“And so many of them!” she breathed.
She was tempted to believe she was in a trance. To the right of her, to the left, before, behind, she saw them. Ten, twenty, thirty, perhaps forty darkly enshrouded heads peered out from the shadows.
“As if in a fairy book!” she thrilled. “What can it mean? What are all these people doing out here at this ghostly hour?”
Suddenly she was seized with a fit of calm, desperate courage. Gliding from her shadow, she walked boldly out into the moonlight. Her heart was racing madly; her knees trembled. She could scarcely walk, yet walk she did, with a steady determined tread. Past this ice-pile, round this row of up-ended cakes, across this broad, open spot she moved. No one sprang out to intercept her progress. Here and there a dark head appeared for an instant, only immediately to disappear.
“Cowards!” she told herself. “All cowards. Afraid.”
Now she was approaching the sandy beach. Unable longer to restrain her impulses, she broke into a wild run.
She arrived at the side of the O Moo entirely out of breath. Leaning against its side for a moment, she turned to look back. There was not a person in sight. The beach, the ice, the black lines of breakwaters seemed as silent and forsaken as the heart of a desert.
“And yet it is swarming with men,” she breathed. “I wonder what they wanted?”
Suddenly she started. A figure had come into sight round the nearest prow. For an instant her hand gripped a round of the ladder, a preparatory move for upward flight. Then her hand relaxed.
“Oh!” she breathed, “It’s you!”
“Yes, it is I, Mark Pence,” said a friendly boyish voice.
“I—I suppose I should be afraid of you,” said Lucile, “but I’m not.”
“Why? Why should you?” he asked with a smile.
“Well, you see everyone about this old dry dock is so terribly mysterious. I’ve just had an awful fright.”
“Tell me about it.” Mark Pence smiled as he spoke.
Seating herself upon the flukes of an up-ended anchor she did tell him; told him not alone of her experience that night, but of the one of that other night in the Spanish Mission.
“Do you know,” he said soberly when she had finished, “there are a lot of mysterious things happening about this dock. I don’t think it will last much longer, though. Things are sort of coming to a head. Know what those two policemen were here for?”
Lucile shook her head.
“Made a call on the Chinks, down there in the old scow. Came to look for something. But they didn’t find it. Heard them say as much when they came out. They were mighty excited about something, though. Bet they thought it was mighty strange that there was a stairway in that old scow twenty feet deep.”
“Are—are you sure about that stairway?”
The boy’s reply was confident:
“Sure’s I am that I’m standing here.”
Lucile protested:
“But most folks don’t use circling stairways much. They don’t know—”
“I do though. I work in a library. There are scores of circling stairways among the stacks and I know just how high each one is.”
“It is queer about that stairway,” Lucile breathed. “I must be going up. I’m getting chill sitting here.”
“Well, good-bye.” Mark Pence put out his hand and seized hers in a friendly grip. “Just remember I’m with you. If you ever need me, just whistle and I’ll come running.”
“Thanks—thanks—aw—awfully,” said Lucile, a strange catch in her throat.
Her eyes followed him until the boat’s prow had hidden him; then she hurried up the rope-ladder and into the cabin. She was shivering all over, whether from a chill or from nervous excitement she could not tell.
The other girls came in a few moments later. For an hour they sat in a corner, drinking hot chocolate and telling of their night’s adventures. Then they prepared themselves for the night’s rest.
For a long time after the others had retired, Florence sat in a huge upholstered chair, lights out, staring into the dark. She was thinking over the experiences of the past few weeks, trying to put them together in a geometric whole, just as an artist arranges the parts of a stained glass window.
“There’s Lucile’s experience in the old Spanish Mission,” she mused, “and my own in the museum. Then there’s Mark Pence’s visit to the old scow and the circular stairway. Then there’s the blue candlestick. It’s rare, mysterious and valuable. Why? The police are interested in it. Why? Then there’s the police-sergeant’s visit, and Lucile’s experience on the ice, and the two policemen visiting the old scow, and there’s that man on the bridge tonight, the two with the sled and the one sitting on the ice. It’s all mysterious, so it ought all to fit together somehow.”
For a long time she sat wrapped in deep thought. Then she started suddenly.
“Blue!” she whispered. “The face Lucile saw in the Mission was blue, illuminated and blue. In the story the old seaman told me the face of the god of the Negontisks was illuminated and blue. The candlestick I found was blue. What should be more natural than that a blue jade candlestick should be made in which to set a candle with which to illumine the blue god? Blue jade is valuable. A ring or stickpin set with a small piece of it is costly. That makes the candlestick both costly and valuable. All that,” she sighed, “seems to hang together.”
Again she sat for a time in deep thought.
“Only,” she breathed at last, “who ever heard of a tribe of Negontisks in America, let alone here in Chicago? Try to imagine a hundred or more near-savages, with no money and no means of transportation but their native skin-boats, traveling eight thousand miles over land and sea and ending up in Chicago. It can’t be imagined. It simply isn’t done. So there goes my carefully arranged puzzle all to smash.”
