Mystery Stories for Girls
Witches Cove
By
ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago New York
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright, 1928
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
All Rights Reserved
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE [I Mysteries of the Night] 11 [II Sculling in the Night] 23 [III In the Dungeon] 34 [IV The Face in the Fire] 42 [V Three Gray Witches] 58 [VI Off for Further Adventure] 80 [VII Some Lobsters] 84 [VIII From Out the Fog] 109 [IX Off Black Head] 121 [X The Tilting Floor] 137 [XI The Wavering Red Light] 149 [XII The Little Man of Witches Cove] 170 [XIII Under Fire] 178 [XIV The Passing of Black Gull] 193 [XV The Searching Pencil of Light] 200 [XVI The Old Fort] 212 [XVII Secrets Told] 221 [XVIII Kidnapped] 230 [XIX A Fire on the Beach] 241 [XX The Chase] 245 [XXI On Air and Sea] 254 [XXII The Story Told] 261
WITCHES COVE
CHAPTER I
MYSTERIES OF THE NIGHT
It was night on Casco Bay off the coast of Maine. There was no moon. Stars were hidden by a fine haze. The distant harbor lights of Portland, eight of them, gleaming faintly in pairs like yellow cat’s eyes, served only to intensify the blackness of the water and the night.
Ruth Bracket’s arms moved backward and forward in rhythmic motion. She was rowing, yet no sound came from her oarlocks. Oars and oarlocks were padded. She liked it best that way. Why? Mystery—that magic word “mystery.” How she loved it!
In the stern of the little punt sat slim, black-haired, dark-eyed Betty Bronson, a city girl from the heart of America who was enjoying her first summer on the coast of Maine.
Betty, too, loved mystery. And into her life and that of her stout seashore girl companion had come a little mystery that day. At this very moment, as Ruth rested on her muffled oar, there came creeping across the silent waters and through the black of night a second bit of mystery.
The first mystery had come to them on shore in the hold of a beached three-masted schooner.
Ruth knew the schooner well enough. She had been on board her a dozen times and thought she knew all about her—but she didn’t.
The owner, a dark-skinned foreigner who had purchased the schooner six months before, used her for bringing wood to the islands. There is, so they say, an island in Casco Bay for every day in the year. Each island has its summer colony. These summer folks like an open fire to sit by at night and this requires wood. The schooner had been bringing it in from somewhere—from Canada some said. No one seemed to know for sure.
Being an old schooner the wood-carrying craft must be beached from time to time to have her seams calked. They beached her at high tide. Low tide found her stranded. The return of high tide carried her off again.
In this there is no mystery. The mystery began when Ruth and Betty, along with other girls and boys of the island, swarmed up a rope ladder to the tilted deck of the beached schooner.
Being of a bolder nature than the others, having always a consuming desire to see the hold of so ancient a ship, Ruth had led Betty into the very heart of the schooner and had opened a door to pursue her investigation further when a harsh voice called down to her:
“Here now. Come out’a da sheep!”
It was a foreign skipper.
Startled, the girls had quickly closed the door and bolted up the gangway. Not, however, until they had seen a surprising thing. They had seen three bolts of bright, red cloth in that cabin back of the hold. Were there others? They could not tell. The place had been quite dark.
“Looked like silk,” Betty had said a few moments later as they walked down the beach.
“Can’t tell,” Ruth replied. “Probably only red calico, a present for the wood chopper’s wife.”
“Three bolts?”
“Three wood choppers’ wives with seven children apiece,” Ruth laughed.
She had found this hard to believe. There certainly was something strange about those bolts of cloth, and the foreign skipper’s desire to get them away from the cabin.
And now, as they listened in the night on the bay with muffled oars at rest, they caught the creak of oarlocks. The schooner had got off the beach with the tide. She was anchored back in the bay. That the dory had come from her they did not doubt.
“Where are they going?” Betty asked in a faint whisper as the sound of rowing grew louder, then began to fade away in the distance.
“House Island, perhaps.”
“There’s nothing over there.”
“Only an abandoned house and the old fort. No one living there. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Really mysterious,” Betty agreed.
“We’ll row around the Black Gull, then we’ll go home,” said Ruth.
Visiting the Black Gull, an ancient six-master that had lain at anchor in the harbor months on end, was one of Ruth’s chief delights.
Steam and gasoline, together with the high price of canvas, high wages and demand for speed, had brought this slow going craft to anchor for good.
So there she stood, black and brooding, her masts reaching like bare arms toward heaven, her keel moving with the tide yet ever chafing at the massive anchor chain that was never drawn.
Night was the time to visit her. Then, looming out of the dark, she seemed to speak of other days, of the glory of Maine’s shipping, of fresh cut lumber, of fish and of the boundless sea.
It was then that Ruth could fancy herself standing upon the deck, with wind singing in the rigging and setting the sails snapping as they boomed away over a white-capped sea.
