“Great!” Frank exulted.
After their excitement wore off, the three fell asleep, but were awakened a few hours later by Crowfeet. He beckoned them to join him on deck.
“Ha-ha.” He chuckled. “I see you’ve resigned yourselves to your fate and rested calmly.”
“What’s the use of resisting?” Frank said bitterly. “You’re too smart for us!”
“Now you’re talking sense, boy. I’m smarter than all the Hardys put together. People call my ship the phantom freighter. Good name for it, eh?”
“You said last night that we’d get along fine if we behaved ourselves,” Joe said. “Does that mean you’ll let us join up with your crew?”
“I can always use strong hands,” growled Crowfeet. “We’ll see.” He eyed the boys narrowly. “You’re pretty clever. Caught on to my code, though in the end that’s how I got you here!” He laughed uproariously.
Frank asked if the various parts of the code stood for ships and places. He was told they did. A23 meant the phantom freighter, and in combination with some other number meant a certain ship was to meet the freighter at a designated time and place.
Crowfeet gave orders that they were to be given breakfast, and later they were allowed to go on deck. The boys scanned the ocean but saw no plume of smoke or other sign of a ship.
“Not looking for the Father Neptune by any chance, are you?” Crowfeet said sarcastically. “Well, forget it. We’re far away from her. She doesn’t even know where we are.” He added, “Come here. I’ll show you something!”
On a staging lowered over the side, two men armed with giant spray guns were directing great clouds of gray paint at the dark hull of the Black Gull.
“Sometimes we hardly have time to let one coat dry before we have to change the color and the name again,” Crowfeet bragged. “Get our supplies from launches and never go into port.”
“You called your ship the Falcon once, didn’t you?” asked Frank.
Crowfeet gave the Hardys a superior look. “You almost found me out while I was using that name, because the motor of that fishing launch went dead. Well, I can’t tell you everything! We gotta have some secrets!”
As time dragged by and no help came, Frank and Joe began to lose hope. Perhaps their message had not been received. Then, suddenly, they noticed a white dot on the horizon. Their hearts leaped wildly. The spot soon enlarged into a snowy canvas. Closer and closer it came, until they recognized a racing sloop under full sail!
Suddenly there was a shout from Crowfeet. “What’s that yacht doing out there? I don’t like this. Full speed ahead!”
The phantom freighter, its name now the Red Bird, rattled and groaned as its speed increased.
“Say, it looks like they’re chasing us!” Crowfeet yelled wildly. “My repeller! My repeller! It can’t work against a sailing ship!”
He bellowed orders to the engine room. But it was no use. The big sloop soon overtook the Red Bird. Over the water blared a crisp command from a bullhorn:
“Stop your engines and lower a ladder! We’re boarding you for inspection!”
“Coast Guard!” screamed Crowfeet. He ran toward his cabin for a rifle, but Frank and Joe, hitting him high and low, brought the criminal down with a bone-cracking tackle.
Crowfeet rose to his feet, dazed. A few minutes later an officer came over the side, followed by Fenton Hardy.
After a joyous reunion between the detective and his sons, Crowfeet learned how he had been outsmarted. Realizing the game was up, he gave his real name, Harry Piper, and threw himself at the mercy of the authorities with a full confession.
Crowfeet had preyed on people in many walks of life. He had even stolen inventions and kidnapped their inventors. Professor Rossiter was not the only prisoner on board. There also was a chemist who had perfected a method of aging wood and paper. Crowfeet had forced him to counterfeit old documents and letters which were then sold as collectors’ items.
“I figured out how to hide the papers in cartons of compressed wool along with ampules of an illegal drug and ship them to the houses of people who were away,” Crowfeet boasted. “And if I hadn’t had such stupid fools working for me, you’d never have caught me!”
“Like the two who got into a fight in a motorboat on Barmet Bay and threw a carton overboard?” remarked Joe.
Crowfeet just grunted.
“And you stole electric motors,” Frank accused.
The captain admitted that he had. He bragged of how he had outwitted Customs in smuggling thousands of dollars’ worth of goods in and out of the country, including the South American cowhides which the boys had discovered in the old barn.
The Hardys also learned that one of the gang had tinkered with the gas tank and radio on Captain Harkness’s boat, fearful they were going to search for the phantom freighter.
“How you kids got passage on the Father Neptune I’ll never know,” growled Crowfeet. “But when I heard you had, I sneaked men aboard the ship to reload the cargo so it would shift.”
Klack, too, was found hiding below. The FBI would have one less wanted man to hunt for!
Mr. Hardy revealed that the captains of the Hawk and the Wasp and several others in the gang had been captured already. “James Johnson” had finally confessed his part in the scheme, saying if he had not been greedy and kept Aunt Gertrude’s carton, and, with “Mrs. Harrison‘s” help, sold the contents, the Hardys would probably never have caught the gang.
The thief admitted that he had lost his good-luck medal in the Phillips’s barn and that his cigarette butt might have started the fire.
Because “Mrs. Harrison” had warned Frank and Joe about the danger of going on the freighter trip, she would perhaps get a lighter sentence, as well as the man who had telephoned the Hardys, telling them that Frank was on the bungalow porch.
Contact was made with the Father Neptune. The worried passengers cheered when they heard the news of the boys’ release and the smugglers’ capture. As the phantom freighter headed toward it, Professor Rossiter came on deck and joined the Hardys.
“You don’t know what this means to me,” he said. “I had given up all hope for rescue. Now if I could only find my partner, Thaddeus McClintock, with whom I worked on the repeller before—”
“McClintock!” the boys interrupted in unison.
“Why, yes,” Rossiter replied. “Do you know him?”
“He’s aboard the Father Neptune!” Frank said.
“I’m sure he thought I stole the plans. But now ...”
When the Hardys witnessed the happy reunion of McClintock and his partner they felt well rewarded for their work.
Mr. McClintock beamed. He had been planning to ask Frank and Joe to investigate Rossiter’s strange disappearance when they returned from the freighter trip. It was the mystery he had talked about.
“But now that won’t be necessary,” he said. “How would you like a new car instead? Or something else?”
Frank and Joe stopped him short. “Please, sir,” Frank said, “just being able to help round up this gang and have a trip is reward enough.”
When the excitement was over, and the Father Neptune with McClintock’s party was steadily plowing southward, the Hardys began to wonder what their next adventure would be. They had no way of knowing then that sinister forces at work in Bayport would involve them in The Secret of Skull Mountain.
Suddenly Chet, who had been listening to them, gave a tremendous sigh. “We’ve had enough mystery for a while,” he said. “Let’s eatl”
“Nothing better than food, is there, Chet?” Joe quipped.
“There sure is.”
“What?” Biff Hooper asked.
“That new car Frank and Joe just turned down!” Chet replied.
Gales of laughter drifted out over the sea.
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The Phantom Freighter Page 12