Throwing off her dressing-gown, she climbed into her berth, listening to the flag-rope lashing the mast for an instant, then fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER X
THE REAL CRUISE BEGINS
Next morning Florence was skating down the lagoon, deep in thoughts of the mysterious events of the past few days. So deeply engrossing were these thoughts that she did not see what lay before her. Suddenly her skate struck some solid obstacle. She tripped, then went sprawling. Her loosened skate shot off in another direction.
“That’s queer,” she murmured as she sat up rubbing her knees.
Glancing back over the way she had come, she saw nothing more than a circular raised spot which had formed when water had sprung up through a hole in the ice.
“That’s strange,” she mused, and rising, she hopped and glided back to the spot.
“Someone must have cut a hole in the ice,” she reflected, “though what they’d do it for is more than I can see. We youngsters used to do that to get a drink when we were skating on a little prairie pond, a long way from nowhere. But here the ice is fourteen inches thick and there’s a drink of water to be had for the asking up at the skate house.”
As she glanced down at the spot, another strange circumstance surprised her. “What makes that spot look so much bluer than the other ice?” she asked herself.
As she examined it more closely she saw that this patch of blue had a very definite outline, but rough and jagged, like the edges of a piece of cloth haggled by a child who is just learning to use a pair of scissors.
Having recaptured her fugitive skate, she clamped it to her foot and was about to go on her way when another startling fact arrested her.
“Why, that,” she thought, “is just about where that man was sitting last night; the one Marian and I saw who had apparently dropped in from nowhere.”
So struck with the discovery was she that she skated over to the edge of the ice where the sled drawn by the two strangers had left the snow. There she took good notice of the direction in which the sled had been going when it came upon the ice.
Turning about, she skated backward with her eyes on the track made by the
sled runners. She was endeavoring to retrace the sled over the ice where no tracks were visible, in an effort to prove that the sled had arrived at the point on the ice where the hole had been cut when it turned and struck off at another angle.
So successful was she in this that she all but fell over the rise in the ice a second time.
“That’s that,” she murmured. “Now for something else.”
Skating rapidly to the end of the lagoon nearest the dry dock she circulated about until she discovered the spot at which the sled had left the ice.
Again guiding herself by the course taken by the sled, she skated backward and in a short time found herself once more beside the spot in the ice where the hole had been cut.
“That proves something,” she told herself, “but just how much I can’t tell. But I’ll leave that to study out tonight. Must hurry on or I’ll be late to my lecture.”
“That sled track went toward the dry dock,” she told herself a few moments later. “Tonight when I go home I’ll try to trace it out and see where it went.”
Lucile was home early that day. Marian had not gone to school at all. She had stayed on the beach making sketches of the ice-jam on the lake front.
“I’ll be going out again tonight,” she told Lucile. “Wind’s shifted. It’s offshore now and rising. There are certain effects of lights and shadows which you get on the rim of a body of fresh water which you don’t in the sea ice. Sea ice is white, dull white, like snow. Fresh water ice is blue; blue as the sky sometimes. I want to catch it before it blows out again. But what brings you home so early, Lucile?”
“Cut my lecture. Headache,” she explained, pressing her temples. “Nothing much though. And, Marian,” she exclaimed suddenly, “what do you think? That story!”
“Did he take it?”
“The editor of the Literary Monthly? No, better than that.”
“Could anything be better than that?”
“Lots of things.”
“What is better?”
“Listen,” declaimed Lucile, striking a mock dramatic attitude. “He said, the literary editor did, that it was too good for his poor little publication! Fancy! ‘His poor little publication!’ My story too good! My story! A freshman’s story!” She burst into sudden laughter, but stopped abruptly and sat down pressing her temples and groaning: “My poor head!”
“You never can tell about it—about stories,” said Marian. “Heads either. You’ll have to go to bed early tonight and get a good night’s sleep. There’s been entirely too much excitement on board these last few nights.”
“He said,” Lucile went on, “that the Literary Monthly didn’t pay for stories. Of course I knew that. And he said that he thought I could sell my story; that he thought it was good enough for that. The technique was not quite perfect. There was too much explanation at the beginning and the climax was short, but the theme and plot were unusual. He thought that would put it over. He knew exactly the place to send it—‘Seaside Tales,’ a new magazine just started by a very successful editor. He knows him personally. He gave me a letter of introduction to him and I mailed the story to him right away. So you see,” she smiled folding her arms, “I am to be an authoress, a—a second George Eliot, if you please!”
“But Seaside Tales is published right down town. Why did you mail it?”
“Do you think,” said Lucile in real consternation, “that I would dare beard that lion of an editor in his den? The editor of a real magazine that pays genuine money for stories? Why I—I’d die of fright. Besides, one does not do it. Really one doesn’t.”
“What was your story about?” asked Marian suddenly.
“Why, I—I wasn’t going to tell, but I guess I will. It was about three girls living on a yacht in a dry dock. And, one night in a storm the yacht broke loose on the dry dock and went out into the water. Then it drifted out to sea. Then, of course, they had to get back to land. Wasn’t that dramatic?”
