green waters beyond the rocks as though she were fascinated.
“What ye lookin’ at, Miss Nann?” he inquired.
She turned toward him, wide-eyed. “Gib,” she said, “I thought I saw that
octopus you were telling about. Look, there it is again! See it
stretching out a long brown arm.”
The boy laughed heartily. “That thar’s sea weeds, Miss Nann,” he
chuckled, “one o’ the long streamer kind.” Then he added, more seriously,
“We’d better scud ’long. ’Pears like the tide is turnin’.” Then his
optimistic self once again, “All the better if it has turned. It’ll take
us to Siquaw Point a scootin’.”
When they reached the ridge of the island, the boy looked regretfully
back at the grim skeleton. “D’ye know, Miss Nann,” he remarked, “I’m sure
sartin that we’re leavin’ without findin’ a clue that’s hidin’ thar
waitin’ to be found. I’m sure sartin we are.”
It was a habit with the boy to repeat, perhaps for the sake of emphasis.
“Wall,” Nann declared, “to be real honest, Gib, I’d heaps rather be
standing on that sandy stretch of beach over there where the cottages are
than I would to find any clue that the old skeleton may be concealing.”
Then she laughed, as she accepted his proffered assistance to descend the
rocks. “I don’t know why, but I feel as though something skeery is about
to happen. Maybe I’m more imaginative on water than I am on land.”
They slid and scrambled down the rocks and were nearing the bottom when
an ejaculation of mingled astonishment and dismay escaped from the boy.
“What is it, Gib?” the girl asked anxiously. “Has the skeery something
happened already?”
“The punt. ’Taint thar. The tide rose sooner’n I was countin’ on and
like’s not that boat o’ mine is sailin’ out to sea.”
For one panicky moment the girl stood very still, her hand pressed on her
heart. Then she recalled something that her father once had said: “When
danger threatens, keep a clear head. That will do more than anything else
to avert trouble.”
The boy, shading his eyes, was searching for the escaped punt far out on
the shining waters, but Nann, looking about her, made a discovery. Then
she laughed gleefully. The boy turned toward her in astonishment. Then,
being very quick witted, he too understood. “You don’ need to tell me,”
he said, “I’m on! We changed our location, so to speak, when we went to
look at the wreck, and that fetched us down at a different place on this
here side.”
Nann nodded. “I do believe that we’ll find the punt beyond the rocks
yonder,” she hazarded. And they did. Ten minutes later the boy had pushed
the boat safely over the submerged shoal. The rising tide carried them
swiftly out of danger of the hidden rocks. Although Nann said nothing,
she kept intently gazing into the dark green water. She would far rather
meet any number of ghosts on land, she assured herself, than even catch a
glimpse of one of those dreadful sea monsters.
It was nearly one o’clock when Dories, who was standing on the porch of
the cabin, saw the flat-bottomed boat returning, and she ran down to the
shore to meet her friend.
“Did you find a clue?” she called as Nan leaped ashore.
“I don’t believe so,” was the merry response. “We found an old whitening
skeleton of some ill-fated boat, but I’m not going to believe it is the
Phantom Yacht. Not yet, anyway.” Then Nann turned to call to the boy who
was pushing his punt away from the rocks, “See you tomorrow, Gib, if you
come this way. Thank you for taking me sailing.”
As soon as the girls had turned back toward the cottage, Dories
exclaimed, “Nann, I believe that I have thought of a splendid way to trap
the ghost tonight, but I’m not going to tell you until just before we go
to bed.”
CHAPTER XIII.
BELLING THE GHOST
There was a sharp, cold wind that afternoon and so Nann suggested that
they make a big fire on the hearth in the living room and write letters.
Miss Moore had told them that she wished to be left alone.
“We have used up nearly all of the wood in the shed,” Nann said as she
brought in an armful.
“There’s lots of driftwood on the shore. Let’s gather some tomorrow,”
Dories suggested as she made herself comfortable in a deep, easy willow
chair near the jolly blaze which Nann had started. “Now I’m going to
write the newsiest kind of a letter to mother and brother. I suppose
you’ll write to your father.”
Nann nodded as she seated herself on the other side of the fireplace,
pencil and pad in readiness. For a few moments they scribbled, then
Dories glanced up to remark with a half shudder, “Do hear that mournful
wind whistling down the chimney, and here comes the fog drifting in so
early. If it weren’t for the fire, this would be a gloomy afternoon.”
Again they wrote for a time, then Dories glanced up to find Nann gazing
thoughtfully into the fire. “A penny for your thoughts,” she called.
Nann smiled brightly. “They were rather a jumble. I was wondering if, by
any chance, you and I would ever meet the wee girl and the handsome
little boy who sailed away on the Phantom Yacht; then, too, I was
wondering who was playing a practical joke on us.”
“Meaning what?”
“Why the notes, of course.” Nann folded her finished letter, addressed
the envelope and after stamping it, she glanced up to ask, “Why not tell
me now, how you intend to trap the joker.”
“You mean the spook. Well this is it. I found a little bell today. One
that Aunt Jane used, I suppose, to call her maid in former years.”
Nann’s merry laughter rang out. “I’ve heard of belling a cat,” she said,
“but never before did I hear of belling a ghost.”
Dories smiled. “Oh, I didn’t mean that we were to catch the—well, whoever
it is that leaves the messages, first, and then hang a bell on him. That,
of course, would be impossible.”
“Well, then, what is your plan?”
But before Dories could explain, a querulous voice from the adjoining
room called, “Girls, its five o’clock! I do wish you would bring me my
toast and tea. The air is so chilly, I need it to warm me up.”
Contritely Dories sprang to the door. She had entirely forgotten her
aunt’s existence all of the afternoon. “Wouldn’t you like to have part of
the supper that Nann and I will prepare for ourselves?” she asked. “We’ll
have anything that you would like.”
“Toast and tea are all I wish, and I want them at once,” was the rather
ungracious reply. And so the girls went to the kitchen, made a fire in
the stove and set the kettle on to boil.
“Goodness, I’d hate to have nothing to eat but tea and toast day in and
day out,” was Dories’ comment. Then to her companion, “It’s your turn to
choose from the cupboard tonight and plan the supper.”
“All right, and I’ll get it, too, while you wait on Miss Moore.”
An hour later the girls had finished the really excellent meal which Nann
had prepared, and, for a while, they sat close to the kitchen stove to
keep warm. The wind, which had been moaning all of the afternoon about
the cabin, had risen in velocity and Dories remarked with a shudder that
it might be the start of one of those dismal three-day storms about which
Gib had told them.
“It may be as terrible as that hurricane that swept the sea up over the
wall and undermined old Colonel Wadbury’s house,” she continued, bent, it
would seem, on having the picture as dark as she could.
“Won’t it be great?” Nann smiled provokingly. “You ought to be glad, for
surely the spook that carries the lantern down on the point will be blown
away.” Then, chancing to recall something, she asked, “But you haven’t
told me your plan yet. How are you going to bell the ghost?”
“My plan is to hang a little bell on the knob after we have locked our
door. Then, of course, if we have a midnight visitor, he won’t be able to
enter without ringing the bell,” Dories explained.
“Poor Aunt Jane, if it does ring,” Nann remarked. “How frightened she
will be.”
Dories drew her knees up and folded her arms about them. “Well, I do
believe that we would be most scared of all,” she said.
“Then why do it?” This merrily from Nann. “And, what’s more, if it is a
ghost, it will be able to slip into our room without awakening us.
Whoever heard of a ghost having to stop to unlock a door?”
“Maybe not,” Dories agreed, “but if we are going to have any real
enjoyment during our stay in this cabin, we must frighten away the ghost
that seems to haunt it. I think my plan is an excellent one and, at
least, I’d like to try it.”
“Very well, maiden fair.” Nann rose as she spoke. “On your head be the
result. Now, shall we ascend to our chamber?”
Taking the lantern, she led the way, and Dories followed, carrying a
small bell. When the loft room was reached the lantern was placed on a
table. Nann carefully locked the door and, removing the key, she placed
it by the lamp.
Then she held the small bell while Dories tied it to the knob. This done,
they hastily undressed and hopped into bed.
“Let’s leave the light burning all night so that we may watch the bell,”
the more timid maiden suggested.