They had rowed to the dark bulk that they knew to be the Black Gull and had moved silently along the larboard side, about the stern and half way down the starboard side, when of a sudden a low exclamation escaped Ruth’s lips. Something had brushed against her in the dark.
The next instant a gurgling cry came from the bow of the boat. This was followed by a splash.
“She—she’s overboard!” thought Ruth, reversing her strokes and back paddling with all her might.
“Ruth!” came a call from the water. “I’m over here! Some-something pulled me in.”
So astonished was the stout fisher girl that for a moment she did not move. Something had taken her companion overboard. What could it have been?
By the time she had come to her senses, Betty had gripped the gunwales of the boat and was calling for help. The next moment, drenched with salt water, but otherwise unharmed, she sat shivering in her place.
“Some-something caught me under the chi-chin,” she chattered, “and ov-over I wen-went.”
“I felt it,” said Ruth. “Let’s see what it was.”
Slowly, deftly, she brought the punt about and alongside. Then, with both hands she groped in the dark.
“I have it!” she exclaimed. “It’s a rope ladder. How queer! There’s no one staying out here. There never was a ladder before. It goes up to the deck.”
“Let’s go up,” said Betty. “What a lark!”
“You are drenched. You’ll catch your death of cold.”
“B-best thing to d-do,” said Betty, beginning to chatter again, “to take off my clo-clothes and wring them out.”
“Right!” said Ruth, fumbling for the painter. “Guess it’s safe enough. Just tie the boat to the ladder.”
A moment of feeling about and struggling with ropes, then up they went, like blue-jackets, hand over hand. Another moment on deck and Betty was doing a wild whirling dance in the dark while her companion’s strong hands wrung out her clothes.
“Boo-oo, it’s cold!” shivered the city girl as she struggled to get back into her sodden and wrinkled garments.
“Come on,” said Ruth. “Now we’re here, we might as well explore. There’s a cabin forward—the Captain’s. We’ll be out of the wind if we get in there.”
They were more than out of wind in that cabin. They found a great round stove set up there. With the aid of two matches Ruth examined its flue, and with a third she lighted the fire that was laid in it. The next moment Betty and her clothes were drying before a roaring fire.
“Think of being in such a place at ten o’clock at night!” Betty said with a delighted shudder.
“Might not be so good,” said Ruth. “That ladder wasn’t left there accidentally. Someone’s been here.”
“Tell you what!” she added suddenly. “While you are drying out I’ll play I’m the ship’s watch, and pace the deck.”
“You don’t think——”
“Don’t think anything,” said Ruth as she disappeared through the door. “It isn’t safe to take too many chances, that’s all.”
Ruth had not been on deck three minutes before, lost to all sense of impending danger, she walked the deck, captain of this great sailing craft.
Few girls are more generously endowed with imagination than are the fisher-folk’s daughters of the coast of Maine. None are more loyal to their state and their seaboard.
As this girl now paced the deck in the dark, she saw herself in slicker and high boots with a megaphone at her lips shouting commands to nimble seamen who swarmed aloft. Sails fluttered and snapped, chains rattled, rigging creaked as they swept adown the boundless sea.
But now the scene was changed. No longer was she aboard a great shipping boat, but an ancient man-o’-war. An enemy’s sloop threatened her harbor. With bold daring she set the prow of her ancient craft to seaward ready to do battle with the approaching foe.
Once more, her craft, half fancied, half real, is a cutter, chasing smugglers and pirates.
Pirates! How her blood raced at the thought. There had been pirates in those half-forgotten days, real, dark-faced pirates with cutlasses in their teeth and pistols at their belts. Not an island on the bay but has its story of buried treasure. And as for smugglers’ coves, there was one not a mile from the girl’s home.
“Smugglers!” she whispered the word. Rumors had run rife in the bay these last months. Dark craft, plying the waters, were supposed to be smugglers’ boats. A bomb had sunk a revenue cutter. “Smugglers!” the people had whispered among themselves.
She thought now of the three bolts of red cloth in the beached schooner’s hold, and of the dory that had passed them in the night.
“Smugglers!” she thought. Then, “Probably nothing to it. Only a wood hauler.”
Then her heart skipped a beat. She had thought of the rope ladder. What a hiding place for smuggled goods, this deserted six-master, lying alone in the dark waters of the bay!
“What if it were used as a smuggler’s store room,” she thought as her pulse gave a sudden leap. There was a fire laid in the cabin. The ladder was down. “What if some of them are on board at this very moment.”
She thought of the slim city girl sitting alone there in the dark. Turning, she started toward the cabin when a sudden sound from the water arrested her.
The next instant, a few hundred yards from the ship, a light flared up. The sight that struck her eye at that moment froze the blood in her veins.
For a full half moment she stood stock still. Then with a sudden effort she shook herself into action to go tip-toeing down the deck and thrust her head in at the cabin door and whisper:
“Betty! Betty! Quick! Get into your clothes! There’s something terrible going to happen. Quick! We must get off the ship!”
