The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  I’ll say this for Bascom…he didn’t waste any time cussing his luck. He must have taken a quick look at the situation, accepted it in an instant and acted accordingly. For he never paused when he reached the outboard. As he jumped down into it, he twitched its painter loose from the dock pole. Then he turned, balancing in the pitching boat, and set both hands against the edge of the dock. Leaning over his hands to get maximum leverage, he gave a mighty shove with them against the edge of the dock. And as his boat skittered out into Dolphin Inlet, he scrambled aft over its thwarts toward the kicker in the stern.

  The tide was on the ebb and the outboard began to drift rapidly toward the center of the inlet, bouncing over the little waves. Harter bent over the motor when he reached it and began to jerk frantically at the starting cord.

  He was home free. Nobody could catch him now. Not if the motor caught.

  By this time I had reached the dock, and I kicked off the other moccasin as I pounded over the planks. That was all I had time to do before I took a flat running dive off the dock and felt the cool waters of Dolphin Inlet close around me once again.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE TREASURE

  When I came to the surface, I shook the water out of my eyes to see what direction to aim at. I gulped in a breath, got low in the water and started to swim as fast as I could toward a spot where the outgoing tide ought to place Harter’s boat in about two minutes.

  It was a hopeless effort, probably. I knew that. Once the outboard motor caught, Harter would be away like a racer. He’d leave me so far behind in seconds that even Tarzan couldn’t catch him. He was already twenty yards from the dock and gaining headway on the strong current. But I was just stubborn enough to keep after him as long as I had any chance at all. The way I felt about him, I wanted to lay just one good punch on him, the way I had on Osgood. So I swam like crazy and kept hoping his motor would balk long enough for me to reach him.

  Next time I lifted my head to gauge distance and direction, it seemed like I might get lucky twice in the same day. For the outboard motor wouldn’t start. Harter was fiddling viciously with the choke and trying to brace himself in the moving boat for another hearty yank on the starting cord.

  I swam harder than ever. I lashed at the surface of Dolphin Inlet like a guy trying to dig a permanent trench in the water. And I was covering distance in pretty fair style when a stutter of underwater thunder hit my eardrums. I knew what that was. The roar of an outboard motor catching, a propeller taking its first bite at the water under high acceleration. I was going to miss him after all.

  That thought put a little temper into my last effort. I made a desperate stab forward with my right arm and groped blind for the boat. I ought to be within a few feet of it now, if my figuring of its drift was right. And it was. For my fingers closed over the gunwale of the boat amidships. I brought my left hand around and grabbed on with that, too. As a result, I nearly had both shoulders torn loose from their moorings. The racing motor sent the boat ahead with a strong preliminary lunge that jerked me along like a rag doll hitched to the side.

  I hung on. I had the boat. And Harter was in the boat. So I wasn’t about to let go. In fact, I tried a little action of my own. I pulled myself up on the side of the boat as it began to pick up speed. Then I plunged down again and yanked downward on the gunwale with my full weight and all my strength.

  I had no idea whether it would do any good. But luckily, the boat hadn’t got much weigh on her yet. And Harter, still standing in the stern by the kicker, wasn’t the steadiest steersman in the world right then. So when I rocked his boat, I rocked his steering arm, too, and the boat slewed around sharply, throwing him off balance.

  Well, what happened then was the prettiest thing I’d seen yet in Dolphin Inlet except Susan. The gunwale I was hanging to clipped clear down below the surface. Harter made a wild grab at something to hold him topside. All he got was a handful of air. And the next thing he knew, he was splashing into the inlet with arms and legs going like a pin-wheel, tilted out of his boat as neat as I’d shuck an oyster. It was beautiful.

  The most beautiful part of it was that Harter started choking right away. It prevented him from outswimming me, outfighting me or outdiving me, if he’d had it in mind to try any of those things. All he could do with the mouthful of water he swallowed when I dumped him was to gag and gasp and cough and wave his arms around while I took a lifesaver’s grip on him and towed him ashore to where Mike and Susan were watching it all from the dock. Harter’s empty outboard boat had gone hard aground on the inlet beach nearby and the beaching killed the motor.