How her companion laughed. “Why watch it?” she inquired. “We surely will
be able to hear it in the dark if it rings. There is very little oil left
in the lantern, so we’d better put the light out now, and then, if along
about midnight we hear the bell ringing, we can relight it and see who
our visitor may be.”
“Nann Sibbett, I’m almost inclined to think that you write those messages
yourself, just to tease me, for you don’t seem to be the least bit
afraid.” This accusingly.
“Honest, Injun, I don’t write them!” Nann said with sudden seriousness.
“I haven’t the slightest idea where the messages come from, but I do know
that whoever leaves them does not mean harm to us, so why be afraid? Now
cuddle down, for I’m going to blow out the light.”
Dories ducked under the quilt and, a moment later, when she ventured to
peer out, she found the room in complete darkness, for, as usual, a heavy
fog shut out the light of the stars.
“How long do you suppose it will be before the bell rings?” she
whispered.
“Well, I’m not going to stay awake to listen,” Nann replied, but she had
not slept long when she was suddenly awakened by her companion, who was
clutching her arm. “Did you hear that noise? What was it? Didn’t it sound
like a faint tinkle?”
The two girls sat up in bed and stared at the door.
CHAPTER XIV.
A PUNT RIDE
The faint tinkle sounded again. Nann sprang up and lighted the lantern.
To her amazement the bell was gone. Surprised as she was, she had
sufficient presence of mind not to tell her timid companion what had
happened. Very softly she turned the knob. The door was still locked. She
glanced at the window; the blind was still hooked. Then, blowing out the
light, she said in a tone meant to express unconcern, “All is serene on
the Potomac as far as I can see.” After returning to bed, however, Nann
remained awake, long after her companion’s even breathing told that she
was asleep, wondering what it could all mean. Toward morning Nann fell
into a light slumber, from which she was awakened by the sun streaming
into the room. Sitting up, she saw that Dories was dressed and had opened
the blinds. For a moment she sat in a dazed puzzling. What was it that
she had been pondering about in the night? Remembering suddenly, she
glanced quickly at the door. There hung the little bell as quietly as
though it had never disappeared. Dories, hearing a movement, turned from
the window where she had been gazing out at the sparkling sea.
“Good morning to you, Nancy dear,” she said gaily. “O, such a lovely day
this is! How I hope that I may go sailing with you and Gib.” Then, as she
saw her friend continuing to stare at the bell as though fascinated,
Dories remarked, “Well, I guess the ghost took warning all right and
stayed away. We won’t find a little paper in our room this morning, I’ll
wager.” As she talked, she was crossing the room to the door. Lifting the
little bell, she dropped it again with a clang.
Nann sprang out of bed, all excited interest. “Dories, what happened? Why
did you drop the bell?”
Dories pointed to the floor where it lay. Nann bent to pick it up. Tied
to the clapper was a bit of paper and on it was written in the familiar
penmanship and with the same red ink, “In eleven days you will know all.”
Instead of acting frightened, Dories’ look was one of triumph. “There
now, Mistress Nann,” she exclaimed, “you are always saying that it is not
a being supernatural that is leaving these notes. What have you to say
about it this morning?”
“That I am truly puzzled,” was the confession Nann was forced to make;
“that the joker is much too clever for us, but we’ll catch him yet, if
I’m a prophet.” She was dressing as she talked.
Dories, standing near the window, was examining the paper. “It seems to
be the sort that packages are wrapped in,” she speculated. Then, after a
silent moment and a closer scrutiny, “Nann, do you suppose that it is
written with blood?”
“Good gracious, no!” the denial was emphatic. “Why do you ask such an
absurd question?”
“Well, that was what the red ink was made of in one of the ghost stories
that I read to Aunt Jane yesterday morning.”
Nann, having completed her toilet, went to the window to look out.
“Good!” she exclaimed. “There is Gibralter Strait in his little punt
boat. He seems to have plenty of time to go sailing. Oh, I remember now.
He did tell me that their country school does not open until after
Christmas. So many boys are needed to help their fathers on the farms and
with the cranberries until snow falls.”
“I suppose I ought to stay at home again this morning and read to Aunt
Jane.” Dories’ voice sounded so doleful that her friend whirled about,
and, putting loving arms about her, she exclaimed: “Not a bit of it! You
may sail with Gibralter this morning and I will stay here and read to
your Great-Aunt Jane.”
But when the two girls visited the room of the elderly woman, she told
them that she wished to be left quite alone.
Dories went to the bedside and, almost timidly, she touched the wrinkled
head. “Don’t you feel well today, Aunt Jane!” she asked, feeling in her
heart a sudden pity for the old woman. “Isn’t there something I could do
for you?”
For one fleeting moment there was that strange expression in the dark,
deeply-sunken eyes. It might have been a hungry yearning for love and
affection. Impulsively the girl kissed the sallow cheek, but the elderly
woman had closed her eyes and she did not open them again, and so Nann
and Dories tiptoed out to the kitchen.
“Poor Aunt Jane!” the latter began. “She hasn’t had much love in her
life. I don’t remember just how it was. She was engaged to marry somebody
once. Then something happened and she didn’t. After that, Mother says she
just shut herself up in that fine home of hers outside of Boston and
grieved.”
“Poor Aunt Jane, indeed!” Nann commented as she began to prepare the
breakfast. “She must be haunted by many of the ghosts that your mother
told about, memories of loving deeds that she might have done. With her
money and her home, she could have made many people happy, but instead
she has spent her life just being sorry for herself.” Then more brightly,
“I’m glad we can both go sailing with Gib.”
Half an hour later, the girls in their bright colored sweater-coats and
tams raced across the beach. The red-headed boy was on the watch for them
and he soon had the punt alongside the broad rock which served as a dock.
“Do you want passengers this morning?” Nann called gaily.
“Sure sartin!” was the prompt reply. Then, when the two girls were seated
on the broad seat in the stem the lad hauled in the sheet and away they
went scudding. “Where are you going, Gib?” Nann inquired curiously.
“We’ll cruise ’long the water side o’ the ol’ ruin,” he told them. “Pa
says he’s sure sartin he saw a light burnin’ thar agin late las’ night,
an’ like’s not, we’ll see suthin’.”
CHAPTER XV.
A GLOOMY SWAMP
The girls were as eager as the boy to view the old ruin from the water,
and the breeze being brisk, they were quickly blown down the coast and
into the quiet sheltered water beyond the point. “O, Gib,” Dories cried
fearfully, “do be careful! There are logs under the water along here that
come nearly to the top. Is it a wreck?”
“No, ’taint. It’s all that’s left of the long dock I was tellin’ yo’
about whar the Phantom Yacht used to tie up. Pa said ol’ Colonel Wadbury
had lights clear to the end of it and that, when ’twas lit up, ’twas a
purty sight.”
“It must have been,” Nann agreed. Then Dories inquired: “Doesn’t it make
you feel strange to realize that you are on the very spot where the
Phantom Yacht once sailed?”
“And where some day it may sail again,” Nann completed.
The high rocky point cut off the wind and so Gib let the sail flap as
they slowly drifted toward the swamp.
“Thar’s all that’s left of that sea wall I was tellin’ about,” the boy
nodded at huge rocks half sunken in mire.
“The reeds are higher than our heads,” Dories commented; then she asked,
“Is there a path through the marsh, do you think, Gib?”
“No, I’m _sure_ thar ain’t one,” the boy declared. “Me’n Dick Burton
would have found it if thar had been. We’ve looked times enough from the
land side. We never could get here by water, bein’ as we didn’t have a
boat. That’s why I’ve been savin’ to get a punt. Dick, he put in some
toward it, an’ so its half his’n.”
“Who is Dick Burton?” Nann inquired.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Gib seemed surprised. “Sort o’ thought o’ course you
knew ’bout the Burtons. Dick’s folks own the cabin that’s nearest the
rocks. He’s a city feller ’bout my age, or a leetle older, I reckon. He’s
been comin’ to these parts ever since we was shavers. You’d ought to know
him,” this to Nann, “he lives in Boston, whar you come from.”
The girl addressed laughed good-naturedly. “Gib,” she queried, “have you
ever been up to Boston?”
The boy reluctantly confessed that he had not. Then the girl explained
that since it was much larger than Siquaw Center, two people might live
there forever and not become acquainted.