CHAPTER II
SCULLING IN THE NIGHT
The thing Ruth saw on the water was startling, mysterious. Nothing quite like it had ever come into her life before. She could not believe her eyes. Yet she dared not doubt them. A moment before she had dreamed of pirates with pistols in their belts. Now out there on the sea they were, or at least seemed to be, in real life. There could be no denying the existence of a boat on those black waters of night; a long narrow boat propelled by six pairs of sweeping oars swinging in perfect rhythm. This much the flare of light had shown her.
More, too; there was no use trying to deny it. She had seen the men only too clearly. Dressed in long, black coats, with red scarfs about their necks and broad-brimmed hats on their heads, with their white teeth gleaming, they looked fierce enough.
Strangest of all, there were pistols of the ancient sort and long knives in their belts.
What made her shudder was the sign of skull and cross-bones on the black flag they carried.
“Pirates! What nonsense!” she thought. “Not been one off the Maine coast in a hundred years.” Pausing to listen, she caught again the creak of oarlocks.
“Betty! Betty!” she whispered frantically. “Hurry! We’ll be trapped!”
Poor Betty! She certainly was having her troubles. Frightened half out of her wits; expecting at any moment to be arrested for trespassing, or who knows what, she struggled madly with her half dry and much wrinkled garments.
“It’s all my fault,” she half sobbed. “I insisted on coming up here. Now we shall be caught. I—I hope they don’t hang us at the yardarm.”
This last, she knew, was nonsense; but in the excitement she was growing a trifle hysterical.
At last, with shoes and stockings in her hands, she emerged from the door.
Gripping her arm tight and whispering, “Don’t speak! Not a sound!” Ruth led her rapidly to the end of the rope ladder.
“Follow me. Drop in the boat. Sit perfectly still.”
Tremblingly, Betty obeyed. Presently they were in the punt. The sound of rowing came much more clearly now. They could even hear the labored breathing of the oarsmen.
Thankful for the darkness, Ruth thrust an oar into a socket at the back of the boat and began wabbling it about in the water. She was sculling, the most silent way to move a boat through the water.
“We-we’ll go round the bow,” she thought, as a sudden sound set her heart racing.
“If only they don’t light another flare!”
With a prayer on her lips which was half supplication for forgiveness and half petition for safety, she threw all her superb strength into the task before her.
Many times she had rowed around the Black Gull. Never before had it seemed half so far.
Now they had covered half the distance, now three-quarters. And now there came a panic-inspiring gleam of light on the sea. It lasted a second, then blinked out.
“Only a match.” Her heart gave a bound of joy. “But if they strike another, if they are attempting to light a flare!” She redoubled her energy at the oar. Great beads of perspiration stood out on her brow as they rounded the stern of the ship.
Even then catastrophe threatened, for the ship’s anchor chain, touched by the punt, sent out a rattling sound.
“What was that?” came a bass voice from the sea.
An instant later the sea was all aglow with a second flare. But luck was with them. They had rounded the ship’s hull and were out of sight.
“If they row around her, we are caught,” whispered Betty.
Ten seconds passed, twenty, thirty, forty, a minute. Then came the sounds of a boat bumping the ship and of men ascending the rope ladder.
“Not coming!” Ruth breathed a sigh of relief.
“We’ll just move back under the stern by the rudder,” she whispered a moment later. “Even if they look over the side they won’t be able to see us there.”
“Who-who are they?” Betty’s question carried a thrill.
“I don’t know.”
“What do they look like?”
Ruth told her.
“Oh, oh!” Betty barely suppressed a gasp.
“But they can’t be!” she said the next moment.
“They are,” said Ruth. “And they are going to man the Black Gull and sail her away. The wind is rising. There’s plenty of sail. A sail boat makes no noise. What’s to hinder?”
“What could they want with her?”
“Don’t know; for exhibition, sea pageant, moving pictures, or something. Captain Munson, the owner, has been offered ten thousand dollars for her. Moving picture company wants her. She’s the last six-master in the world.”
“Betty,” she whispered, impressively, after there had been time for thought, “we’ve got to do something. We can’t let the Black Gull go like this. The Black Gull doesn’t belong just to Captain Munson. She belongs to all us Maine folks. That’s why he won’t sell her. She stands for something, for a grand and glorious past, the past of our coast and of the most wonderful state in the Union.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she whispered. “They’re all on board now. We’ll scull around and get their boat. We’ll tow it ashore so they can’t escape, then spread the alarm. Even if they get out to sea, the fast cutter will catch them and bring them back.”
“I h-hope,” chattered Betty, half beside herself with fear, “that they don’t catch us. I wouldn’t like to walk the plank.”
“They won’t,” said Ruth. There was an air of conviction in her tone. Alas for conviction.
