The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Mildred A. Wirt

  “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.”

  “Today,” 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.r />
  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.”

  “Shh! Don’t talk,” she warned as Pearl began to babble excitedly. “We must get ou
t 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.”