“Yeah.” Gib had evidently not been listening to the last part of Nann’s
remark. “I do wish Dick was here now that we’ve got the punt,” he said.
“I sure sartin wish he was.”
“Why?” Dories inquired as she let one hand drift in the cool water.
“Wall, me’n he allays thought maybe thar was a channel through the swamp
up toward the old ruin. If he was here we’d set out to find it.”
“But why can’t Dori and I help you as much as he could?” Nann queried. “I
believe you are right, Gib,” she continued before the boy had time to
reply. “I’ve seen swamps before, and there was always a narrow channel
through them where the tide washed when it was high. See ahead there,
where the swamp comes down to the water’s edge, I wish you’d take the
sail down, Gib, and row as close to it as you can.”
The boy looked his amazement.
“But, I say, Miss Nann, like’s not we’d hit a snag, like’s not we would.”
“Who’s skeered now?” the girl taunted. The boy flushed. “Not me!” he
protested, and taking down the sail he rowed along the water side of the
dense reedy growths. “Yo’ see thar’s nothin’,” he began when Nann,
leaning forward, pointed as she cried excitedly, “There it is! There’s an
opening in the swamp leading right up to that haunted house.”
Nann was right. A narrow channel of clear water appeared among the reeds
that were higher than their heads. It led toward the middle of the marsh
and was wide enough for a larger boat than theirs to pass through.
“Now, the next question is, do we dare go in?” Nann was gleeful over her
find and how she wished that Gib’s friend, Dick Burton, were there to
share with them that exciting moment.
“Well, that question is easy to answer,” Dories hastened to say. “We most
certainly do not dare.”
The boy, having removed his nondescript cap, was scratching his ear in a
way that he always did when puzzled. Then there was a sudden eager light
in his red-brown eyes. Replacing his hat, he seized the oars and began to
row rapidly back up the shore and toward the row of eight cottages.
Nann was puzzled and voiced her curiosity. “Got to get back to Siquaw in
time for the ten-ten train,” was all the information she received.
Since he had said nothing of this when they started out, and had seemed
to be in no hurry whatever, Nann naturally wondered about it.
Some light might have been thrown on his action had she seen him, one
hour later, as he sat on the high stool at his father’s desk in the
general store. He was painstakingly writing, and, when the ten-ten train
arrived, Gibralter Strait was on the platform waiting to send to the
nearby city of Boston the very first letter that he had ever written.
CHAPTER XVI.
OUT IN THE DARK
All the next day the girls waited and watched, but Gibralter Strait
appeared neither on land nor on sea to explain his queer actions. Their
hostess asked Dories to read to her and so the morning was passed in that
way. Nann, busy at a piece of fancy work she was making for a Christmas
present, sat listening. In the afternoon the girls were told to amuse
themselves. This they did by climbing to the “tip-top rock,” sitting
there in the balmy sun and speculating about the old ruin; about the
reason for Gib’s sudden departure for his home the day before, and about
the boy and girl who had sailed away on the Phantom Yacht. It was not
until a fog, filmy at first, but rapidly increasing in density, began to
hide the sun that they thought of returning homewards. As they passed the
cabin nearest the rocks, Dories said, “This is the Burton cottage, I
suppose. I wonder if Dick is our kind of boy?”
“Meaning what?” Nann wondered.
“O, you know as well as I do. I like Gib, of course. He’s a splendid boy,
but he hasn’t had a chance. I merely meant a boy from families like our
own.”
“I rather think so,” Nann replied, as she gazed at the boarded-up cabin.
Then suddenly she stopped and stared at one of the upper windows. The
blind had opened ever so slightly and then had closed again, but of this
Nann said nothing. She was afraid that she was becoming almost as
imaginative as Dories. Then suddenly she recalled something. Gib had said
that his father had seen a light in the old ruin the night before. And
what was more, she and Dories _knew_ there had been someone carrying a
lantern on the beach near the rocks at least twice since they had been
there. What if the lantern-carrier hid in the Burton cottage during the
day? He couldn’t live in the old ruin, since it had only one wall
standing.
Luckily, Dories had been interested in watching the waves breaking at her
feet. Turning, she called, “O, but it’s getting cold and damp. Let’s run
the rest of the way.”
When they reached their home cabin, Nann went at once to inquire if Miss
Moore wished her supper. The girl was sure that she heard a scurrying
noise in the old woman’s room. The door was closed and there was silence
for a brief moment before she was told to enter. Puzzled, Nann glanced
quickly at the bed and noted that the old woman’s cap was awry. She also
saw something else that puzzled her, but she merely said, “What would you
like tonight with your tea, Miss Moore?”
“Nothing at all but toast, and tell Dories to be sure it doesn’t burn. I
don’t relish it when it has been scraped.” The tone in which this was
said was impatient and fretful. It was evident that the old woman was not
in as pleasant a mood as she had seemed to be in the morning.
Returning to the kitchen, where the kettle was already boiling, Nann made
the tea and toasted the bread as well as she could over the blaze; then
Dories arranged her aunt’s tray attractively and took it in to her. While
she was gone, Nann stood staring out of the window at the gathering dusk.
She believed she had a clue to one of the mysteries surrounding them, but
decided not to tell her friend until she was a little more certain about
it herself.
When Dories returned to the kitchen she said, “Day-dreaming, Nann?”
“No, dusk-dreaming,” was the smiling reply; then, “Now let’s get our
evening repast. What shall it be?”
Together they looked in the closet, each selecting a canned vegetable and
something for desert. “This is a lazy way to live,” Nann began, when
Dories exclaimed: “Do you realize that we haven’t had one of those notes
today? I believe my bell scared away the ghost after all.”
Nann laughed merrily. “Nary a bit of it, my friend. Didn’t his spooky
highness tie his last note to the bell clapper? I suppose that is why we
didn’t hear it tinkle again.”
“But we haven’t found a note today—O dear!” Dories broke off to exclaim:
“The fire must be going out, Nann,” she called; “you’re the magician when
it comes to stirring up a blaze. What do you suppose is the matter?”
A quick glance within brought the amused answer: “Wood needed, my dear,
that’s all! Which reminds me of Dad’s wondering why the car won’t go when
it’s out of gas.” As she spoke she turned toward the wood box and found
it empty. “Hmm!” she ejaculated, “that means one of us will have to hie
out to the shed after more wood if we want a hot supper.”
Dories, after a swift glance at the black fog-hung window, suggested,
“Let’s change our menu and have a cold spread.”
“Nixy, my dear,” Nann said brightly. “I’ll be wood-carrier. I’ll sally
forth with a lighted lantern, like that mysterious midnight prowler. I
won’t be able to bring in much wood, but I believe a piece or two will
provide all the heat we’ll need to warm up canned things.” She was
lighting the lantern as she talked. The lamp was burning on the kitchen
table, and, while her friend was gone, Dories laid out the dishes and
silver.
Nann, having reached the shed, groped about for the leather thong. To her
surprise the door was not fastened, and, as she stood peering into the
dense blackness, she was sure that she heard a scrambling noise inside.
Then all was still. Nann scratched one of the matches that she had
brought with her. In the far corner stood an empty barrel and in front of
it was piled the wood that she and Dories had gathered on the beach. Not
another thing was to be seen, and although she stood listening intently
for several seconds, not another sound was heard.
“A rat probably,” the girl thought as she placed her lantern on the floor
and picked up several pieces of wood.
Returning to the kitchen, Nann threw her armful of wood into the box near
the stove, when Dories suddenly leaped forward, exclaiming excitedly,
“There it is. There’s the note we have been wondering about.”
“Why—why, so it is!” Nann stared as though she could hardly believe her
eyes. Then, springing up, she cried joyfully: “Dories Moore, we’ve caught
the ghost. He was leaving this paper when I went out. He must still be in
the woodshed somewhere, for I bolted the door on the outside. He must
have been hiding in that old empty barrel when I looked in. Light the
lantern again and let’s go out this minute and see who is there.”
Although Dories was not enthusiastic over the prospect of capturing a
ghost in a woodshed on so dark a fog-damp night, yet, since her companion
was ready to start, she couldn’t refuse to accompany her, and so, after
closing the kitchen door, they stole along the path leading from the
porch to the shed that was nearer the swamp. Suddenly Dories clutched her
friend’s arm, whispering, “Hark. What’s that?”