Once more their punt, creeping forward in the dark, rounded the ship’s hull and came at last to a point but a boat’s length from a long, dark bulk just ahead.
“Their boat,” thought Ruth. “We’ll be away in a moment.” But they were not.
That they were taking grave chances, Ruth knew right well. Her heart was in her throat as she sent her punt gliding through the dark. Only thoughts of her beloved Maine and the ancient six-master that stood for so much that was grand and glorious in the past could have induced her to run the risk. Run the risk she did. Trouble came sooner than she dreamed.
She breathed a sigh of relief when the dim light told her that there was no one in the long boat that had brought the black-robed crew to the ship.
Her relief was short lived. She had succeeded in untying the painter of that other boat and swinging it half about, when there came a harsh jangling of chains. A rusty chain dangling from the side of the ship had caught in the stern of the long boat and, slipping free, had gone thudding against the hull. Ten seconds of suspense ended with a gruff:
“Who’s there?” and the sudden flash of a brilliant electric torch which brought the two girls out in bold relief.
At once there followed exclamations of astonishment as dark figures crowded the deck above them.
“Trying to steal our boat,” said one.
“Ought to walk the plank,” came from another.
“Up with ’em!” said another, placing a foot on the top rung of the ladder.
Ruth sat there, red-faced, defiant. Betty was beginning to cry softly, when a fourth person spoke up suddenly:
“Lay off it, boys! Can’t you see they’re just girls? I don’t know what they are about, but I’m bound to say it can’t be anything wrong. One of ’em is Tom Bracket’s girl. I know her well.”
Ruth’s heart gave a great leap of joy. She had recognized her champion’s voice. He was Patrick O’Connor, the skipper of a sea-going tug, one of her father’s good friends.
At once her head was in a whirl. What could it all mean? Captain O’Connor dressed as a pirate and aiding in a night raid of the harbor? The thing seemed impossible.
Her thoughts were broken short off by the voice of the man on the ladder.
“I’m still in favor of havin’ ’em tell their story. An’ mebby girls don’t care for pie and hot coffee an’ the like.”
“We’ll leave it to them,” said Captain O’Connor. “If they want to come up we’ll be glad to have them. If they don’t, then they have their punt. Let them go. What do you say, girls?”
“Come on,” said Ruth. There was a large lump in her throat. “We’ve got to go up. ’Twon’t do to let them misunderstand.”
Truth was, there were things she did not understand and that she wanted dreadfully to know about.
So, once more, hand over hand, they went up the rope ladder and tumbled in upon the deck.
Ten minutes later the two girls found themselves seated one on either side of Captain O’Connor before the massive mahogany table in the cabin of the Black Gull.
The table was piled high with good things to eat. A great copper kettle filled with doughnuts, a basket of sandwiches, two hams roasted whole, a steaming tank of coffee, and pies without end, graced the board. A merry band of pirates, surely. Most surprising of all was the fact that the pirate at the head of the table, blackest and fiercest of them all, was none other than Captain Munson, owner of the Black Gull.
“Now,” said Captain Munson, and there was a friendly smile on his formidable face, “I am sure you will enjoy the meal more fully if you tell us first why you were about to take our boat.”
“Rest assured,” he said, as he saw the crimson flush on Ruth’s cheek, “you stand absolved. You shall not walk the plank.”
CHAPTER III
IN THE DUNGEON
“Please,” said Ruth, “I—I—” She choked as she looked into the many pairs of eyes around the table in the Black Gull’s cabin, and stammered, “We thought you were,—no, we didn’t think. We knew you were not real pirates, but we thought you—were—were going to stea-steal the Black Gull. And we—we thought we could stop you.”
No laugh followed these stammered remarks. Each man sat at attention as Captain Munson asked in a kindly tone:
“And why did you wish to save the Black Gull?”
“Because she stands for something wonderful!” The girl’s tones were ringing now. “Because she tells the story of Maine, our grand and glorious state we all love so well.”
“Boys,”—the pirate chieftain’s dark eyes glistened—“I propose three cheers for Ruth and her dauntless companion.”
Never did the walls of that cabin ring with lustier shouts than when those men ended with, “Ra, Ra, Ra! Ruth, Ruth, Ruth! Betty! Betty! Betty!”
“And now for the feast!” exclaimed the Chief. “Fourteen men on a dead man’s chest. Buckets of blood! There never was a pirate crew but liked their victuals. Ho! You scullions, hove to with the viands!”
All this talk made Betty shudder, but Ruth only sat and stared.
They were hungry enough after the long row across the bay and without asking further questions they accepted the cold chicken, coffee, doughnuts and huge wedges of pie and did full justice to all.
A half hour later, as the pirate crew joined ringing notes of a pirate chanty ending with a rousing, “Heave ho, Ladies, Heave ho!” the girls pushed their punt away from the towering hull of the Black Gull and went rowing away into the night.