“Yes, very!” smiled Marian. “Goodness! I hope it never happens to the O Moo! Just think! Not one of us even knows how to start the engine.”
“I mean to have Dr. Holmes show me the very next time he and Mrs. Holmes come down.”
“He’ll think you’re crazy.”
“Maybe he will. But you never can tell.”
That was one time when Lucile was right; in this queer old world you never can tell.
When Florence returned from the university the shades of night were already falling. There was, however, sufficient light to enable her to follow the track of the sled she had seen the night before. This track led straight across the park to the beach, then along the beach in the direction of the dry dock. A few hundred yards from the dry dock it turned suddenly to the left and was at once lost among the tumbled masses of ice, where no trace of it could be found.
“Sled might be hidden out there,” she mused.
For a time she contemplated going out in search of it. When, however, she realized that it was growing quite dark, and recalled Lucile’s unpleasant experience of the night before, she decided not to venture.
“If they come back to the beach again,” she told herself, “I can pick up their tracks in the snow farther down.”
Walking briskly, she covered the remaining distance to the spot on the beach opposite the O Moo.
“Not yet,” she whispered, and climbing over the trestle she made her way on down the beach. Her eyes were always on the ground. Now she climbed a trestle, now walked round an anchor frozen into the sand, but always her eyes returned to the tracks in the snow. Tracks enough there were, footprints of men, but never a trace of a sled leaving the ice.
She had gone a considerable distance when she became conscious of some person not far away. On looking up she was startled to note that she had reached a point opposite the great black scow where the Orientals lived.
At the end of the scow stood a man. His face disfigured by a scowl, he stood watching her. He was dressed in the black gownlike garb of the Chinese. He wore a queue. There was, however, something strange about his face. She fancied she had seen him somewhere before, but where she could not tell.
Then the man moved out of the light that shone on him from a window and was swallowed up by the shadows.
“No use going farther,” she told herself. “If the sled belongs on the dry dock somewhere it would be the easiest thing in the world for two persons to lift it on their shoulders and carry it in from the ice. That would throw one completely off the trail.”
Turning, she retraced her steps along the beach to the trestle work on which the O Moo rested, then swinging about to the right she made her way to the yacht’s side.
Once on deck, she made certain that the other girls were aboard, then retraced her steps to the deck’s side, where she pulled down the canvas and tied it securely. For a moment she stood listening to the lash of ropes on the mast. The canvas covering bulged and sagged. Cool air fanned her cheeks.
“Going to be a bad storm,” she told herself. “Offshore wind, too. All the ice will go out tonight, and everything with it that isn’t tied down.” When all was tight on deck she slipped into the cabin.
Lucile, who ate very little dinner that night, retired early. Marian studied until nine-thirty. The clock pointed at eleven when Florence, with a sigh of regret, put down her psychology to prepare for sleep.
“Whew!” she breathed, “what a storm! Listen to the canvas boom! Like a schooner at sea! Hope it doesn’t tear the canvas away. Hope it doesn’t—”
She did not finish the sentence. The thought which had come to her was too absurd.
Once snugly tucked in her bed, she found her mind returning to the morning’s discovery. What did that new ice on the lagoon mean? Why had the hole been cut? Why was the ice blue? Did the sled and the man sitting on the ice the night before have anything to do with it? Did the man cut that hole? If so, why?
He might, she told herself, have had something to conceal, some valuables, stolen diamonds or gold. But ho
w could he hope to recover it if he dropped it through a hole in the ice. The water beneath the ice was always murky and there was a strong current there. Anything dropped beneath that ice would be lost forever.
She remembered the two policemen whom Lucile had seen on the beach that same night. Perhaps those two men had been running from the officers, trying to conceal something. But how had the man come there on the ice? Perhaps—she started at the thought—perhaps this man rode there beneath the sled. The runners had been extraordinarily broad. A man could easily ride between them. The thought gave her a start.
She thought of Lucile’s experience in the old Mission, and of her own with the blue candlestick. Perhaps, she told herself, they dropped the blue god through the ice.
Then she smiled at herself. How could the blue god be in Chicago? If it were they would never drop it in the water beneath the ice where it could never be recovered. Yet why had the ice been blue? Why—
She fell asleep, to listen in her dreams to the lash of ropes, the boom of canvas and to dream of riding a frail craft on a storm-tossed sea.
It would be difficult to determine just why it is that one knows how long he has slept, yet we very often do know. One wakens in the middle of the night and before the clock strikes the hour he says to himself, “I have slept three hours.” And he is right.
When Florence awoke that night she knew she had been asleep for about five hours. It was dark, pitch dark, in the cabin. The storm was still raging.
“Just listen,” she murmured dreamily, “One could easily imagine that we were out to sea.”
There was a tremendous booming of canvas and a lashing sound which resembled the wash of the waves, but this last, she told herself, was the ropes beating the mast. She had dozed off again when some strange element of the storm brought her once more half awake.
“One would almost say the yacht was pitching,” she thought as in a dream, “but she’s firmly fastened. It is impossible. She—”
Suddenly she sat up fully awake. She had moved a trifle closer to the porthole. Her head had been banged against it.
The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 63
