The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Mildred A. Wirt

  “It’s too late to go to the fort now,” said Ruth as she straightened up to ease her aching back. “Let’s go for a sail instead.”

  So a sail it was. They dropped down around the island and, skimming along over a faultless sea, came at last just as the shadows were deepening to Witches Cove.

  “Let’s drop anchor and have our supper here,” suggested Pearl.

  “Three gray witches may rise from the water and ask to join us,” said Ruth with a low laugh.

  “Let them,” said Pearl, sending the anchor with a plunk into the sea. “There are worse creatures about than gray witches. Here’s hoping they don’t come too close to us.”

  The tide was setting in. The Flyaway which, like some active child, seemed always aching to be away, swung and turned, turned and dragged at anchor until she lay within a few feet of the rocky shore. Lying on the deck, munching crabmeat sandwiches and whispering of many things, the girls did not notice this until, with a suddenness that was startling, some dark object came flying through the air to land lightly on the deck.

  “Boo!” exclaimed Pearl, springing up.

  “Only a black cat,” laughed Ruth. “Smelled our crabmeat. There are some cunners in the box by the mast. Give him one.”

  The girls had settled down once more to quiet murmuring, when from the rocks on the shore came a call.

  “Ahoy, there! Something tells me you have one of my cats.”

  “Or he has us,” said Pearl.

  “Oh! It is you?” It was the little Secret Service man who spoke. “How are you? Anything new?”

  “You should know!” said Ruth. “Black Gull is gone!”

  “Yes, that’s right. But I don’t see—”

  “Then you don’t see very well. She was blown up. Wasn’t supposed to be any explosives in her hold, was there? Who put them there?”

  Ruth went on to remind him of her stolen punt and of the explosives she had found in it. She told him too of the secret meeting of the mock pirates on the Black Gull.

  “Does look like the work of the man smugglers,” he admitted. “Question is, were they using the old ship as a storehouse for stolen explosives, or did they wish to destroy the meeting place of those who have been attempting to bring them to justice?”

  “Well, at any rate,” he said after a moment’s silence, “the Black Gull is gone, and that’s one more loss to charge against them. Something tells me that their days in this, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, are numbered.”

  “I hope so,” said Ruth fervently.

  “Ruth,” whispered Pearl, leaning close, “shall we tell him about Fort Skammel?”

  “No. Not yet,” the other girl whispered back.

  His lunch finished, the black cat was returned to his master, then in the darkness the Flyaway edged out to the channel and away toward home.

  In order to avoid the deeper channel where larger boats might be encountered, they sailed close to old Fort Skammel. There in the shadows of those ancient walls they met with further adventure.

  As they came very close to the fort that at this point towers straight above the sea, the night suddenly went dark. It was as if some ghost of other days, a prisoner perhaps who had died in the fort’s dungeon, had turned off the light of the Universe.

  Ruth shuddered and suddenly felt herself grow cold all over.

  “Only a very dark cloud before the moon,” she told herself. “No danger. Know the way in the dark.”

  So she did, but there was danger all the same. That she knew well enough in a moment, for of a sudden there came the pop-pop of a gasoline motor and a boat swinging round the point of the island began following them.

  “No one lives on the island,” she said to Pearl in a low tone tense with emotion. “They must be following us. They burned Black Gull last night. Now they are after us. Well, if the wind holds they won’t get us.”

  She put her boat exactly before the wind. Her deck tipped till it dipped water. Yet the staunch-hearted girl did not alter the course by so much as an inch.

  “Show ’em, Flyaway. Show ’em!” She spoke in tender tones as if the schooner were a child.

  They were gliding silently up the bay when a pencil of light like a hot finger reached forward to touch them, then blinked out.

  “Powerful electric torch,” the girl told herself.

  A moment, two, three passed. The pop-popping grew louder.