Ruth’s arms had swung in rhythmic motion for a full ten minutes before she spoke. Then dropping her oars, she said in a deep, low tone,
“Of all the things I ever heard of, that beats ’em.”
“I thought,” said Betty, solemnly, “that I had seen strange things, but that beats them all.”
“And somehow,” Ruth said, still more soberly, “I have a feeling that this is the beginning of something very big and mysterious, and perhaps awfully dangerous.”
“That is just the way I feel about it,” said Betty, with a shudder.
After that they lapsed into silence, and Ruth renewed her silent rowing.
The hour was late. Betty’s head began to nod. Ruth, alone with her thoughts, was swinging her oars in strong, sweeping strokes when a curious thing struck her eye. They were passing the ancient abandoned fort on House Island, a massive pile of solid granite, when through a narrow space where cannon had frowned in the long ago, a light appeared. One instant it shone there clear and bright, the next it was gone.
“How strange!” she thought. “No one is ever there.” At once she registered a resolve to visit the fort to have a look into this new mystery.
Once more she thought of the ancient wood-carrying schooner, of the bolts of silk cloth in her hold, and of the dory that had passed them in the night.
“It’s astonishing,” she told herself, “the way events connect themselves up, woven together in a pattern like a rug. But you have to trace them out one by one before the pattern comes out clear and strong.”
The moon was out. The stars were shining when their punt touched the sandy beach of the island that had always been Ruth’s home.
A half hour later that same moon, looking down upon a brown and weather-beaten fisherman’s cottage, beamed through narrow panes of glass upon two girls sleeping side by side. One was large and strong and ruddy. Her arms, thrown clear of the covers, showed the muscular lines of an athlete. Endless miles of rowing, clam digging in the early morning, hauling away at the float line of lobster traps, had done this. There was about the girl’s whole make-up a suggestion of perfect physical well-being which is found oftener than anywhere else in a seacoast village.
The other girl, as you will know, was slim, active and with nerves tight as fiddle strings. Her life had been lived in the city. A few months before she had gone with her father to live at a school by the side of Lake Michigan. Now, for the summer, she was staying with a wealthy young married woman in her summer cottage on the island. She was with Ruth for but this one night.
As one looked at Betty lying there in repose, he read in her face and figure signs of strength. The slender arms and limbs were not without their suggestion of power. Her strength was the quick, nervous strength of a squirrel; useful enough for all that. One might be sure that she would leap into action while others searched their troubled minds for a way out.
Strangely matched as they might be, these girls were destined to spend much of their summer together and to come to know in a few brief weeks how much of mystery, adventure and romance the rugged coast of Maine has to offer those who come there to seek.
“Betty,” said Ruth as she sprang out of bed next morning, “do you know what day this is?”
“Wouldn’t need two guesses if I didn’t know,” said Betty. “Listen to the boom of cannons. It’s the Glorious Fourth of July.”
“To-day,” said Ruth, “we must do something exciting.”
“What shall it be?” Betty’s tone was eager.
“Listen!” said Ruth, seized with a sudden inspiration, “I’ve got a dollar.”
“So have I.”
“We’ll spend them all for Roman candles.”
“Roman can—”
Ruth held up a hand. “We’ll get Pearl Bracket to go along. We’ll row over to House Island in the evening and eat a picnic lunch on the grass before the fort that overlooks the bay. The sunset is wonderful from there.
“Then when it’s getting dark, we’ll go into the old fort and have a sham battle with Roman candles.”
“Sham battle?”
“Sure! The boys did that last year, Don and Dewey, Chet and Dill and some others. They said it was no end of fun. They’re all going up the bay for fireworks this year, so we’ll have the fort all to ourselves. We’ll get Pearl Bracket to go along.
“It’s something of an adventure, just going into that old fort at night. Secret passages and dungeons with rusty old handcuffs chained to the wall, and all that. Quite a place.”
“I should think so. Is it very old?”
“The fort? Almost a hundred years, I guess. Used to be cannons there. They’re gone now. No one’s been there for years and years. Just big and empty and sort of lonesome.”
“But how do you play sham battle in there?”
“All scatter out with tallow candles in tin cans, just a little light. Each one has an armful of Roman candles. When you hear something move you know it is an enemy who has broken into the fort, and you shoot a candle at him, shoot low at his feet. Be dangerous if you didn’t.
“But think what fun!” she enthused. “You’re creeping along between stone walls, all damp and old. Just a little light. Dark all around. All of a sudden down the long passage a little stir, and like a flash your fuse sputters. Bang-pop-pop-pop-bang! Red, blue, green, yellow, orange, five balls of fire leap away at the enemy and he is shot, defeated, routed into wild retreat.”
“I should think he might be,” said Betty. “But it should be great sport. I’m for it. Any jolly thing on the Fourth of July.”
