Then, of course, there were the people on Gamblers’ Island. The lady cop had said she believed someone had mistaken their boat for hers. “That would mean that they know she is after them, and they wish to destroy her,” she reasoned. “And yet she hides from them as if they knew nothing about her. It’s all very puzzling.”
She recalled her latest visit to the lady cop’s cabin. They had been seated by the lady cop’s fire when Tillie said, “O-oo! How thrilling to be the friend of a lady detective!”
“It may be thrilling,” Miss Weightman had replied, “but you must not forget that it is dangerous, too.”
“Dangerous!” Tillie had stared.
“The crook, the lawbreaker is sought by the detective,” the lady cop had continued soberly. “Too often the tables are turned. The detective is hunted by the crook. There is an age-long war between the law and the breakers of the law.”
“Such peril,” Florence assured herself now, “should be welcomed by every right-minded person. If being a friend to justice and to those who uphold the arm of the law puts one in danger, then welcome, oh you danger!”
All the while she was thinking these problems through, she was conscious of a drumming sound beating in upon her senses. Now it suddenly grew into a roar.
“Another speed boat. And I am alone, far out at sea,” she thought to herself in sudden consternation as, gripping the sides of her boat, she braced herself for a sudden shock.
The shock did not come. Instead the put-put-put of a motor ceased and, ten seconds later, the strangest craft Florence had ever seen glided up beside her boat. She stared at it in amazement. The thing was not one quarter the size of her rowboat; yet it boasted an outboard motor capable of handling a twenty foot boat. It had no keel. The prow was flat as a surfboard. There was one seat, large enough for a single person. In that seat reposed a grinning boy of some eighteen summers.
“What is it?” The question escaped her lips unbidden.
“Name’s Spank Me Again.” The boy’s grin broadened.
“But what is it?” she persisted.
“Guess.”
“I can’t.” She was beginning to feel amused. “It makes a noise like an airplane. But it has no wings. Looks like a surfboat. But surfboats don’t have their own power. It can’t be a boat because it has no keel. I guess it’s a what’s-it.”
“Correct,” laughed the boy. “And I’m a who’s-it. I’m Bradford Erie. My dad’s frightfully rich, so I have to have this thing to advertise.”
“Advertise?” Florence was puzzled.
“To advertise the fact that I’m just like everybody else. People think rich folks are not. But they are. How could they be different, even if they wanted to? They eat and sleep, drink, fish, play, fight and go to school if they are boys. And what does anyone else do? Exactly the same.”
“I think I could like that boy,” Florence thought to herself.
She said to him in a mocking tone, “It must be truly dreadful to be rich.”
“Oh! it is!
“Want a tow back?” He changed the subject.
“That might be thrilling, and perhaps a trifle dangerous.”
“I won’t dump you out. I’m no rotter. Give me a try.”
She gave him a try. It was indeed a thrilling ride. His boat cut the foam as it leaped from side to side. She got some spray in her face, and was home before she knew it.
“With that boy at the wheel,” she told herself, after thanking him and bidding him good-night, “no speed boat would run down a humbler craft. But then, perhaps he only mans the Spank Me Again.
“That thing will be the death of him,” she said, as she finished telling Jeanne of this little adventure. “It will turn over when it’s going at full speed. The motor will take it to the bottom, and him with it.” Little she knew how nearly a true prophetess she was.
That evening Florence sat for some time before the fire. She was trying to read the future by the pictures in the flames. The pictures were dim and distorted. She read little there. But often the smiling face of the “poor little rich boy,” who found it necessary to advertise the fact that he was just like other folks, danced and faded in the flames.
“He’s a real sport,” she told herself. “I hope we meet again.”
Strangely enough, with this wish came the conviction that they would meet again, that his life and her life, the life of Tillie, of Jeanne, and of the lady cop, were inseparably linked together.
“But after all,” she told herself skeptically, “this, too, may be but a dream of the passing flames.”
CHAPTER XV
FISHING AND FIGHTING
“Do you want to catch some fish, some real big black bass?” Tillie’s face shone, as she shouted this to Florence.
Did she? The supreme thrill of a born fisherman, that which comes from seeing one’s line shoot out sweet and clean, telling of a bass on the hook, had come to her but three times in all her young life.
“Do I!” She seized Tillie and gave her an impulsive hug. “Lead on!”
“It’s a long way out. Two miles; maybe more.”
“What’s two miles?” Florence tightened the muscles of her right arm till they were hard as stone.
“We’ll go,” said Tillie. “I saw them yesterday; three big black bass. And were they black! And big! Long as your arm. Anyway, half. They all marched out to see my minnie, like three churchmen in black robes. They looked, then turned up their noses and marched right back into the weeds.
“But now!” Her eyes shone in triumph. “I got crawdads (soft-shell crawfish). Five of them. And do they like ’em! You’ll see!”
Half an hour later, in Florence’s clinker-built rowboat, their two pairs of bronzed arms flashing in perfect unison as they plied four stout ash oars, they glided down the bay toward Gull Rock Point.
