Rogues on the River

by Alice Simpson

  “You have a great deal to worry you,” said Florence. “And you’re working too hard.”

  “I’ll be all right as soon as Fred’s trial is over. He’s not here this morning—” Anne’s voice broke. “In fact, I don’t know where he is. Fred was out all last night. He’s been trying to gain evidence which will prove his innocence.”

  “You mean your husband went away yesterday and failed to return?” I asked.

  Anne nodded. “He’s on the trail of the real saboteurs, and it’s dangerous business. That’s why I’m so worried. I’m afraid he’s in trouble.”

  “Have you talked to the police?” Flo inquired.

  “Indeed, I have not. The police are not to be trusted.”

  “Didn’t your husband tell you where he was going when he left home?”

  “No, he didn’t. He keeps things from me because he says I worry too much.”

  “I suppose he never explained what happened at the Green Parrot?”

  “He said he couldn’t remember, and I want to believe him. Oh, everything’s so mixed up. I try not to think about it, because when I do my head simply buzzes.”

  Once more Anne tried to start the balky engine, and this time her efforts brought success.

  “Thank goodness for small favors,” she shouted over the sputtering of the engine. “Now I’ve got to go out on the river and look for our stolen boat. Hope no one runs off with this place while I’m gone.”

  “You’ve not had another boat stolen?” Florence asked.

  “I figure that’s what happened to it. Late yesterday afternoon a man came here and rented our fastest motorboat. That’s the last I’ve seen of him or it.”

  “Didn’t you report your loss to the Coast Guards?” I asked Anne.

  Anne answered with a trace of impatience. “Of course, I did. They searched the river last night. No accident reported, and no trace of the boat.”

  “The man might have drowned,” Florence said.

  “Possibly, but that’s not very likely. If he had gone overboard, the empty boat would have been found by this time. No, it’s been pulled up somewhere in the bushes and hidden. Last year one of our canoes was taken. Fred found it a month later, painted a different color.”

  “Didn’t you know the man who rented the boat?” questioned Jane.

  “Never saw him before. He was tall and muscular and dark-haired. In his middle fifties. Wore a felt hat and a gray overcoat. I noticed his hands. They were soft and well-manicured. I said to myself, ‘This fellow doesn’t know a thing about boats,’ but I was wrong. He handled that motor like a veteran.”

  “The man didn’t look like a waiter, did he?” I asked.

  “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

  I wracked my brain to recall a distinguishing characteristic of the headwaiter of the Green Parrot. I could think of only two: that small scar on his cheek and that he had worn a large, old fashioned gold watch which might have been of foreign make.

  “The fellow who rented the boat did have a watch like that,” said Anne, “but I didn’t notice any scar. What is his name? The man who rented the boat went by the name of Harold Peters.”

  “Florence and I never were able to learn his name,” I told Anne. “The Green Parrot has closed its doors, so I don’t know how to track him down.”

  Anne sighed. She placed an oar, a bailer, and a can of gasoline in the boat, and prepared to leave the dock.

  “I’ll be lucky if I ever see that Peters fellow again if that was even his real name,” Anne said. After hesitating, she asked: “Don’t suppose you ladies would like to go along?”

  I wondered if my ears had betrayed me.

  “Why, of course, we’d love to go,” Flo said before I could find my voice.

  Florence and I scrambled out of the Maybelline, made her fast to the dock and transferred to the other boat. Anne opened the throttle, and we shot away, leaving behind a trail of churning foam. We rounded a channel buoy at breakneck speed.

  “You can certainly handle a boat,” I told Anne. I was a bit jealous, truth be known. Other women might envy another’s flawless skin, or flaxen hair or jewelry collection. I admire a woman who knows how to do things.

  “Been driving a boat since I was a kid,” Anne said, transparently pleased at my compliment. “I could cruise this river blindfolded.”

  We passed the floating barge. The Coast Guard cutter had arrived and was proceeding up river to take it in tow. Anne turned upstream and swung the boat toward shore.