  I handed Harter up to Mike who lifted him out on the dock as easily as he’d lift a baby. Mike said, “Nice work, Pete,” in a kind of surprised way.

  “Thanks,” I said, as I climbed out on the dock. “Arrest this guy, Mike, will you please?”

  “What charge?” Mike said, grinning at me.

  “Attempted kidnapping for one thing. Maybe murder for another.” I turned to Susan. She was standing there crying, wiping the tears off her cheeks with the ends of her hair. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. “You hurt?”

  She shook her head and kept on crying. “No,” she said. “Are you?”

  “Not me,” I said. I was breathing hard but that was all.

  “I-I-I guess I’m just excited,” Susan sobbed. I patted her on the back and felt stupid.

  “She’s all right,” Mike said. “She told me about the attempted kidnapping. But whose murder? Chapin’s?”

  “Yeah. It’s a good bet they killed Chapin, Mike. Harter and Perry Osgood together.”

  Mike was bewildered. “Harter? Is this Harter?” He shook the bedraggled Harter in one hand. Harter coughed up more water.

  “That’s Harter. The fellow Susan called Mr. X. Bascom Harter.”

  “Where’s Osgood?”

  “Locked in the shed up there.” I pointed.

  “I know that. I mean Hamilton Osgood?”

  “Dead. Perry said Chapin killed his brother in Spain.”

  “How come?” Mike stared at me, thunderstruck.

  “I don’t know.” I waved toward the mouth of the inlet. “Maybe something to do with the treasure ship out there on the bottom. We kind of forgot to tell you about that, Mike. Anyway, why don’t you take them to jail and ask them?” I was still upset about Susan’s crying.

  “I will,” Mike said. “It’s a nice little party you’ve had out here this morning, I can see that. Treasure, hey? Well, well, I didn’t know whether to believe your message or not, Pete. Lucky I did, though.” He grinned at me, man to man, for the first time since I’d known him. “Otherwise you’d have had to haul these two to jail yourself, as well as licking them both single-handed. Come on, buddy,” he growled to Harter, “let’s get your partner.”

  They went off up the path. I patted Susan again and pretty soon she stopped crying. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “I’m not usually the nervous type.” She gave me her lopsided smile.

  Shepherding a now-conscious and sheepish-looking Osgood out of the shed, Mike yelled to us, “You coming?”

  I yelled back we’d wait at the inlet for Susan’s father. He ought to be here any minute. So Mike went off, herding Perry Osgood and Bascom Harter in front of him down the beach and toward his patrol car on Gulf Road. Osgood and Harter were handcuffed together for safety. Mike could have carried one of them under each arm if he’d wanted to, and they’d have been just as safe.

  Five minutes after he’d left, Mr. Frost, Mr. Simons and Professor Harris showed up. Susan and I were sitting under the slash pines waiting for them as they walked down the beach. They had seen Mike loading his two prisoners into his cruiser on Gulf Road and were full of questions.

  Mr. Frost got pretty excited himself when he heard our story, and had to be convinced over and over that Susan was really okay. Professor H
arris and Mr. Simons were upset, too, but not as much as Susan’s father.

  When we’d told them everything that had happened to us, I asked Mr. Simons about the airplane survey. He laughed. “You were right as rain, Pete,” he said. “There’s a sunken ship down there on the bottom of the Gulf just outside the mouth of the inlet. From the air, we spotted a dark patch on our fifth pass, and saw long cannon shapes, and if there isn’t a pile of ballast stones and decayed timbers down there from a Spanish treasure ship, I’m ready to resign my job.”

  “It’s there,” Professor Harris added. “Just as you thought, Pete.”

  “Harter and Osgood admitted to me they’d been diving for treasure,” I said, “when they thought they could get away with some of it.”