  “Gaining,” she said with a sigh that was a sob. “Should have told all. Had the customs officials, Civil Service, Captain O’Connor and all after them,” she said to Pearl. “But that room in the old fort. I wanted to see it. Silks, dresses, such things as she’d never seen, that’s what Betty said.”

  The pencil of light felt for them again out of the dark, found them, then swung away.

  “Nearer,” said Ruth. “Much nearer. Get us. And then?”

  She leaned far forward, trying to see into the night. Fort Georges was ahead there somewhere, and—

  The sudden reach of the white finger of light showed her something—a dark bulk straight ahead.

  Quick as a flash she shot a line free, gripped a yardarm, reefed the sail, reached out into the dark, felt something, braced herself against it, held the schooner away, but allowed her to move forward until with a sigh she lost the touch of that hard bulk and all but fell into the sea.

  The schooner swerved to the right, then glided forward once more.

  “Hist!” Ruth whispered. “We are inside the sunken hull of Black Gull. For—for the moment, even in death she has saved us.

  “Quick!” she said ten seconds later. “We will leave the Flyaway here and take to our dory.”

  As they crept away into the night with muffled oars making no sound, they saw the pencil of light searching the bay for them. It searched in vain.

  A half hour later they were on their own beach. At once Don in the Foolemagin was away with three armed men to scour the bay. They found the Flyaway where the girls had left her, inside the scarred hull of Black Gull, but the motor boat with its creeping pencil of white light had vanished off the sea.

  “Tomorrow,” Ruth said to Pearl as she bade her good night, “shall be the last day. Either we visit the mystery room of old Fort Skammel or we turn the whole affair over to the authorities.”

  Before retiring Ruth sat for a long time before her window, looking out into the night, thinking things through.

  The night was too dark to see far. In a way, she was thankful for that. Black Gull was gone. She felt a tightening at the throat. When she recalled how the broken and charred skeleton of this once noble boat had saved her from something very terrible, she wanted to cry. Two unruly tears did splash down on her cheek.

  “I must be brave,” she told herself. “There is much work to do.”

  Work. They would go to old Fort Skammel in the morning. She was sure of that. And then?

  The whole affair, or group of affairs, as she looked back upon them, now appeared to be coming together. The old wood ship with the bolts of cloth in her hold, the dory’s creaking oars in the night, their visit to Black Gull, the strange pirate band, the face-in-the-fire, the curious little man at Witches Cove, the mysterious room at the heart of the old fort, their pursuers this very night, it all appeared to be reaching out to join into a solid whole.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Betty’s experience off Green Island with the big guns and the seaplane might prove to be a part of the drama, though how I can’t see.”

  A sound from off the bay reminded her of the great dark seaplane Pearl had seen off Monhegan.

  “Monhegan and the girl I saved from the sea,” she said to herself. “How do they work in? Well, perhaps they don’t. As life is built up, some stones must be thrown aside.

  “Life,” she said quite suddenly, “life is a joke.”

  Somehow the words did not seem to ring true. She was tempted to wonder how she had come to believe that at all.

  “It was the way that boy said it,
I suppose,” she told herself. “Some people have a way about them. They are hard to resist.”

  Stepping to the chest of drawers in one corner of her room, she took out the figured taffeta dress. It was a very attractive dress—pink roses over a background of pale gray. She had never worn it. To wear it would be to declare to her little world that she believed life was a joke. At least that was the way she felt about it. So, as yet, she did not feel ready to put it on.

  Spreading it out on the bed, she looked at it for a long time. Then, carefully folding it up again, she put it back in the drawer.

  After that, with all the realization of what tomorrow might bring forth, she did something she had not done since she was a little child. She dropped on her knees beside her humble bed, and placed her palms together in prayer.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE OLD FORT

  Coming events do not always cast their shadows before them; or, if they do, those shadows are so filmy and ghostlike that only one endowed with the keenest of vision is able to see them. Never was there a fresher, calmer sea than that which greeted the three girls, Betty, Pearl and Ruth, when they pushed off in Ruth’s punt that morning bound for Fort Skammel. A perfect morning, not a shadowy suggestion of adventure. And yet—

  An hour after they left the sandy beach of the island, Ruth’s unnerved fingers dropped a lighted electric torch on the floor at the heart of the ancient fort. It fell with a dull thud, and blinked out.