  “Keep close watch of the bushes,” she told us. “If you see anything that looks like a hidden boat, sing out.”

  We crept along the river’s edge, watching for marks in the sand which might reveal where a craft had been pulled out of the water. Once, venturing too close in, Anne went aground and had to push off with the oars.

  “It doesn’t look as if we’ll have any luck,” she said after a full hour of searching. “The boat’s probably so well hidden; it would take a ferret to find it.”

  We kept on upstream ‘til we reached the Seventh Street Bridge, which was still closed to all save pedestrian traffic, then we turned downstream again, searching the opposite shore. Before we had gone far, Anne beached the boat on a stretch of sand.

  “It was along here that Fred found our canoe last year,” she explained. “If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll get out and prowl around a bit.”

  “Aren’t we near Bug Run?” I asked.

  Anne pointed out the mouth of the stream which was hidden from view by a clump of willows.

  “If you expect to be here a few minutes, Florence and I might pay Noah a flying visit,” I said. “We’re curious to learn what has happened to him.”

  “We are?” Flo protested.

  “Well, I am anyway. You aren’t going to make me go alone, are you?”

  “I’ll be around for at least half an hour,” Anne told us. “Take your time.”

  I set off along the twisting bank of Bug Run, Flo trailing behind. As we reached the vicinity of the ark, I began to see corked blue bottles caught amid the debris of the sluggish stream.

  “I’ll bet a cent and a half that Noah still is on the old stamping grounds,” I said to Florence. “Sheriff Anderson probably hasn’t found a way to get rid of him. Unless a deluge of Biblical proportions floods this stream, the ark never could be floated out to the main river.”

  “The sheriff could put Noah in jail.”

  “True, but a great many people would criticize him if he did.”

  “It would be heavy-handed. He is a harmless fellow, I suppose.”

  We rounded a bend in the stream and spotted the ark. Wet garments fresh from the wash tub hung from a long clothes line stretched from bow to stern flapped in the breeze.

  “Noah is still here,” I said to Flo. “He’s run up the white flag, though. Or should we say the white flags.”

  Noah was so busy that he failed to note our approach. He stood in the center of a ring of soiled clothes, laboring diligently over a tub of steaming suds.

  As we reached the gangplank, a dog from inside the ark began to bark. Noah glanced up, startled, but then went right back to his work. His long white beard slipped into the soapy water, and unknowingly he rubbed it vigorously on the washboard.

  I heard Flo behind me, suppressing a giggle. As Noah kept on scrubbing his beard, I could not resist saying loudly: “Excuse me, but aren’t you washing your whiskers by mistake?”

  Surprised, the old man straightened to his full height. Squeezing the dripping beard, he carefully wrung it out. Next, he produced a comb from his loose-fitting brown pantaloons, and painstakingly unsnarled the tangles. Only after attending to his beard did he greeted us.

  “Good morning, my daughters. I am glad you kept your promise to visit me again.”

  “Good morning, Noah,” I said, trying not to laugh. “We thought we would drop by and see if you were still here. I remember Sheriff Anderson said he was going to call on you again.”

  �
�So he did, but he reckoned without the Might of the Righteous. I was watching for him when he came.”

  “I hope you didn’t mistreat him,” I said. “If you assault an officer of the law, they can throw you in jail.”

  “I am not a violent man,” Noah said as if the very notion of assaulting an officer was absurd. “When I observed his approach, I untied my two hounds, Nip and Tuck, and hid myself in the forest. He was gone when I returned to the ark.”

  “Likewise, part of his anatomy, I suppose,” Flo said.

  “Nip and Tuck did cause a commotion,” Noah acknowledged, “but they did him no harm. When he went away, the sheriff left a cowardly note tacked to a tree. It said he would return to dispossess me. Before that happens, I will blow this ark to Kingdom Come.”

  “How will you do that?” I asked, alarmed. Perhaps, Noah was not as peaceful as I believed him to be.