  “So now we’ve got clear evidence of a treasure find,” Simons said dryly. “And the state could collect its quarter. The only trouble is, the men who found the treasure are under arrest and the whereabouts of the treasure they’ve recovered is not known.”

  “When they see they’re cooked,” Mr. Frost said, “maybe they’ll tell where the treasure is.”

  “Why should they?” asked Professor Harris. “Suppose they go to prison for kidnapping or murder or whatever. They’ll get out sometime. Or one of them will. And he’ll be able to go straight to a large hidden fortune that will help to compensate for his past problems. If they keep quiet about the treasure in the meanwhile. I wouldn’t tell where the treasure is, myself, under the circumstances, would you? The ship, yes, we’ve located that, and can salvage anything that remains in her. But the treasure already brought up? Uh-uh. Might as well kiss your quarter share of that good-by, I’d say.” He grinned at Mr. Simons.

  Susan said, “I think those two sacks Mr. Osgood was carrying when he ran into me were to carry the treasure away in.”

  I said, “I know they were. He was carrying them when he ran into me, too. And Harter took them when he said he was going for the loot.”

  Simons brightened up. “Then maybe we can find it on our own. Will you show us where you were when he surprised you in the woods?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know one thing. The treasure isn’t in the shed where they said it was. The dirt floor in there hasn’t been disturbed for fifty years. And I guess they wouldn’t hide the treasure in their house, the first place anyone would look for it. So it’s got to be over there in the woods someplace between Gulf Road and the inlet beach. Probably right around the spot where I heard the whistle of warning on my first visit to the inlet. Osgood might have been making a trip to their cache when I busted in for a swim. And he whistled to Harter not far from where Susan and I met Osgood with his sacks today.”

  Susan jumped up. Her face was pink with excitement and sunburn. “Come on!” she said. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go find the treasure!”

  We all took off down the beach like kids that have just figured out where Captain Kidd buried his chest. And if you look at it in one way, we had. Susan and I led the way. We had to move fast to keep ahead of Mr. Frost, Mr. Simons and Professor Harris. They were stepping right on our heels.

  We came to Susan’s easel, still standing splay-legged inside the edge of the trees with the blank canvas on it. It looked lonesome now. And it seemed hours since I’d seen it the first time. “That’s where I was when Mr. Osgood caught me,” Susan said.

  “That’s where I ran into him, too,” I said. “So let’s turn through the woods toward Gulf Road about here.” We did so. “That night Chapin followed us through the woods,” I said to Susan, “I bet he was trying to find out the same thing we are now—where the treasure’s hidden.”

  “Of course!” Susan said. “That’s why he followed us in the dark. He thought maybe we were Osgood and Harter and would lead him to the treasure.”

  Mr. Frost said briskly, “Where were you when you heard that whistle, Pete?”

  I couldn’t be sure of the exact spot. After all, I’d thought it was a bird at the time, and hadn’t been paying attention. Yet I felt fairly sure that I could nail the place down within fifty feet either way. The whistle had seemed to come from a tangle of underbrush to my left, I remembered, as I walked toward the inlet that first afternoon. That would put the tangle of underbrush to my right now, walking in the reverse direction. I kept my eyes peeled for it.

  I passed three or four possibles on my right before I thought we were far enough into the woods. I looked over my shoulder once at Susan and the three men who were following us. I had to laugh to myself at the solemn, fired-up look on all their faces. Their eyes were squinted and their lips pressed together and they all breathed short. Talk about treasure hunters! We were a prime group, all right. I felt the pressure myself. Like when you get that first hard strike from a big sheepshead and set the hook, and wait without breathing to see whether you can play him free or whether he’s going to run under a rock and snap off your hook, leader and everything. It was a thrill. I’ll admit it.

  “This is the place,” I said, stopping finally opposite a big batch of brush about halfway through the strip of woods. “I think the whistle came from here.”

  “Then spread out and start searching,” Mr. Simons directed. “Reconnoiter carefully. I don’t think we need concern ourselves with subterranean concealment. Too difficult to hide traces of digging here. And too inconvenient for Osgood and Harter to get at frequently.”

