“Lend me a hand, please, Dorothy, and we’ll see what a bit of leverage will do.”
Together they seized the crowbar and pulled. There was a sharp snap and the door flew open.
“Good enough!” cried Terry. He sprang into the corridor and grasped their hands.
“You said it,” laughed Bill. “That’s the second time this bar has come in handy since we started this job. If we ever get out of here I’m going to keep it as a souvenir.”
“I’ll take the diamonds,” Dorothy added enthusiastically.
“What’s on deck now?” inquired Terry.
Bill grew suddenly serious.
“Have you any idea where they keep themselves above?”
“It’s ten to one they’ll be playing poker in the kitchen. They’ve nothing else to do now, except to feed me—or so Peters says.”
“Where’s the kitchen? I mean, how do we get to it from here?”
“It’s along this passage and up the staircase at the end. The door at the top—the sound proof one—opens into the kitchen.”
Bill handed Terry a gun. “Don’t be afraid to use it,” he commanded. “They won’t hesitate to shoot if they get a chance.”
Terry looked at him in great disdain. “Say, just because I appear to be my cheerful self and so on, don’t get the idea that I’ve enjoyed this rest cure. All I’ve been thinking about for days—and nights too—is the chance to get even with them. Now I have it.” He patted the revolver.
“O.K. then, come along, both of you.”
It was but a step to the turn in the passage. Directly ahead lay a steep flight of stairs. And at the top was the silent menace of the closed door.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Flags
“Do you think it will be unlocked?” Bill dropped his voice to a whisper. The three were standing on the landing at the head of the stairs, facing the door.
“Sure to be,” returned Terry. “That is, if we can take friend Peters’ word for it. He spilled all this dope when he’d had an argument with the rest of the gang.”
“Then let’s go—” said Bill. “You stand to one side, Dorothy.”
“Shucks!” With a twist of the handle, that young lady threw the door wide and jumped into the room.
“Hands up! Stick ’em up!” she cried.
Two of the three men seated at the table complied at once with her command. Their hands shot above their heads with the rapidity of lightning. The third reached for a revolver that lay amongst the scattered cards.
“Bang!”
The man gave a cry of pain and caught at his shattered wrist with his other hand.
Startled by the sudden detonation just behind her, Dorothy almost dropped her gun.
“Dog-gone it!” Terry seemed annoyed.
“What’s the matter?” Bill still covered the men.
“Matter enough! Too much rest cure, I guess. Forgot to remove the safety catch on this gat you gave me. Lucky you fired when you did.”
“Well, never mind that now,” Bill’s words were crisp and to the point. “Grab that clothesline and tie their hands behind their backs. That’s right! Dorothy, will you give first aid to that fellow’s wrist? I’ll see that they don’t play any tricks.”
After securing the men, Terry searched their clothes and produced two revolvers and a wicked looking knife. He also took a ring of keys from Peters.
“Gee!” exclaimed that gentleman. “If it ain’t the girl what blame near kicked me teeth out I’ll eat me bloomin’ hat!”
“You’ll eat skilly in Wethersfield Prison, or Atlanta, before you get through,” Terry promised. “Shake a leg—both of you. Down to the cells for yours. Did you ever realize what a swell difference there is between the titles of jailer and prisoner? March!”
“Wait a minute!” Dorothy cut in. “I’ll help you take this man along, too. I’ve done all I can for him. It’s a clean hole through his wrist. Bone’s broken but the bullet missed the artery. He might be worse off.”
Bill spoke from the doorway that led into the rest of the house. “While you’re gone I’ll search this place for any other members that might otherwise be overlooked!”
After housing the smugglers in cells, Dorothy and Terry returned to the kitchen and were surprised to find Bill speaking over the telephone.
“And that’s that, Dad,” they heard him say. “Spread the good tidings in proper places and make it snappy, please. Bye-bye!”
He placed the receiver on its hook.
“I guess you got that,” he smiled. “Dad will phone the police and Washington. Then he’s driving over here with Frank. And he will also let Mr. Walters and your father know, Dorothy.”
“Fine—I’m glad he thought of that!” Dorothy laughed in excited approval.
“Didn’t take you long to search the place,” said Terry.
“No—only a few rooms on this floor are being used. The staircase is thick with dust. Nobody up there—no footprints.”
“Well, what’s to do now?”
“We’ll wait for Dad, of course,” said Bill, “and then Dorothy and I can fly our respective planes home. How about it, pal? Feel able to do that?”