  “Hot,” Ruth whispered. “The air down there is hot!”

  “I told you,” Betty whispered back. She was working feverishly, struggling to free a second flashlight from the tangled mesh of her knitted sweater pocket.

  Sensing what she was about, Ruth whispered:

  “Get—get it?”

  “Not yet.” The younger girl’s words came in short gasps.

  Little wonder that they were startled. Having penetrated into the very heart of the old fort, having made their way through a one-time secret passage to a dungeon, they had come at last to the door in the floor. And the door stood wide open. Against their cheeks, grown cold from constant contact with clammy air, had blown a breath that seemed hot like the blast of a furnace.

  They had come to a sudden halt, and there they stood.

  Even in the broad light of day there is something gloomy, foreboding and mysterious about old Fort Skammel. Children who have ventured across the bay to the all but deserted island, where this ancient abandoned fort stands, will tell you of curious tales of adventures met with there, how the red eyes of rats as big as cats gleamed at them in the dark, how they have discovered secret passageways that led on and on until in fright they turned and went racing back into the bright light of day, and how at times ghostlike voices sounded down the echoing aisles.

  In a little cove where the sand was snow white the three girls had drawn their punt high on the beach. Pearl had volunteered to stand guard outside. The other two had begun wending their way over a path that winds between tall grass and bushes to the fort.

  Finding themselves at last before a great open stone archway that led directly into the chill damp of the fort, they had paused to listen and to think. The next moment, with a little quickening at her heart, Ruth had led the way into the semi-darkness of a stone corridor, and from there on and on into the deepening darkness. Now, here they were. Ruth had longed to look into that mysterious room. The opening to it was now at her feet, yet she felt more inclined to run away than to linger.

  “Can’t you get it?” she whispered again, as no light appeared.

  “It’s caught in my pocket. No, now I have it.”

  The next instant a yellow light brought out once more the damp and dripping walls of stone with the mysterious opening in the floor at their feet.

  “It was hot.” Ruth’s tone was full of awe. “I felt it. I felt hot air on my cheek!”

  “So did I.”

  Putting out two fingers, Ruth felt the fanning of hot air. “Warm,” she said, “not hot. Just seemed that way. But how could it be?”

  “Can’t be a stove?”

  “No. Tons of granite above.” Her eyes sought the low stone arch over their heads.

  “Going to see,” said Ruth stoutly, dropping on her knees.

  With a gasp Betty put out a hand to stop her. She was too late. Ruth had caught the ledge and swung down. Betty could but follow. The next instant they were looking upon a strange scene. This room, warmed by some mysterious power, as Betty had said, was piled high with bales and boxes of every description.

  One of the boxes had slid from its place and burst open, revealing a half dozen silk dresses of bright and varied hues.

  At once Ruth’s heart was in her throat. Here was treasure. Where was its keeper?

  A rapid survey of the room revealed the surprising fact that there was no keeper, or at least, if there was one, he was away.

  The thing that the two girls did after recovering from their astonishment might, by some cold and practical people, seem the height of folly. Certainly, under the circumstances, it could not be called wise. But who of us all behave wisely at all times?

  Placing the flashlight carefully in the niche in the wall, Ruth picked up the top dress of the half dozen in the broken cardboard box.

  It was a beautiful thing of purple, so thin and soft that it waved like a rippling sea.

  “How strange!” she murmured. “Just my size.”

  Before she knew what she was about, her khaki waist and knickers were off and the beautiful dress was on.

  Not a moment had passed before Betty, too, was dressed in silk, a marvelous creation of flaming red.