  We all started out in different directions. Each one of us worked slowly outward from the central patch of brush I’d pointed out. We looked carefully at everything we came across that showed any signs of being a possible hiding place for anything at all.

  It didn’t take long. And as it happened, I got lucky for the third time that day. Because I was the one who wormed my way into the tangled timber, dead brush and branches of a big windfall about forty yards south of the starting place, and found the hollow tree trunk.

  The butt of a huge old live oak sprouted from the ground in the middle of the windfall. It was dead and gray and stripped of bark long ago. The tree had probably been snapped off short by a hurricane or felled by a long-gone fire. Anyway, there was a branch of fresh green foliage spread across this old dead stump, and as soon as I saw it, I got a feeling it didn’t belong there, that it wouldn’t be there, so gracefully draped, if somebody hadn’t put it there to hide something.

  So I pulled the green branch aside, and sure enough, there was this big hollow place in the oak stump, about the size of a good-sized barrel. I didn’t even put my hand into the opening before I called to the others. I was that sure I’d found the treasure.

  They came running. And it seemed right for Mr. Simons to be the first to put his arm into the stump. When he pulled it out again, we could see by what he held in his clenched fist that we’d found the treasure. It was a rough round ingot of heavy gold about the size and shape of an English muffin.

  Well, I don’t need to describe all the wonderful things we took out of that tree stump because you can see a lot of them for yourself in the state museum at Gainesville. There were a lot of doubloons like the one I found on the beach. And several more big biscuits of solid gold. There were two heavy clusters as big as your head of silver pieces of eight, all glued together into a black lump by centuries underwater. There were old-fashioned knives and forks of blackened silver; several gold rings with rough-cut diamonds and emeralds in them; a beautiful necklace of gold links with some kind of golden demon or Aztec god or something at the end of it. And a lot more besides. Professor Harris seemed most excited about some porcelain rice bowls he said must have been made in China two hundred and fifty years ago and come halfway around the world to Mexico or Peru, only to be lost on the bottom of the sea in a sunken ship while being taken to Spain. Several of the bowls were absolutely perfect, the delicate porcelain smooth and uncracked. They sent Professor Harris into a real state of ecstasy.

  Anyway, we had the treasure. We spent a half hour or so
oohing and ahing over the various items we pulled out of the tree stump. We could have spent hours—days—admiring them. And we would have, probably, if Mr. Frost hadn’t reminded us. “It’s wonderful stuff,” he said, “but it’s not ours. It belongs to Perry Osgood and Bascom Harter, even if they are in jail.”

  “Twenty-five percent,” said Mr. Simons quickly, “belongs to the state of Florida.”

  “What are you going to do with all this?” Susan asked.

  “I’ll take official charge of it,” Mr. Simons said, “with you as witnesses, and put it in a safe place in Osgood’s and Harter’s names until we can get straightened away on things. Maybe a bank vault would be best for the present.”

  I looked at my watch. It was past noon. My wet clothes were almost dry on me again. I said, “Is it all right if I leave now, Mr. Simons? I’ve got to get back to work at the fish market. My sister will be fit to be tied. I left her there to do all the work alone.”

  With one accord, everybody turned around from the treasure, spread out there on the ground around the stump, and looked at me. I felt like a comic on the stage who has just said the wrong line.

  “Pete,” said Mr. Simons, “you go if you have to. But before you go, I want you to know how enormously appreciative of your efforts in this matter we are—the Internal Improvement Fund, the state of Florida and me, personally. Thank you.”

  Mr. Frost broke in, “I hate to think what might have happened to Susan if you hadn’t been here today, Pete. We’ll never forget it…”

  And Susan broke in on him. She saw I was feeling embarrassed and tried to kill off the formal speeches. “It hardly seems right,” she said with a laugh, “that just after you’ve found all this treasure you should just casually go back to cleaning fish, Pete.”