“It’s the ghost. He’s still in there.” This triumphantly from Nann, the
fearless. “That’s the same scrambling noise that I heard before. Come on.
Don’t be afraid. I’ll throw open the door and at least we’ll see who it
is.”
Leaping forward, Nann unbolted the door and held up the lantern. The shed
was as empty as it had been before, and there was nothing at all in the
barrel.
Dories’ sigh was one of relief, and she fairly darted back to the warm
kitchen, nor did she breathe naturally until the outer door was bolted.
Then Nann inquired, “What did the note say. We forgot to read it?”
Stooping, she took it from under a splinter of wood and, opening it,
read: “In ten days you will know all.”
CHAPTER XVII.
MORE MYSTERIES
Long after Dories slept that night Nann lay awake thinking of the several
mysteries surrounding them. Who was leaving the notes in places where the
girls could not help finding them; who was carrying a lantern on the
rocky point at night; was it the same light that was seen in the old ruin
by people living in Siquaw Center, and why had the blind in the Burton
cottage opened ever so little and then closed again as though someone had
peered out at them for a brief moment? It was indeed puzzling. Could it
possibly have anything to do with the Phantom Yacht? Nann decided that
was impossible. At last she fell asleep. When she awakened it was nearly
dawn. The fog had drifted away, the stars shone out and the full moon
made it as light as day.
Nann, the fearless, decided to dress and go out on the sand and look at
the Burton cottage. She was nearly dressed before she realized that if
Dories woke and found her gone, she might scream out in her fright and
waken the old woman, and so she shook her gently, whispering her plan.
Dories’ eyes showed her terror at being left alone. She got up at once.
“I simply will not stay in this haunted loft,” she declared vehemently.
“I’m going with you.” As it was still dark they took the lighted lantern
with them, but when they reached the back porch, Nann whispered that they
would have to put out the light as they would be seen if, indeed, there
was anyone to see them. “We’ll take it, though. I have matches in my
pocket. We’ll light it if we need it.”
Dories clung to her friend’s hand as Nann led the way back of the row of
boarded-up cottages. When they reached the seventh, Dories suddenly drew
back and whispered, “Nann, why are we doing this? What are you expecting
to see? I’m simply scared to death.” Her companion realized that this was
true, since Dories’ teeth were chattering. Self-rebukingly, she said, “O,
I ought not have brought you. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have come
myself, but I am so eager to solve at least one of the mysteries that
surround us.” Then she told how she had been sure that she had seen a
blind open ever so slightly and close late the afternoon before as though
someone had been watching them. “I thought if someone goes every night to
the old ruin and returns to the Burton cottage to hide during the day, he
probably comes just about this hour, and that if we were watching, we
might at least see what the—the—well—whoever it is—looks like.” They had
crouched down in the shadow of the seventh cottage as Nann made this
explanation.
Slowly the darkness lightened, the stars and moon dimmed and the east
became gray; then rosy, but still there had been no sign of anyone
entering the Burton cabin. Nann had been sure that an entrance could not
be made in the front of the cottage as the lower windows and door on that
side were securely boarded up. The back door was not boarded, and so that
was where she was watching.
An hour dragged slowly by. The sun rose and was well on its apparent
upward way, and still no one appeared.
“Don’t you think that maybe you imagined it all?” Dories inquired at
length as she tried to change her position, having become stiffened from
crouching so long.
“Why, no, I am sure that I didn’t.” Then, fearless as usual, Nann
announced, “I’m going up to the back porch and try the door.”
This she did, and to her surprise it opened, creaking noisily as it swung
on rusty hinges.
Dories leaped to her side. “Gracious, Nann, are you going in?” she
whispered tragically. “If anyone is in there, he might lock us in or
something.”
Nann turned to reply, but instead she exclaimed: “Why, Dories Moore,
you’re whiter than any sheet I ever saw. If you’re that scared, we’d
better go right home.”
“I am!” Dories nodded miserably. “I wouldn’t any more dare go into this
cottage than—than——”
“Then we won’t.” Nann took her friend by the hand and together they went
down the back steps, and Dories said: “I’d rather go home by the front
beach if you don’t mind. It’s more open. There’s something so uncanny
about the swamps at the back.”
“Anything to please,” was the laughing reply. As they rounded the
cottage, Nann looked curiously at the upper windows, and was sure that
she saw the same blind open ever so little, then close again. She said
nothing of this, and tried to change the trend of her companion’s
thoughts by talking about Gibralter Strait and wondering if they would
see him during that day which had just dawned. Nann was deciding that she
would take Gib into her confidence. A boy as fearless as he was would not
mind entering the Burton cottage and finding out why that upper blind had
opened and closed as it seemed to do.
As they neared their home cabin, Dories became more like her natural self
and even skipped along the hard beach, laughing back at Nann as she
called, “Another glorious, sparkling day! I hope something interesting is
going to happen.”
“I believe something will,” Nann replied. They were nearing the front
steps when Dories stood still, pointing, “Look at that stone lying in the
middle of the top step. How do you suppose it ever got there?”
Nann shook her head and, leaping up the steps, she lifted the small rock,
then turned back, exclaiming: “Just what I thought! Here is today’s note
from your ghost. It’s much too clever for us.” Then she read: “In nine
days you shall know all.”
Not wishing to awaken Miss Moore at so early an hour, the girls tiptoed
down the steps and went around to the back of the cabin.
“Let’s look in the woodshed by daylight,” Nann suggested as she unbolted
the door. “Nothing within, just as I supposed,” she remarked. “Humm-ho.
We’re not very good detectives, I guess.”
They started walking toward the kitchen. “But why try to find out what
the mysteries are about if every day brings us one nearer to the time
when we are to know all?” Dories inquired.
Nann laughed. “O, I’d heaps rather ferret the thing out for myself than
be told.” Then she said more seriously: “Honestly, Dori, I don’t think
the notes refer to the mystery of the old ruin at all. I think, if that
is ever solved, we’ll have to find it out for ourselves.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I’d rather not tell quite yet.” They entered the kitchen. “Now,” Nann
said, “I’m going to make a fire and get breakfast. We’ve been up so long
that I’m ravenously hungry. I’m going to make flapjacks no less.”
“Good!” Dories replied. “I won’t refuse to eat them.” Although consumed
with curiosity concerning what her friend had said, Dories decided to
bide her time before asking Nann to explain.
CHAPTER XVIII.
AN AIRPLANE SIGHTED
Miss Moore did not awaken, apparently, until midmorning and the girls did
not want to go away until they had served her breakfast. They had been to
her door several times and to all appearances the elderly woman had been
asleep. When, at length, Miss Moore did awaken, she complained of having
been disturbed by noises in the night. “Why did you girls tiptoe around
the living-room just before daybreak?”
“Why, we didn’t, Aunt Jane! Truly we didn’t,” Dories replied. She did not
like to tell that it would have been a physical impossibility for them to
have done so, as they were crouched behind “cabin seven” at that hour
watching “cabin eight.”
The old woman looked at the speaker sharply, then continued: “I called
your name and for a time the tiptoeing stopped. Then, when I pretended to
be asleep, it began again. I was sure that under the crack of the door I
could see a fire burning as though you had lighted wood on the grate.”
“Oh, no, Miss Moore, we didn’t, I assure you,” Nann exclaimed. “There
wasn’t any wood on it. We swept it clean yesterday afternoon.” A cry from
Dories caused the speaker to pause and turn toward her. She was pointing
at the fireplace. There was a small charred pile in the center of the
grate. The old woman’s thoughts had evidently changed their direction for
she asked, querulously, if they were going to keep her waiting all the
morning for her breakfast.
While out in the kitchen preparing it, Dories whispered, her eyes wide,
“Nann, _what_ do you make of it all? You are smiling to yourself as if
you had solved the mystery.”
“I believe I have, one of them; but, Dori, please don’t ask me to explain
until I catch the ghost red-handed, so to speak.”
“White-handed, shouldn’t it be?” Dories inquired, her fears lessened by
Nann’s evident delight in something she believed she had discovered.