  “I’ll blow it up with dynamite.”

  “Do you keep dynamite aboard the ark?”

  Noah smiled mysteriously. “I know where I can lay my hands on all I’ll need. When I was hiding in the woods yesterday, I saw where they keep it.”

  I couldn’t help glancing over at Florence. While it was possible that Noah was imagining things, this loose talk of dynamite made me extremely uneasy.

  “Whose dynamite is it?” I asked Noah.

  “I don’t rightly know. It may belong to those strangers who were pestering me last night. They came to my ark and were very nosey, asking me about this and that.”

  “Not police officers?”

  “These men had no connection with the Law. They spoke of the police with great contempt.”

  “How many men were there, Noah?”

  “Two.”

  “And they came by car?”

  “Bless you, no,” replied Noah wearily. “They arrived in a motorboat. Of all the pop-poppin’ you ever heard. It almost drove my animals crazy.”

  “After they talked to you, the men went away again in their boat?”

  “They started off, but as soon as they had turned the bend, they switched off the motor. I wondered what they were up to, so I sneaked through the bushes and spied on them.”

  “Yes, go on,” I urged Noah as he interrupted his narrative to wash another shirt. “What did the men do then?”

  “Nothing much. They just pulled the boat up into the bushes and went off and left it.”

  “The boat is still there?”

  “So far as I know, my daughter.”

  “Will you show us where the boat is hidden? And the dynamite cache too?”

  “I am too busy now,” Noah said, shaking his flowing locks. “I have this pesky washing to do, and then, there are all the animals to feed.”

  “Can’t we help you?” offered Florence. ”Then you’d have time to show us.”

  “I thank you kindly, but it would not be fit work for ladies. If you will return tomorrow, I gladly will guide you to the place.”

  Florence and I tried all our considerable powers of persuasion, but the old man was not to be moved. In the end, we had to be satisfied with a description of the site where the motorboat had been hidden. Noah stubbornly refused to tell us the location of the cache of dynamite.

  When we finally said goodbye to the master of the ark, we had been gone longer than I had anticipated. We hurried back in the direction of the river to join Anne before she started to worry that something had happened to us.

  “Noah may be making up wild stories, or it’s possible he has hallucinations from time-to-time,” I said to Flo as we struggled through the underbrush on the creek bank, “but if he’s telling the truth, I think we’ve stumbled into an important clue—one which may have a bearing on the bridge dynamiting case.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anne was waiting beside her boat when Flo and I came running along the muddy shore. I was so excited to relay our conversation with Noah that I forgot all about apologizing for keeping Anne waiting.

  “Maybe that hidden motorboat is ours,” Anne said. “What did it look like?”

  “We didn’t take time to search for it,” I told her. “We knew you would be waiting, so we came straight here.”

  “Let’s see if we can find it,” Anne said, as she fired up the engine.

  “Noah’s animals don’t like motorboats,” Florence pointed out. “I suggest we do our searching afoot.”

  “All right,” Anne agreed, switching the motor off again. “Lead and I’ll follow.”

  We returned to the mouth of Bug Run and then along its slippery banks to a clump of overhanging willows.

  “According to Noah’s description, this should be the place,” I said. “No sign of a boat though.”

  Anne took off her shoes and stockings and waded through the shallow, muddy water. Whenever she came to a clump of bushes, she would pull the branches aside to peer behind them.

  “Noah may have been spoofing us,” I said, sorry for Anne that our search had turned out to be fruitless, but my regret was premature because just then Anne gave a little cry.

  “Here it is. I’ve found our boat!”

  Florence and I slid down the bank to the water’s edge. A motorboat had been pulled out on the sand and hidden behind a dense thicket of brambles. The engine remained attached, covered by a piece of canvas.

  “Is it your boat, Anne?”

  “I’m sure of it. The hull has been repainted, but it takes more than a lick of paint to fool me.”

  “Any way to positively identify it?”

  “By the engine number. Ours was 985-877 unless I’m mistaken. I have it written down at home.”