A second half hour had not elapsed before they were silently drifting toward the edge of a weed bed that ran along a narrow point.
“It’s right there before us,” Tillie said in a low tone. “You can see the bullrushes. You can’t see the pikeweed, only a top sticking up here and there. The pikeweed’s got wide leaves and stands thick on the bottom like a forest. Fish hide there just as wolves and bears do in the woods.
“Here’s the spot.” She dropped her anchor without the slightest splash.
“You catch ’em by the back,” she whispered, seizing a crawfish. “So they can’t pinch you, you hook ’em through the tail. Then you spit on ’em. That’s for luck.”
When she had performed all these ceremonies, she tossed her crawfish far out toward the edge of the weed bed.
“Now for yours.” She adjusted Florence’s struggling crab, then sent him off at another angle from the boat.
After that she jammed her boy’s cap down over one eye, squinted at the water with the other, and sat quietly down to wait.
A moment passed into eternity; another, and yet another. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. The water lapped and gurgled about the boat. A slight breeze set the bullrushes murmuring. A great, green dragon fly came bobbing along over the water. A sea gull soared aloft, but uttered never a sound. From his point of vantage, what did he see? Two girls fishing. Quite true. But what of the fish? Were those three bass lying among the weeds? Had they seen the crawfish?
It was Tillie who first knew the answer. The rattler was off her reel. The reel spun round with no effort and no sound. Suddenly it stopped.
Tillie placed a thumb on the spool, then counted in a whisper. “One, two, three, four, five.”
The tip of her pole executed a whip-like motion. The fish was hooked, the battle begun.
She gave him line. She reeled him in. He saw the boat and ran. He leaped a full foot from the water. He came down with a splash. The line slackened. Was he off? No. One more wild tug.
And after that a slow, relentless battle in which the girl won.
The fish lay flopping in the boat, a fine three pounder. Tillie bent over him, exultant, when with startl
ing suddenness a voice sounded in her ear.
“Hey, you kids! Beat it! This is our fishing hole.” The tone was cold and gruff.
Tillie looked up in amazement. Then she scowled. A trim sailboat, manned by two boys and a girl, all in their late teens, had glided silently up to them and dropped anchor.
Tillie fixed her keen blue eyes upon the trio. All were dressed in silk pajamas and were smoking cigarettes.
“Since when?” she demanded, as her hands moved toward an oar.
“Since then!” The older of the two boys seized a short pike pole from the deck and struck her across the back.
To Florence, who looked on, it seemed that Tillie’s red hair stood on end, as she seized her oar and, using it as a spear, gave the intruder a sharp thrust in the stomach that doubled him up and sent him reeling off the narrow deck into the water.
“Hey, you little devil!” The other youth turned purple with rage.
All to no purpose. Tillie’s oar mowed him down. He, too, went into the water.
“That for all your robbin’, gamblin’ lot!” Tillie screamed.
Then in quite another tone, “Up anchor and away. There’s a storm brewing.”
They were away before the first of their adversaries had reached the side of the sailboat.
The shore was not far away. Tillie headed straight for it.
“Got to defend our ship,” she breathed. “But we lack ammunition.”
Gull Rock Point is a finger of land three rods wide, a quarter of a mile long, extending straight out into the bay. Its shores are moderately steep and composed entirely of small rocks.
They bumped the shore, threw off their anchor, caught at overhanging branches, and climbed to land.
They looked about. The two boys were on board the sailboat now. They were lifting anchor and setting sail.
“They’ll come after us,” said Tillie, in the calmly assured tone of a great commander. “Load up.” She set the example by piling her left arm with rocks the size of a baseball.
“Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes,” she murmured. “Make every shot count. We can retreat if we must. They’d never find us in the brush. But don’t give up the ship.”
Silence once more hung over the bay as the sailboat glided forward. The rushes whispered, the dragon fly bobbed and the water winked in the sun.
The sailboat was a beautiful thing. Highly varnished it was, and all trimmed in brass.
“Must have cost a small fortune,” was Florence’s mental comment. “They’re rich. How does Tillie dare?”
In all this there was no thought of disloyalty to Tillie. She was ready to fight the affair through at her side.
“Come on,” shouted Tillie, as the boat drew near. “Come on, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field.”
The answer was a contemptuous laugh.
This angered Tillie still more. “Come on!” she screamed, “come on, you crooks, you tin horn gamblers, you—!”
The names Tillie called her adversaries belong only to the land of the north. Florence heard them that day for the first time. We shall not repeat them here, but utter a little prayer that Tillie may be forgiven in Heaven.
She punctuated her last remark with a wild swing of the arm. Not so wild as it seemed, however, for a stone, crashing against the side of the highly polished craft, cut a jagged line of white for fully two feet.
“Come on!” she screamed. “We’ll make your pretty boat look like a tin can the day after Fourth of July!” A second swing, a second streak of white down the shiny surface of brown.
Suddenly, the younger of the two boys took command. He veered the boat sharply about, then went sailing away.
“We win!”
For the first time Florence saw that Tillie’s face had gone white. She slumped down among the rocks to hide her face in her hands.