When Miss Moore’s breakfast had been served, the girls, wishing to tidy
up the cabin, set to work with a will. Nann was sweeping the porch and
Dories was dusting and straightening the living-room when a queer humming
noise was heard in the distance. “Dori,” Nann called, “come out here a
moment. Can’t you hear a strange buzzing noise? It sounds as though it
were high up in the air. What can it be?”
The other girl appeared in the open doorway and they both listened
intently.
“Maybe it’s a flock of geese going south for the winter,” Dories
ventured, but her friend shook her head. “That noise is coming nearer.
Not going farther away,” she said. The buzzing and whizzing sounds
increased with great rapidity. Springing down the steps, Nann exclaimed,
“Whatever is making that commotion, is now right over our heads.”
Dories bounded to her friend’s side and they both gazed into the gleaming
blue sky with shaded eyes.
“There it is!” Nann cried excitedly. “Why, of course, it’s an airplane!
We should have guessed that right away. I wonder where it is going to
land. There’s nothing but marsh and water around here besides this narrow
strip of beach.”
“Oh, look! look!” This from Dories. “It’s dropping right down into the
ocean and so it must be one of those combination air and sea planes.”
“Unless it has broken a wing and is falling,” Nann suggested. The
airplane, nose downward, had seemed verily to plunge into the sea.
“Let’s run to the Point o’ Rocks.” Dories started as she spoke and Nann,
throwing down the broom, raced after her. It was hard to go very rapidly
where the sand was deep and dry, and so by the time they had climbed up
on the highest boulder out on the rocky point, there was no sign whatever
of the airplane either sailing safely on the water nor lying on the shore
disabled.
“Hmm! That certainly is puzzling,” Nann said as she half closed her eyes
in meditative thought. “Now, where can that huge thing have gone that it
has disappeared so entirely?”
“I can’t imagine,” Dories replied. “If only Gibralter were here with his
punt, we might be able to find out.” Then she exclaimed merrily, “Nann,
there is another mystery added to the twenty and nine that we already
have.”
“Not quite that many,” the other maid replied, giving one last long look
in the direction they believed the plane had descended or fallen. “I’m
inclined to think,” she ventured, “that there is a bay or something
beyond the swamp. O, well, let’s go back to our task. It’s lunch time, if
nothing else.”
They decided, as the day was unusually warm for that time of the year, to
eat a cold lunch, and, as their aunt did not wish anything then, the
girls decided to walk along the beach in the opposite direction and see
if they could find the cove where Gib kept his punt in hiding. But, just
as they reached the spot where the road from town ended at the beach,
they heard a merry hallooing, and, turning, they beheld Gibralter Strait
riding the white horse that was usually hitched to the coach.
“Oh, good, good!” was Dories’ delighted exclamation. “Now perhaps we will
find out about the plane. Of course the people in town saw it and Gib may
know——” She stopped talking to stare at the approaching steed and rider
in wide-eyed amazement. “How queer!” she ejaculated. “Nann, am I seeing
double? I’m sure that I see four legs and Gib certainly has only two.”
There were undeniably four long, slim legs, two on either side of the big
white horse, but the mystery was quickly explained by the appearance,
over Gib’s shoulder, of a head belonging to another boy.
“Nann Sibbett!” Dories whirled, the light of inspiration in her eyes, “I
do believe that other boy is Dick Burton, of whom Gib has so often
spoken.”
And Dories was right. Gib waved his cap, then leaped to the sand, closely
followed by the newcomer. One glance at the young stranger assured the
girls that he was a city lad. His merry brown eyes twinkled when
Gibralter introduced him merely as the “kid that was crazy to find a way
into the old ruin.”
The city boy took off his cap in a manner most polite, adding, “By name,
Richard Ralston Burton, but I’m usually called Dick.”
Nann, realizing that Gib hadn’t the remotest idea how to introduce his
friend to them, then told the lad their names, adding, “Oh, Gib, you just
can’t guess how glad we are that you have come at last. The mysteries are
heaping up so high and fast that we simply must solve a few of them.”
But it was quite evident that the boys were equally excited about the
airplane, which they, too, had seen as they were riding on the white
horse along the road in the swamps. “I say,” Gib began at once, “did
yo’uns see where that airplane fellow dove to? D’you ’spose he’s smashed
all to smithereens on the rocks over yonder?”
The girls shook their heads. “No,” Dories replied, “we just came from
there and there wasn’t a sign of that airplane. We thought that at least
we would see the wreck of it.”
“It must o’ landed round the curve whar the swamp comes down to the
shore,” Gib said.
“Come on, old man, let’s investigate.” Then Dick smiled directly at Nann
as he added, “We won’t be gone long.”
CHAPTER XIX.
TWO BOYS INVESTIGATE
Turning, the two girls, with arms locked, walked slowly back toward their
home cabin, but their gaze was following the rapidly disappearing boys.
“My, how they did scramble over the rocks. I wonder why they went over
the top. I’m sure one can see better from up there,” Dories turned to her
friend to exclaim with enthusiasm. “Isn’t Dick Burton the nicest boy? I’m
ever so glad he came. He’ll add a lot to our good times.”
Nann nodded. “One can tell in a moment that Dick has been well brought
up,” she commented. “Isn’t it too bad that Gib isn’t going to have a
chance to make something of himself? I believe he would be a writer if he
had an education. You know how imaginative he is and how he enjoyed
telling us the story of the Phantom Yacht.”
The girls sauntered along to the point of rocks and stood watching the
waves break over the boulders that projected into the water.
“Isn’t it queer how calm it is sometimes and how rough at others, and yet
there isn’t a bit of wind blowing, and it’s as warm and balmy one time as
another,” Dories said, then leaped back with a merry laugh as an
unusually large breaker pursued her up the beach.
“I think it may be the stage of the tides,” Nann speculated, “or else
there may have been a storm at sea. O good! Here come the boys.”
Dick’s expressive face told the girls of his disappointment before he
spoke. “Didn’t see a thing unusual,” he said. “Of course we couldn’t go
far because of the marsh.”
“It sure is too bad the surf’s crashin’ in the way ’tis today,” Gibralter
told them. “Here’s Dick, come all the way from Boston to stay till Sunday
night, jest so’s we could go up that little creek in the marsh. He’s wild
to get into the ol’ ruin, aren’t you, Dick?”
“Yep,” the other boy agreed, “but if we can’t make it this week end, I’ll
come down next.” Then with sudden interest, “How long are you girls going
to be here on Siquaw Point?”
Although Dick asked the question of Nann, it was Dories who replied.
“Aunt Jane said this morning that she thinks we will be leaving in about
ten days now. You see,” by way of explanation, “my elderly aunt came down
here for absolute rest, and now that she is rested, we may go back to
town sooner than we expected.”
The four young people had seated themselves on the rocks.
Nann put in with: “I, for one, don’t want to leave this place until we
have cleared up a few of the mysteries.” Then, chancing to thrust her
hand in the pocket of her sweater-coat, she drew out a half dozen slips
of crumpled yellow paper. “Oh, Gib,” she exclaimed, “where in the world
do you suppose these came from? We find them in the queerest places. We
can’t understand in the least who is leaving them.”
Gibralter’s face was a blank. “What’s that writin’ on ’em?” He picked one
up as he spoke and scrutinized it closely.
“In nine days you shall know all,” Dick read as he looked over his
friend’s shoulder.
“Know all o’ what?” Gib queried.
The boys looked from Dories to Nann. The girls shook their heads. “We
thought maybe you could help clear up some of the mysteries,” the latter
said. “Have you ever heard of any queer person hanging around this beach?
A hermit or a—a——”
Gib leaned forward, his red-brown eyes gleaming. “D’y mean, mabbe, the
lantern person that yo’ uns saw one night on the rocks?”
Nann nodded. “We thought it might be someone who visited the ruin by
night and—” the speaker glanced at the visiting boy, then interrupted
herself to inquire, “Dick, do you remember whether your people left your
cabin locked or not?”
The lad addressed turned and looked at the cottage nearest for a moment
as though trying to recall something. Then a lightening in his eyes
proved that he had succeeded. Springing to his feet, he exclaimed, “I
declare if I hadn’t forgotten it. I’m glad you spoke, Miss Nann. Mother
said that in the hurry of getting away she wasn’t sure whether or not she
had locked the back door. She always hides the key under the back porch,
so that if any one of us comes down out of season, he can get in.” Then,
when the others had also risen, Dick suggested, “Let’s walk around that
way and see what we will see.”