CHAPTER IV
THE FACE IN THE FIRE
Ruth let out a little half-suppressed scream. A pasteboard tube slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor. A purple ball of fire bursting forth from the tube shot across the floor, climbed a stone wall, then suddenly blinked out. The yellow gleam of a tallow candle shot downward. A tin can struck the floor with a dull thud. The candle blinked out. Then all about the girl’s trembling figure was darkness, darkness so complete that it seemed you might cut it with a knife.
It was terrifying, that darkness, in an underground place at night. Yet it was not the darkness that affected her most. Nor was it the ball of fire that had danced about her feet.
There had been another ball of fire, and through that red ball of fire she had seen a face.
“The face!” she whispered. “The eyes! I must have blinded him. How perfectly terrible! Whatever am I to do?”
What, indeed? She could not turn and run. Which way should she run? The candle was out. She had counted on the candle to show her the way. The way she had taken was winding, many turns, many corners, and always stone walls.
“And now,” she thought with a sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach. “Oh! Why did I come?
“We started out to stage a sham battle. And I have blinded a man.”
A man! Her thoughts were sobering now. Questions arose. What was the man doing here in the heart of the old abandoned fort on House Island? That was a question.
“His face was low down, close to the stone floor, as if he were crawling.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Perhaps he was crawling. Perhaps I did not injure him after all. He may be at my very feet now. Crawling!” The thought drove her overwrought nerves into tremors.
“Matches!” she thought suddenly. There was a penny box of them in her pocket. Until now, in her excitement, she had forgotten them.
The box out, she broke three matches trying to light one. When the fourth flared up, it so startled her that she dropped it.
In time, however, the candle was lit. Then, with bulging eyes she stared before her.
“Nothing,” she told herself in surprise.
She took three steps forward. Still nothing. She advanced ten yards. Nothing.
“Must have been here,” she told herself. “But there is nothing and no one.” She began to shudder again. Had the Roman candle she had fired into the dark revealed a lurking ghost? Surely this ancient fort was spooky enough. But no! Ghosts were nonsense.
“I saw him,” she told herself stoutly.
“A man was here,” she assured herself. “I saw him. I could not have been mistaken. He is here for no good purpose—couldn’t be. I couldn’t have blinded him, else he could not have found his way to—to wherever he has gone. He’s using this fort without permission—perhaps for illegal purposes.”
No longer able to control herself, she went racing on tip-toe down the narrow winding corridor.
There came a sudden burst of moonlight, and she found herself standing in a stone archway, looking out upon a sort of open court grown wild with tall grass, brambles and rose bushes.
Old Fort Skammel, built before the Civil War, has been abandoned for years to the rats and bats that have found a home there. Yet there is something suggestive of grandeur and protecting power hovering over it still.
Ruth had felt this as she sat with Betty and Pearl at the foot of its massive masonry and ate her Fourth of July evening lunch.
Following out her plan of the morning, they had rowed over here, she and Betty Bronson and Pearl Bracket, for a little picnic. Having been brought up on the island across the bay, the abandoned fort did not inspire in Ruth the awesome fear that it did in some others.
“Rats in there,” Ruth had said, munching at a bun.
“Big as cats,” said Pearl.
“’Fraid of fire, though,” said Ruth. “Won’t hurt you if you have a light.”
“Betty,” said Ruth, changing the subject as she watched the red glow of the sunset, “I never see a sunset but I feel like I’d like to get on a ship and go and go until I come to where that red begins.”
“Yes,” said Betty, “I sometimes feel that way myself.”
“But you’ve traveled a lot.”
“Not so much.”
“But you’ve lived on the banks of the Chicago River and traveled on the Great Lakes. And now you’re here. That’s a great deal. I—why I’ve only been on the sea.”
“The sea is wonderful,” said Betty. “It’s a little world all its own. When you come to it you feel that you have found something that no one you know has ever seen before.”
“I suppose so,” said Ruth, “but of course I’ve always known the sea.”
“And been everywhere on it.”
“No, only a little way. Why,” Ruth said, sitting up, “right over yonder, not a hundred miles from here, is one of the most interesting islands in the world. Monhegan they call it. I’ve never seen it. But I shall some day, I am sure.
“It’s sixteen miles from shore, a great rock protruding out of the sea. If there wasn’t a smaller rock standing right in front of it and making sort of a harbor, no one could ever land there, for most of its headline is bold, a hundred, two hundred feet high. These rocks have strange names. Burnt Head, White Head, Black Head and Skull Rock, that’s the names they’ve given them. They say you can catch beefsteak cod right off the rocks. It’s got a history, too. Captain John Smith was there once and Governor Bradford. I want to go there and watch the breakers come tumbling in. It’s wild, fascinating, you’ve no idea.”
“Must be lonesome,” said Betty.
“Lonesome? Well, perhaps,” Ruth said musingly. “Yes, I guess so. The sea always makes me feel small and lonesome. Out there almost everything is ocean.”