“I forgot!” she moaned at last. “I got mad, and I forgot. Now they’ll ruin us. Dad told me not to do it. But I done it all the same.”
After that, for a long time the bay belonged to the rushes, the ripples and the dragon flies alone.
Rising at last, Tillie seized the anchor line, drew the rowboat close in, climbed aboard, motioned to Florence to do the same, seized the oars and began to row.
They fished no more that day. Not a word was spoken until the boat bumped at Tillie’s dock.
Then Tillie, dangling the fine black bass from the end of a string, said,
“Here! You take it. I couldn’t eat a bite of it. It’d choke me.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s all right. You’re a brick.”
“So are you.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Tillie was gone.
CHAPTER XVI
SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE TWILIGHT
That evening, while the sky was still pink and the water changing from blue to purple and then to gold, Florence went for a row alone. She wanted to think. The events of that day had stirred her to the very depths. She had not believed that there were such persons in the world as those three young people who had attempted to drive them from Tillie’s fishing hole.
“Rich, that’s it,” she told herself. Yet, in the depths of her heart she knew that this was not all.
“Tillie called them crooks, gamblers,” she told herself. “A professional gambler must have a cold heart. He takes money in an unfair way from men who have earned it and need it. How can one expect to find a warm heart in the breast of a gambler’s son?”
As she asked herself this question, she rounded a small island that lay a little way out from the point upon which the palatial summer home of Erie, the millionaire, had been erected.
She barely missed bumping into a canoe that lay motionless in the water. The canoe held a solitary occupant, a girl of sixteen.
Instinctively Florence knew that this was the millionaire’s daughter, she who had lost the three priceless rubies in a gambling den.
Instantly her heart warmed. The girl was beautiful. She was rich. Yet, on her face was a look of loneliness and sadness such as Florence had seldom seen on any face.
“It’s not so much the disgrace of losing the rubies,” she told herself. “This girl is young. She is just launching out into life. She has found it strange and rather terrible. She doesn’t understand.”
Her first impulse was to pause close beside the girl, to tell her that she had heard much about her; that she longed to aid her; that she and the lady cop would help her; that if she would but allow it they would explain life to her; that in the end they would restore the rubies to their proper place.
“But she is rich,” thought Florence, with a quick intake of breath. “I am poor. Her family is in society. I will never be.”
Ah, yes, “society,” that mysterious something to which people have given this name. She did not understand it. There was a barrier. She must not speak. So she passed on. And the twilight deepened into night.
She was just turning the prow of her boat toward the lights of home when a speed boat came roaring by. Just as they were opposite her, the searchlight from a larger boat played for an instant on the faces of those in the speed boat. She recognized them instantly.
“Green Eyes, Jensie Jameson, and that boy who sometimes rides in the Spank Me Again!” she exclaimed beneath her breath. “So she is truly here. Could it have been they who ran us down that night?
“Green Eyes, perhaps. But not that boy. I’d trust him anywhere.”
Yet, even as she thought this, she was tempted to question her judgment.
“Surely,” she told herself, “I have placed every confidence in other persons, and in the end have found them unworthy. Why not this boy?”
She rowed silently and rather sadly back to their little dock. Surely this was a puzzling world. Perhaps, after all, she understood it as little as the “poor little rich girl,” back there in the canoe.
CHAPTER XVII
&nbs
p; VOICES IN THE FOREST
The following day the weather was threatening. Dark clouds came rolling down from the north. The biting chill they brought told that they had journeyed far, from the very shores of Hudson Bay.
Petite Jeanne took one look at the out-of-doors; then she threw fresh wood upon the fire, curled up in her favorite chair, and lost herself in a French romance.
Not so, Florence. For her all days were alike. Come sunshine, come rain, come heat, come cold, calm, or storm, it was all the same to her. The world outside ever beckoned, and she must go.
This day she chose to wander alone over unfamiliar trails. As she plunged into the depths of the forest, she felt the cold and gloom press in upon her. It did not rain; yet the trees shed tears. From all about her came the sound of their slow drip-drip-drip. A cold mist, sweeping in from the lake, enveloped all. Now and again, as she passed through a grove of cottonwoods, a flurry of golden leaves came fluttering down.
“Autumn is here,” she told herself. “We must be going back soon. But how I long to stay!
“I love you, love you, love you,” she sang. And the song was meant for lake and beach, forest and stream, alike.
Her trail was long that day. She wandered so far that she began to be a little frightened.
“Can I find my way back?” she asked herself.
Well enough she knew that before her lay endless miles of slashings and young timber which were known only to the wild deer and the porcupine; that it was quite possible for one to become lost here for days and perhaps die of exposure and starvation.
She was thinking of turning back, when to her great surprise she heard voices.
“In such a place!” she whispered to herself.
At the same moment she noted that the forest ahead of her had grown thin, that she could see patches of sky beyond.
Once more she had crossed a broad point and had come to a strange shore.
But what shore? And who were these people?
Again she paused. As before, she caught the sound of voices, this time much more distinct.
The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 114