Dories glanced quickly at Nann and saw that her friend was gazing
steadily at an upper window. She surmised that Nann was trying to decide
whether or not to tell the boys that she had seen the blind moving, for,
after all, how could she be sure but that it had been her imagination.
The watcher saw Nann’s expression change to one of suppressed excitement,
then she whirled with her back to the cottage and said in a low voice,
“Everybody turn and look at the ocean. I want to tell you something.”
Puzzled indeed, the boys and Dories faced about as Nann had done, and, to
help her friend, the other maid pointed out toward the island. “What’s
this all about?” Dick inquired. “Miss Nann, you look as though you had
seen something startling. What is it?”
Very quietly Nann explained how for the third time she had seen an upper
blind open ever so little as though someone was peering out at them, and
then close again.
“You think someone is hiding in our cottage?” Dick asked in amazement.
Nann nodded. “Well then, we’ll soon find out.” The city boy’s tone did
not suggest hesitancy or fear. “You girls would better go over to your
own cabin and wait until we join you.”
It was quite evident that Nann did not like this suggestion, but Dories
did, and said so frankly. “I’ll run home anyway,” she said when she saw
how disappointed Nann was. “Probably Aunt Jane would like me to read to
her.”
And so it was that Nann accompanied the two boys around to the back of
the Burton cottage. As before, the door creaked open, and very stealthily
they entered the dark kitchen. This being the largest cottage in the row,
the stairway was boarded off from a narrow hall; there being a door at
the foot and another at the top. The one at the bottom was unlocked, and
so the three investigators began the ascent, groping their way in the
dark. “Wish’t we had along some matches,” Gib began, when Nann whispered,
“I do believe that I have some. I took a dozen with us this morning. Yes,
here they are in my watch pocket.” Dick, in the lead, took the matches,
and as he opened the upper door, he scratched one. It very faintly
illumined a long hall with a boarded-up window at the end.
There were four closed doors along the hall. The one at the right front
would lead into the room where a window blind had moved. Nann almost held
her breath as Dick, after scratching another match, tried the door. It
did not open. “Mabbe it’s jest stuck,” Gib suggested. “Let’s all push.”
This they did and the door burst open so suddenly that they plunged
headlong into the room and the flicker of the match went out. How musty
and dark it was! Quickly another match was lighted; but there seemed to
be no occupant other than themselves. The closet door, standing open,
revealed merely row after row of hooks and shelves. There was no
furniture in the room of a concealing nature. Nann went at once to the
blind and found that it was swinging slightly. “Well,” she had to
acknowledge, “I believe after all I was wrong in my surmise. Let’s get
back. Dories will be worried about me.”
Dick, before leaving the room, hooked the blind carefully on the inside,
and, after closing the window, he remarked, “It’s queer Mother should
have left a window open as well as the back door. But I remember now. She
said that they were afraid of losing the train. Something had delayed
them. I had gone on ahead to start school.”
When they were again safely out in the sunshine, Nann inquired, “I wonder
where your mother left the key. It isn’t in the door.”
Before replying Dick went to one corner beneath the porch, removed a
lattice door which could not have been discovered by anyone not knowing
about it, reached his hand around to one of the uprights where, on a
nail, he found the key hanging. He held it up triumphantly. Then, after
locking the kitchen door, he replaced the key and the lattice, exclaiming
as he did so, “I believe I understand now what happened. In the hurry,
Mother put the key in the right place without having locked the door, so
that’s that.” But Nann was not entirely convinced.
The late afternoon fog was drifting in when the three started to walk
along the beach. They saw Dories running to meet them. “Well, thanks be
you’re all alive,” was her relieved exclamation.
Nann laughed. “Did you think a cannibal was hiding in the Burton
cottage?” Then she added, pretending to be disappointed, “I had at least
hoped to find a ghost or a——”
“Look! Look!” Gib cried excitedly, pointing beyond the rocks.
“What? Where?” the girls scrambled to the top step of cabin three, which
they happened to be passing, that they might have a better view of
whatever had aroused Gib’s interest.
“Is it the Phantom Yacht?” Nann asked, almost hoping that it was.
“No, ’tisn’t that, I’m sure, because it isn’t white.” Gib continued to
stare into the gathering dusk. “It’s some queer kind of craft, as best I
can make out, and it’s scooting away from the shore at a pretty speedy
rate and heading right for the island.” For a moment the young people
fairly held their breath as they watched.
Dick was the first to break in with, “Gee-whiliker! I know what it is!
Stupid that I didn’t get on to it from the very first.”
“Why, Dick, what do you think it is?” Dories inquired.
“I don’t think; I know! It’s that seaplane! Look! There she soars. See
her take the air! Now the pilot’s turning her nose, and heading straight
for Boston.”
“Whoever ’tis in that airplane is takin’ a purty big chance,” Gibralter
commented, “startin’ up with night a comin’ on and fog a sailin’ in.”
Dick was optimistic. “He’ll keep ahead of the fog all right, and those
high-powered machines travel so fast he’ll be at the landing place,
outside of Boston, before it’s really dark. He’s safe enough, but the big
question is, who is he, and what was he doing over there close to the old
ruin?”
“Maybe he knows about that opening in the swamp,” Nann ventured.
“I bet ye he does! Like’s not he has a little boat and goes up to the ol’
ruin in it.”
“But where do you suppose his airship was anchored?” Dories inquired.
“Probably in the cove beyond the marsh,” Dick replied, when Gib broke in
with, “Gee, I sure sartin wish we’d taken a chance and gone out in the
punt. I sure do. I’d o’ gone, but Dick, he was afraid!”
The city lad flushed, but he said at once, “You are wrong, Gib, but I
promised my mother that I would only go out in your punt when the tide
was low, and when I give my word, she knows that she can depend upon it.”
“You are right, Dick. It is worth more to have your mother able to trust
you, when you are out of her sight, than it is to solve all the mysteries
that ever were or will be.” Nann’s voice expressed her approval of the
city lad. Gib’s only comment was, “Wall, how kin we go at low tide? It
comes ’long ’bout midnight!”
“What if it does? We can—” Dick had started to say, but interrupted
himself to add, “’Twouldn’t be fair to go without the girls since they
found the opening in the swamp. It will be low tide again tomorrow noon,
and I vote we wait until then.”
“O, Dick, that’s ever so nice of you! We girls are wild to go.” Nann
fairly beamed at him.
“Wall, so long. We’ll see you ’bout noon tomorrow.” This from Gib. Dick
waved his cap and smiled back over his shoulder.
“I can hardly wait,” Nann said, as the two girls went into the cabin. “I
feel in my bones that we’re going to find clues that will solve all of
the mysteries soon.”
CHAPTER XX.
ONE MYSTERY SOLVED
A glorious autumn morning dawned and Dories sat up suddenly. Shaking
Nann, she whispered excitedly: “I hear it again.”
“What? The ghost? Was he ringing the bell?” This sleepily from the girl
who seemed to have no desire to waken, but, at her companion’s urgent:
“No, not the bell! Do sit up, Nann, and listen. Isn’t that the airplane
coming back? Hark!”
Fully awake, the other girl did sit up and listen. Then leaping from the
bed, she ran to the window that overlooked the wide expanse of marsh.
“Yes, yes,” she cried. “There it is! It’s flying low, as though it were
going to land, and it’s heading straight for the old ruin. Get dressed as
quickly as you can.”
“But why?” queried the astonished Dories. “We can’t get any nearer than
we did yesterday; that is, not by land, and the tide is high again, and
so we can’t go out in the punt.”
Nann did not reply, but continued to dress hurriedly, and so her friend
did likewise.
“I don’t know why it is,” the former confided a moment later, “but I feel
in my bones that this is the day of the great revelation.”
“Not according to the yellow messages. They would tell us that in seven
days we would know all.” Dories was brushing her brown hair preparing to
weave it into two long braids.
“But, as I told you before,” Nann remarked, “I don’t believe the papers
refer to the old ruin mystery at all. In fact, I think the ghost that
writes the message on the papers does not even know there is an old ruin
mystery.”