  And then, faint and from far away, there echoed down the long-abandoned corridors the sound of footsteps.

  “This way!” Seizing the flashlight, with no thought of how she was garbed, Ruth leaped up and out, then on tiptoe went racing down the aisle that led away from the chamber of mysteries, and on and on into the dark.

  Madly the feet of the two girls flew down a winding corridor, wildly their hearts beat, as they fled from resounding footsteps.

  Now the round circle of yellow light from their electric torch guided them. And now, as Ruth suddenly realized that the light would reveal their whereabouts, the light blinked out, and, dropping to a walk, then to a slow creep, guided only by the sense of touch, they moved along between the dripping walls.

  “Could anything be worse?” said Betty.

  “Nothing,” Ruth came back.

  She was thinking, thinking hard. Tales had been told of ancient wells dug there years ago to enable the garrison to withstand a siege. That the wells now stood uncovered down there somewhere in the depths of the earth, she knew all too well.

  “If we blunder into one of those!” Her heart stopped beating.

  “The dresses!” Betty whispered suddenly. “Our khakis! We left them. We must go back for them. They will have us arrested.”

  “We can’t. They won’t,” said Ruth, still pushing ahead in the dark.

  “Ought to turn on the light,” she told herself. “Must! It’s not safe.”

  Pausing to listen, she caught the shuffling scamper of rats, the snap of bats. But louder still came the tramp—tramp of heavy feet.

  In her fear and despair, she sprang forward, to go crashing against a solid wall.

  Knocked half senseless, she sank to her knees. There for a moment she remained motionless. For a moment only, then she was on her feet and away. Her eyes had caught a faint glimmer of light. Far down the narrow passage to the left shone the steady light of day.

  “Light!” she whispered solemnly. “Light and hope.”

  One moment of mad racing and they were blinking in the sunlight.

  The race was not over. Out of the passage, down a set of ancient stone steps, into the grass and bushes, skirts tight and high, they flew until they came up short and panting at the beach.

  There in the calm morning were Pearl and the punt.

  “You’re here!” Ruth p
uffed. “Thank God, you’re here!”

  Next moment she stood knee deep in water, launching the punt. Then with a little gasp of hope, she swung the punt about and began rowing as if for her very life.

  CHAPTER XVII

  SECRETS TOLD

  For a full ten minutes the three girls appeared to act a perfect scene in a moving picture. Ruth rowed furiously. Betty sat with eyes fixed on the receding shoreline. Pearl stared at Ruth and Betty with unbelieving eyes.

  At the end of that time Ruth dropped her oars to mop her brow. They were now well out in the bay. Fishing boats and motor launch dotted the bay. It was day, bright and fair. No one was pursuing them. To all appearances they were as safe here as at home.

  “Where did you get them?” Pearl was still staring at their silk dresses.

  “Why—er—” Ruth began, with mock gravity, “that’s a marvelous place down there in the old fort. You go in dressed in cotton blouse and knickers and you come out all togged up in silk.”

  “Ruth,” said Betty, “we’ll be arrested!”

  “Let ’em try it!” said Ruth. “If we’d taken the whole pile they wouldn’t dare. They’re trespassers, smugglers, thieves, perhaps. It’s safe enough. But girls,” her tone grew suddenly sober, “it’s time some one in authority took a hand. This has been a perfectly glorious adventure, thrilling, mysterious and all that, but it’s gone quite far enough. Who shall we tell?”

  “My little man at Witches Cove,” said Pearl. “He is a Secret Service man. Besides, he’s quite wonderful.”

  “All right, then. Witches Cove it is,” said Ruth, gripping her oars once more. “We’ll hug the right shore. That way, anyone that’s watching can’t tell for sure where we’re going.”

  In spite of this precaution some one knew whither they were headed, and no good came of it.

  The little man of Witches Cove had an uncanny way of anticipating the arrival of visitors to his rugged shores. They found him seated on a great boulder with his feet dangling perilously near the water.