  “What’s the number of this engine?”

  “The same!” Anne cried triumphantly after she had removed the canvas covering and examined it. “This is my property all right, and I shall take it back with me.”

  “Noah spoke of two strangers who came here last night by boat,” I said.

  “The fellow who stopped at the dock probably picked up a pal later on,” Anne grunted as she tried to shove the boat back into the water. “My, this old tub is heavy. Want to help?”

  “Wait, Anne,” I said. “Let’s leave the boat here.”

  “Leave it here? I don’t think so. This little piece of floating wood represents three hundred dollars.”

  “I don’t mean that you’re to lose the boat,” I explained. “But if we take it now, we never will catch the fellow who stole it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “If we leave the boat here, we can keep watch of the place and catch those scoundrels when they come back.”

  “They may never come back,” Anne said. “Besides, I’ve no time play at Watson to your Holmes in the bushes. I have my dock to look after.”

  “Florence can be Watson,” I said, “We’ll do most of the watching.”

  “Why must I be Watson?” Flo interrupted.

  “Alright, then,” I amended, “I will play Watson, and Florence can be Holmes. My point is that Anne only has to be Anne and go back to her docks while we take care of the sleuthing end of things.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Anne was still far from convinced. “Something might go wrong. I never would get over it if I lost the boat.”

  “You won’t lose the boat,” I promised. “It’s really important that we catch those two men. From what Noah said, they may have something to do with the bridge dynamiting, and most likely the explosion at the Maxwell Factory, too.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because Noah found a cache of dynamite somewhere near here.”

  “He refused to divulge to us its location,” added Florence. “But he was right about the boat, so I’m inclined to believe he’s telling the truth about the dynamite.”

  “If it should develop that the men are saboteurs, we might learn something which would help your husband’s case,” I said. “How about it, Anne?”

  “I’d be glad to risk the boat if I thought it would help Fred.”

  “
Then let’s leave it here. We can watch the spot night and day.”

  “Won’t anybody miss you if you don’t show up at home for supper?”

  “You can phone home for us,” I told Anne. “We’ll watch this boat day and night until those ne’er-do-wells show up again. Then if necessary, we’ll involve the police.”

  “Let’s leave the police out of it,” Anne said. “If you and Flo will remain throughout the day, I’ll stand the night watch.”

  “Not alone!” Florence protested.

  “Why not? I’ve frequently camped out along the river at night. Once I made a canoe trip the full length of the river just for the fun of it.”

  “Florence and I will stay here now while you return to the dock and telephone home for us, so we don’t end up the subjects of a search and rescue mission,” I told Anne.

  “What will you do for lunch?” Anne asked.

  “Maybe we can beg a sandwich or a fried egg from Noah. We’ll manage somehow.”

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t leave the boat unguarded,” Anne admonished us as she started up her engine. “As soon as it gets dark I’ll come back.”

  Left to ourselves, Florence and I explored our surroundings. Not far from the stolen boat we found a log which offered a comfortable seat, conveniently screened by underbrush.

  “Now we’re all ready for Mr. Saboteur,” I told Flo. “He can’t come too soon to suit me. It’s all very well talking about skipping lunch, but in practice, I’m afraid the experience may be quite trying.”

  “And just what are we going to do when Mr. Saboteur does arrive?”

  “I’m still working on that part of my plan,” I confessed. “We may have to call on Noah for help. He may be white of beard and have more wrinkles than Methuselah, but if ever driven to violence I have no doubt his opponent would come away worse for the wear.”

  “What if Noah happens to be too busy doing a washing or giving the goat a beauty treatment?” Florence said. “If he does come, he might just threaten to call fire down from heaven, but I don’t see him going after anyone with that stick of his. Well, not unless they threatened Bessie.”

  The sun drifted higher, and steam rose from the damp ground. As the hours dragged by, Flo rapidly lost zest for our adventure, and long before noon, all I could think about was a nice ham sandwich with plenty of pickles and extra mustard.