“Well, you’re a better detective than I am,” Dories confessed as she tied
a ribbon bow on the end of each braid. “I haven’t any idea about anything
that is happening.”
The girls stole downstairs and ran out on the beach, hoping to see the
airplane, but the long, shining white beach was deserted and the only
sound was the crashing of the waves over the rocks and along the shore,
for the tide was high.
“I wonder if Dick and Gib heard the plane passing over their town?”
Dories had just said, when Nann, glancing in the direction of the road,
exclaimed gleefully, “They sure did, for here they come at headlong speed
this very minute.” The big, boney, white horse stopped so suddenly when
it reached the sand that both of the boys were unseated. Laughingly they
sprang to the beach and waved their caps to the girls, who hurried to
meet them.
“Good morning, boys!” Nann called as soon as they were near enough for
her voice to be heard above the crashing of the waves. “I judge you also
saw the plane.”
“Yeah! We’uns heerd it comin’ ’long ’fore we saw it, an’ we got ol’
Spindly out’n her stall in a twinklin’, I kin tell you.”
The city lad laughed as though at an amusing memory. “The old mare was
sound asleep when we started, but when she heard that buzzing and
whirring over her head, she thought she was being pursued by a regiment
of demons, seemed like. She lit out of that barn and galloped as she
never had before. Of course the airplane passed us long ago, but that
gallant steed of ours was going so fast that I wasn’t sure that we would
be able to stop her before we got over to the island.”
Gib, it was plain, was impatient to be away, and so promising to report
if they found anything of interest, the lads raced toward the point of
rocks, while the girls went indoors to prepare breakfast. Dories found
her Great-Aunt Jane in a happier frame of mind than usual. She was
sitting up in bed, propped with pillows, when her niece carried in the
tray. And when a few moments later the girl was leaving the room, she
chanced to glance back and was sure that the old woman was chuckling as
though she had thought of something very amusing. Dories confided this
astonishing news item to Nann while they ate their breakfast in the
kitchen. “What do you suppose Aunt Jane was thinking about? It was surely
something which amused her?” Dories was plainly puzzled.
Nann smiled. “Doesn’t it seem to you that your aunt must be thoroughly
rested by this time? I should think that she would like to get out in the
sunshine these wonderful bracing mornings. It would do her a lot more
good than being cooped up indoors.”
Dories agreed, commenting that old people were certainly queer. It was
midmorning when the girls, having completed their few household tasks,
again went to the beach to look for the boys. The tide was going out and
the waves were quieter. Arm in arm they walked along on the hard sand.
Dories was saying, “Aunt Jane told me that she would like to read to
herself this morning. I was so afraid that she would ask me to read to
her. Not but that I do want to be useful sometimes, but this morning I am
so eager to know what the boys are doing. I wish they would come. I
wonder where they went.”
“I think I know,” Nann replied. “I believe they are lying flat on the big
smooth rock on which we sat that day Gibralter told us the story of the
Phantom Yacht. You recall that we had a fine view of the old ruin from
there.”
“But why would they be lying flat?” Dories, who had little imagination,
looked up to inquire.
“So that they could observe whoever might enter the old ruin without
being observed, my child.”
“But, Nann, why would anyone want to get into that dreadful place unless
it was just out of curiosity, which, of course, is our only motive.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” the older girl had to confess, adding: “That is
a mystery that we have yet to solve.”
Suddenly Nann laughed aloud. “What’s the joke?” This from her astonished
companion. Since Nann continued to laugh, and was pointing merrily at
her, Dories began to bristle. “Well, what’s funny about me? Have I
buttoned my dress wrong?”
The other maid shook her head. “It’s something about your braids,” she
replied.
“Oh, I suppose I put on different colored ribbons. I remember noticing a
yellow one near the red.” She swung both of the braids around as she
spoke, but the ribbon bows were of the same hue. Tossing them back over
her shoulder, she said complacently: “This isn’t the first of April, my
dear. There’s nothing the matter with my braids and so—” But Nann
interrupted, “Isn’t there? Unbeliever, behold!” Leaping forward, she
lifted a braid, held it in front of her friend, and pointed at a bit of
crumpled yellow paper. Dories laughed, too.
“Well,” Nann exclaimed, “that proves to my entire satisfaction that a
supernatural being does _not_ write the notes and hide them just where we
will be sure to find them.”
“But who do you suppose does write them?” Dories asked. “This morning
I’ve been close enough to four people to have them slip that folded paper
in my hair ribbon. Their names are Nann Sibbett, Great-Aunt Jane,
Gibralter Strait and Dick Moore. Dick, of course, is eliminated because
he was nowhere about when the messages first began to appear. It isn’t
_your_ hand-writing,” the speaker was closely scrutinizing the note,
“and, as for Gib, I’m not sure that he can write at all.” Then a light of
conviction appeared in her eyes. “Do you know what I believe?” she turned
toward her friend as one who had made an astonishing discovery. “I
believe Great-Aunt Jane writes these notes and that she gets up out of
bed when we are away from home and hides them.”
Nann laughed. “I agree with you perfectly. I suspected her the other day,
but I didn’t want to tell you until I was more sure. But why do you
suppose she does it—if she does?”
Dories shook her head, then she exclaimed: “Now I know why Aunt Jane was
chuckling to herself when I looked back. She had just slipped the folded
paper into my hair ribbon, I do believe.”
“The next thing for us to find out is when and why she does it?” The
girls had stopped at the foot of the rocks and Nann changed the subject
to say: “I wonder why the boys don’t come. It’s almost noon. We’ll have
to go back and prepare your Aunt Jane’s lunch.” She turned toward the
home cottage as she spoke. Dories gave a last lingering look up toward
the tip-top rock. “Maybe they have been carried off in the airplane,” she
suggested.
“Impossible!” Nann said. “It couldn’t depart without our hearing.”
When they reached the cabin, Dories whispered, “I’ve nine minds to show
Aunt Jane the notes and watch her expression. I am sure I could tell if
she is guilty.”
“Don’t!” Nann warned. “Let her have her innocent fun if she wishes.”
Then, when they were in the kitchen making a fire in the wood stove, Nann
added, “I believe, my dear girl, that there is more to the meaning of
those messages than just innocent fun. I believe your Aunt Jane is going
to disclose to you something far more important than the solving of the
ruin mystery. She may tell you where the fortune is that your father
should have had, or something like that.”
Dories, who had been filling the tea-kettle at the kitchen pump, whirled
about, her face shining. “Nann Sibbett,” she exclaimed in a low voice,
“do you really, truly think that may be what we are to know in seven
days? O, wouldn’t I be glad I came to this terrible place if it were?
Then Mother darling wouldn’t have to sew any more and you and I could go
away to school. Why just all of our dreams would come true.”
“Clip fancy’s wings, dearie,” Nann cautioned as she cut the bread
preparing to make toast. “Usually I am the one imagining things, but now
it is you.”
Dories looked at her aunt with new interest when she went into her room
fifteen minutes later with the tray, but the old woman, who was again
lying down, motioned her to put the tray on a small table near and not
disturb her. As Dories was leaving the room, her aunt called, “I won’t
need you girls this afternoon.”
“Just as though she divined our wish to go somewhere,” Nann commented, a
few moments later, when Dories had told her.
“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” the younger girl suggested, “let’s pack a
lunch of sandwiches and olives and cookies. Then when the boys come we
can have a picnic. It’s noon and they didn’t have a lunch with them, I am
sure.”
“Good, that will be fun,” Nann agreed. “I’ll look now and see if they are
coming. We don’t want them to escape us.”
A moment later she returned from the front porch shaking her head. “Not a
trace of them,” she reported. Hurriedly they prepared a lunch and packed
it in a box. Then, after donning their bright-colored tams and sweater
coats, they went out the back door and were just rounding the front of
the cabin when Nann exclaimed, “Here they come, or rather there they go,
for they do not seem to have the least idea of stopping here.”
Nann was right. The two lads had appeared, scrambling over the point of
rocks, and away they ran along the hard sand of the beach, acknowledging
the existence of the girls merely by a hilarious waving of the arms.
Nann turned toward her friend, her large eyes glowing. “They’ve found a
clue, I’m sure certain! You can tell by the way they are racing that they
are just ever so excited about something.” As she spoke the boys
disappeared over a hummock of sand, going in the direction of the inlet
where Gibralter kept his punt hidden.