That was all they said of Monhegan. Little they dreamed of the part that bewitching island would play in their lives during the weeks that were to follow.
Pearl had been timid about taking part in the sham battle. At last the others talked her over. So, armed each with a bundle of Roman candles and a tallow candle stuck in a tin can, they had made their way silently down the long corridor that led to the gun room, from which massive cannons had once looked down upon the bay.
“Spooky in here at night,” Pearl had said with a shudder. The sound of her voice awakened dead echoes and live bats.
Betty felt like turning back, but Ruth plodded on. Down a long, steep stairway, across a circular court, then into a narrow passage they went, until Ruth with a sudden pause whispered:
“There! There! I hear ’em.”
“Here,” she said, holding out her burning candle. “Get a light from this and shoot straight ahead.”
With trembling fingers Ruth lighted a Roman candle, watched the fuse sputter for a second, then jumped as pop-pop-pop, three balls of fire went shooting down between stone walls to send an astonishing number of rats scurrying for shelter.
It would be difficult indeed to find a more exciting game than the one that followed. And such a setting! An ancient and abandoned fort. Down these narrow passageways and resounding corridors had sounded the tramp-tramp-tramp of marching soldiers. Through long night watches in time of peace, in stress of war, weary night guards had patrolled their solemn beats. From these narrow windows eyes had scanned the bay, while like giant watch dogs, grim cannons loomed at the gunner’s side.
In this small room, where chains, lifted and dropped, give out a lugubrious sound, some prisoner has sat in solitary confinement to meditate upon his act of desertion or of treachery against the land that offered him food and shelter.
The three girls thought little of these things as they parted to go each her own way down separate corridors to meet sooner or later with screams of terror and laughter as one stealing a march upon another set balls of fire dancing about her feet.
A move in the dark or the slightest sound called forth a volley of red, blue, green and yellow fire. More often than not it was a rat or a bat that drew the fire, but there is quite as much sport in sending a huge rat scurrying for cover as in surprising a friendly enemy.
So the battle had gone merrily on until Ruth, finding herself alone in a remote corner of the fort and, hearing a sound, had fired a volley with the result we have already seen.
“And now, here I am all alone,” she told herself. “Wonder where the others are?”
“They are in there alone with that strange man,” she told herself. “How—how terrible!”
That she could do nothing about it she knew well enough, and was troubled about their safety.
“If anything serious should happen to them I never could forgive myself!” she thought with a little tightening at the throat. “They are such good pals. And it was I who proposed that we go on that wild chase, I who really insisted.”
She was beginning to feel very uncomfortable indeed about the whole affair.
She and Pearl had been pals for a long time. In the same Sunday School class and the same grade at school, they were always together. At the beach, swimming, boating and fishing in summer, tramping and skating in winter, they shared their joys and sorrows.
“And now,” she asked herself, “where is she? And where is Betty?”
Relighting her candle, she turned about to go inside and search for them.
“No use,” she told herself. “Place is a perfect labyrinth, passages running up and down, this way and that. Never would find them. Have to wait. Have—”
She broke short off. Had she caught some sound? Were they coming? Or, was it some other person, the man of the face in the fire? She shrank back against the wall, then called softly:
“Girls! Betty! Pearl! Are you there?” There came no answer. “Have to wait,” she told herself.
She fell to wondering about that mysterious face, and what in time she should do about it.
She and Pearl were fortunate in having as a day teacher a splendid patriotic woman. That very day they had come upon her sitting on the grassy bank of their island that overlooks Portland harbor. They had dropped to places beside her, and together for a time they had listened to the bang-bang of fireworks and the boom-boom of cannons, had watched flags on ships and forts and towers flapping in the breeze. Then Pearl, who was at times very thoughtful, had said:
“It makes me feel all thrilly inside and somehow I think we should be able to do something for our country, something as brave and useful as Betsy Ross, Martha Washington and Barbara Fletcher did.”
“You can,” the teacher had said quietly. “You can honor these by helping to make this the finest land in the world in which to live.
“One thing more you can do, wherever there is an old fort, a soldiers’ home, or a monument dedicated to our hallowed dead, you can help prevent their being defaced or defiled or used for any purpose that would bring a reproach upon the memory of those who lived and died that we might be free.”
“I wonder,” Ruth said to herself, “what sort of den I came upon just now in this grand old fort?”
Then, very quietly, very solemnly, she made the resolve that, come what might, the whole affair should be gone into, the mystery solved.
“If only they would come!” she whispered impatiently.
“Ruth! Ruth! Is that you?” sounded out in a shrill whisper from the right.
“Yes! Yes! Here I am.”
“Shsh! Don’t talk,” she warned as Pearl began to babble excitedly. “We must get out of here at once.”
“Why? Wha—”
“Don’t talk. Come on!”
A moment later a punt with three dark forms in it crept away from the shadowy shore.
They rowed across the bay in awed silence. Having reached the shore of their own island, they breathed with greater freedom; but even here, as they climbed the steep board stairway that led from the beach to the street above, they found themselves casting apprehensive backward glances.
Once in the main street of their straggling village, with house lights blinking at them from here and there, they paused for a moment to whisper together, then to talk in low tones of the probable outcome of their recent mysterious adventure.
“I fully expected to see the Black Gull gone when I looked out of the window this morning,” said Ruth. “But she wasn’t.”
“Still chafing at her chains. Poor old Black Gull!” Pearl always felt this way about the discarded ship of other days.
“What did you think?” said Ruth. “You wouldn’t expect the owner of the boat to steal it himself. And he was a member of that terrifying band.”
“But the old wood-hauling boat and the silks in her hold, (they were all sure the bolts of cloth were silk by this time) and the dory from her that passed us in the night,” said Betty. “They’re different.”
“And the face I saw in the fire,” said Ruth with a shudder. “Such a strange face it was, dark and hairy and eyes that gleamed sort of red and black. Oh! I tell you it was terrible! I am glad we’re all here!”
“You—you wouldn’t go back,” said Pearl. “Not for worlds.”
“Yes,” Ruth said slowly, “I think I would, but in the daytime. Daytime would be different. And someone should go. If that grand old fort is being used by rascals they should be found out.”
“And there’s been so many whispers about smugglers this summer,” said Pearl. “Smuggling in goods and men, they say. All sorts of men that shouldn’t be allowed to come to America at all.”
“That’s it!” said Pearl excitedly. “That’s what he was! One of them, one of the men America don’t want.”
“Who?”
“That man, the face in the fire!”
“You can’t be sure,” said Betty.
“No,” said Ruth, “not until we go back there. Then perhaps we won’t.”
They parted a moment later, Ruth to go to her cottage on the slope, Pearl to her home on the water front, and Betty to the big summer cottage that tops the hill.
As Ruth lay in her bed by the window, looking out over the bay that night, she felt that the cozy and comfortable little world she knew, the bay, the cluster of little islands, the all enclosing sea, had suddenly become greatly agitated.
“It’s as if a great storm had come sweeping down upon us,” she told herself.
“Mystery, thrills, adventure,” she said a moment later. “I have always longed for these, but now they have begun to come I—I somehow feel that I should like to put out my two hands and push them away.”
With that she fell asleep.
CHAPTER V
THREE GRAY WITCHES
The next afternoon Pearl Bracket went fishing. She felt the need of an opportunity for quiet thought. The events of the past few days had stirred her to the very depths. A quiet, dreamy girl, she was given to sitting across the prow of her brother’s fishing boat or the stern of her ancient dory as it drifted on a placid bay. But this day only Witches Cove would do.
To this imaginative girl Witches Cove had ever been a haunting place of many mysteries. A deep dark pool on three sides by the darkest of firs and hemlocks, on the north of the island where no sunbeams ever fell, it had always cast a spell of enchantment about her.
There, when the tide was coming in, water rushed over half submerged rocks to go booming against the granite wall, then to return murmuring and whispering of many things.
Pearl sat in the stern of her dory on this particular afternoon and recalled all the strange tales that had been woven about the cove.
At one time, so the story ran, it had been a smugglers’ cove. Here in the days of long ago, dark gray, low lying crafts came to anchor at dead of night to bring ashore cargoes of rich silks, tea, coffee and spices.
Still farther back it had been a pirates’ retreat. Even the renowned Captain Kidd had been associated with the place.
“On a very still day,” Uncle Jermy Trott had told her once in deepest secrecy, “you can still see a spar lyin’ amongst the rocks. That spar came from a Spanish Gallion. I’ve seen it. I know. An’ I’ve always held that a treasure chest were lashed to it an’ that it were left there as a markin’ thing, like skulls and cross-bones were on land.”
Pearl had never seen the spar. But more than once her fish-hook had snagged on something down there that was soft like wood and she had lost the hook and part of her line.
To-day, however, she thought little of the spar at the bottom of the cove. She thought instead of the strange doings aboard the Black Gull and of Ruth’s face in the fire.
“I’m going back to the old fort,” she told herself stoutly. “There’s more to that than we think.”
“And still,” she thought, as she dragged a larger cunner from the water, “that’s Ruth’s discovery. It’s only fair to let her go to the bottom of it. Nothing important ever happens to me. I—”
She paused to look at the cunner she had caught. Its coloring was curious, all red, blue, green and purple.
“Like he’d been dipped in burning sulphur,” she told herself. “Nothing in Witches Cove is the same as anywhere else. They say it’s the three gray witches. Tom McTag saw ’em once, three gray witches coming up out of the water behind the fog. Boo! It’s spooky here even in daytime. Seems like eyes were peering at you. Seems—”
Her glance strayed to the bank. Then she did receive a shock. Eyes were staring at her, two pairs of glaring red eyes.