Dories clapped her hands. “I know!” she cried elatedly. “They’re going
out in the punt. The tide has turned! Oh, Nann, what do you suppose they
saw?”
“I believe they saw the pilot of the airplane enter the old ruin, so now
they are going to get the punt, and they’re in a great hurry to get back
to the creek before the airplane leaves.”
“Oh! How exciting! Do you suppose they will make it?”
Nann intently watched the blue water beyond the hummock of sand as she
replied, “I believe they will.” Then she added, “Oh, dear, I do hope
they’ll take time to stop and get us. It wouldn’t be fair for them to
have all the thrills, since we girls found the channel in the marsh.”
“Of course they’ll take us,” Dories replied, although in her heart of
hearts she rather hoped they would not, as she was not as eager as Nann
for adventure. “You know Dick said it wouldn’t be fair to go without us.”
Nann nodded. Then, with sudden brightening, “Hurry! Here they come! Let’s
race down to the point o’ rocks and see if they want to hail us.”
Then, as they started, “Do you know, Dori, I feel as though something
most unexpected is about to happen. I mean something very different from
what we think.”
The girls had reached the point of rocks and were standing with shaded
eyes, gazing out at the glistening water.
The flat-bottomed boat slowly neared them. Dick held one oar and Gib the
other. They both had their backs toward the point and evidently they had
not seen the girls.
“Why, I do declare! They aren’t going to stop. They’re going right by
without us.” Nann felt very much neglected, when suddenly Gib turned and
grinned toward them with so much mischief in his expression that Dories
concluded: “They did that just to tease. See, they’re heading in this way
now.”
This was true, and Dick, making a trumpet of his hands, called: “Want to
come, girls? If so, scramble over to the flat rock, quick’s you can!
We’re in a terrifical hurry!”
Dories and Nann needed no second invitation, but climbed over the jagged
rocks and stood on the broad one which was uncovered at low tide and
which served as a landing dock.
Dick, the gallant, leaped out to assist them into the punt, then, seizing
his oar, he commanded his mate, “Make it snappy, old man. We want to
catch the modern air pirate before he gets away with his treasure.”
CHAPTER XXI.
A CHANNEL IN THE SWAMP
The wind was from the shore and Gib suggested that the small sail be run
up. This was soon done and away the little craft went bounding over the
evenly rolling waves and, before very many minutes, the point was rounded
and the swamp reached.
“Where is the airplane anchored?” Nann inquired, peering curiously into
the cove which was unoccupied by craft of any kind.
“Well, we aren’t sure as to that,” Dick told her, speaking softly as
though fearing to be overheard. “We climbed to the top of the rocks and
lay there for hours, or so it seemed to me. We were waiting for the tide
to turn so we could go out in the punt. But all the time we were there we
didn’t see or hear anything of the airplane or the pilot. Of course,
since it’s a seaplane, too, it’s probably anchored over beyond the marsh.
“Now my theory is that the pilot has a little tender and that in it he
rowed up the creek and probably, right this very minute, he is in the old
ruin, and like as not if we go up there we will meet him face to face.”
“Br-r-r!” Dories shuddered and her eyes were big and round. “Don’t you
think we’d better wait here? We could hide the punt in the reeds and
watch who comes out. You wouldn’t want to meet—a—a—”
Dories was at a loss to conjecture who they might meet, but Gib chimed in
with, “Don’t care who ’tis!” Then, looking anxiously at the girl who had
spoken, he said, “’Pears we’d ought to’ve left you at home. ’Pears like
we’d ought.”
The boy looked so truly troubled that Dories assumed a courage she did
not feel. “No, indeed, Gib! If you three aren’t afraid to meet whoever it
is, neither am I. Row ahead.”
Thus advised, the lad lowered the small sail, and the two boys rowed the
punt to the opening in the marsh.
It was just wide enough for the punt to enter. “Wall, we uns can’t use
the oars no further, that’s sure sartin.” Gib took off his cap to scratch
his ear as he always did when perplexed.
“I have it!” Dick seized an oar, stepped to the stern, asked Nann to take
the seat in the middle of the boat and then he stood and pushed the punt
into the narrow creek.
They had not progressed more than two boat-lengths when a whizzing,
whirring noise was heard and the seaplane scudded from behind a reedy
point which had obscured it, and crossed their cove before taking to the
air. Then it turned its nose toward the island. All that the watchers
could see of the pilot was his leather-hooded, dark-goggled head, and, as
he had not turned in their direction, it was quite evident that he didn’t
know of their existence.
“Gone!” Dick cried dramatically. “’Foiled again,’ as they say on the
stage.”
“Wall, anyhow, we’re here, so let’s go on up the creek and see what’s in
the ol’ ruin.”
Dick obeyed by again pushing the boat along with the one oar. Dories said
not a word as the punt moved slowly among the reeds that stood four feet
above the water and were tangled and dense.
“There’s one lucky thing for us,” Nann began, after having watched the
dark water at the side of the craft. “That sea serpent you were telling
about, Gib, couldn’t hide in this marsh.”
“Maybe not,” Dick agreed, “but it’s a favorite feeding ground for slimy
water snakes.” Nann glanced anxiously at her friend, then, noting how
pale she was, she changed the subject. “How still it is in here,” she
commented.
A breeze rustled through the drying reed-tops, but there was indeed no
other sound.
In and out, the narrow creek wound, making so many turns that often they
could not see three feet ahead of them.
For a moment the four young people in the punt were silent, listening to
the faint rustle of the dry reeds all about them in the swamp. There was
no other sound save that made by the flat-bottomed boat, as Dick,
standing in the stern, pushed it with one oar.
“There’s another curve ahead,” Nann whispered. Somehow in that silent
place they could not bring themselves to speak aloud.
“Seems to me the water is getting very shallow,” Dories observed. She was
staring over one side of the boat watching for the slimy snakes Dick had
told her made the marsh their feeding ground.
“H-m-m! I wonder!” Nann, with half closed eyes looked meditatively ahead.
“Wonder what?” her friend glanced up to inquire.
“I was thinking that perhaps we won’t be able to go much farther up this
channel, since the tide is going out. The water in the marsh keeps
getting lower and lower.”
“Gee-whiliker, Nann!” Dick looked alarmed. “I believe you’re right. I’ve
been thinking for some seconds that the pushing was harder than it has
been.”
They had reached a turn in the narrow channel as he spoke, but, when he
tried to steer the punt into it, the flat-bottomed boat stopped with such
suddenness that, had he not been leaning hard on the oar, he would surely
have been thrown into the muddy water. As it was, he lost his balance and
fell on the broad stern seat. Dories, too, had been thrown forward, while
Gib leaped to the bow to look ahead and see what had obstructed their
progress.
“Great fish-hooks! If we haven’t run aground,” was the result of his
observation.
“Nann’s right. This here channel dries up with the tide goin’ out.”
“Then the only way to get to the old ruin is to come when the turning
tide fills this channel in the marsh,” Dick put in.
“Wall, it’s powerful disappointin’,” Gib looked his distress, “bein’ as
the tide won’t turn till ’long about midnight, an’ you’ve got to go back
to Boston on the evening train.”
“I’d ought to go, to be there in time for school on Monday,” the lad
agreed.
“Couldn’t you make it if you took the early morning train?” Nann
inquired.
“May be so,” Dick replied, “but we can decide that later. The big thing
just now is, how’re we going to get out of this creek?”
“Why—” The girls looked helplessly from one boy to the other. “Is there
any problem about it? Can’t you just push out the way you pushed in?”
Dick’s expression betrayed his perplexity. “Hmm! I’m not at all sure,
with the tide going out as fast as it is now.”
“Gracious!” Dories looked up in alarm. “We won’t have to stay in this
dreadful marsh until the tide turns, will we?” Then appealingly, “Oh,
Dick, please do hurry and try to get us out of here. Aunt Jane will be
terribly worried if we don’t get home before dark.”
The boy addressed had already leaped to the stern of the boat and was
pushing on the one oar with all his strength. Gib snatched the other oar
and tried to help, but still they did not move. Then Nann had an
inspiration. “Dori,” she said, “you catch hold of the
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