Dorothy lifted her eyebrows in derision. “Well, I should hope so! I suppose I do look pretty frazzled—but you don’t seem in the best condition yourself. However—I’ve another plan.”
“What’s that?”
Terry had taken over the phone and was talking in low tones to his mother.
“Do you remember I told you I had a hunch, Bill?”
“Yes, I do. What about it?”
“We’re going to follow my hunch.”
“Where to?”
“Well, we’ll start out of this house—by the front door this time, if you please—then across the meadow and through the wood to the field where our planes are parked.”
“And—?”
“And then you’re going to get into the rear cockpit of Will-o’-the-Wisp and take a little hop with me.”
Bill looked surprised. “What about my Ryan?”
“Oh, Frank can pilot her home.”
“Yes? And then where are we going?”
“That’s my secret. Tell Terry, and come along now. We’re in a hurry, even if you don’t know it.”
“Well, I’m evidently not supposed to know anything of this new mystery!”
“Don’t be stuffy! Come on, now. This is serious, Bill, really, I’m not leading you on a wild goose chase, I promise you.”
“Humph! It must be hot stuff—not!”
Dorothy made a face at him. “I want to tell you it’s the hottest stuff of the whole business. And I just want you to be in at the finish, don’t you see, stupid?”
“All right. As you insist—”
“That’s right. Of course I do. And when we’ve done this thing up brown, I’ll cart you back home to dinner—and if you are very good you can sit next to me!”
Bill grinned. “You may be New England Yankee, but that line of blarney you hand out spells Ireland in capital letters! Come on then, we’ll leave Terry to guard the fort.”
After they had put that young man wise to their plans, the two left the Castle. They were both pretty nearly exhausted after their experiences in the tunnel, but the success of their adventure was elating, and more than made up for its bad effects.
“Well, here’s the field just where we left it,” announced Bill as he helped Dorothy over the stone fence. “And there’s that Willy plane of yours, too. Whither away?”
“Hop in and you’ll see.”
Five minutes later, Bill looked down from his seat in the rear cockpit and saw that she was going to land near the tennis courts in the broad parking space behind the cabanas at the beach club. The members had become used to seeing her land Will-o’-the-Wisp on the club grounds. Their descent therefore caused little or no notice. The plane stopped rolling and a man in the club uniform of a beach attendant ran up.
“Hello, Jeffries,” waved Bill. “I thou
ght you might be here. How are things?”
“We caught Donovan and Charlie Myers over at Babylon. But they’re small fry. Anything new, Bolton?”
Bill got out of the plane and helped Dorothy to descend.
“I should say there is! Tell you about it in a minute. Dorothy, let me present Mr. Arthur Jeffries, one of the very big men of the United States Secret Service. Arthur, this is the famous Dorothy Dixon!”
Arthur Jeffries said some polite things which caused Dorothy to blush modestly, and in a few pithy sentences Bill told the story of their afternoon.
“So you see, old man,” he ended. “You won’t have to wait around this club any longer disguised as a goldfish or what have you—because the bearded aviator won’t fly the Mystery Plane over here any more—that is to say—not for twenty years or so at the soonest.”
“He’ll get all that or more,” Jeffries commented crisply. “But the man he worked for—sunning himself over there on the sand—old Holloway, I mean—he’s the nigger in the woodpile! The boss of this gang of diamond smugglers—but I can’t arrest him on that evidence!”
Dorothy made an eager gesture. “Will you come with me—I want to show you two something. We’ll go around the far side of that big cabana on the end of the boardwalk. We’re going inside.”
“Holloway’s bath house?” This from Bill.
“Exactly. I don’t want him to see us, though, so be careful.”
The three rounded the gaily painted cottage and ducking under the red and black striped awning, entered the front room which was fitted out with the usual wicker furniture and bright rugs.
“I wonder where he keeps them,” Dorothy murmured to herself. “Ah—this looks like it!”
She lifted the hinged lid of a handsome sea chest and pulled forth a dozen or more colored flags.
“By jove! The goods!” cried Bill. “How did you ever guess it, Dot?”
Dorothy was so pleased by her find that she passed over his use of the despised diminutive.
“I just happened to remember that he generally decked out his cabana with a flock of these things. And though the club runs up flags on special occasions, Mr. Holloway did it nearly every afternoon. It came to me when you pulled off Tracey’s beard back there in the tunnel.”
“Precisely,” said Arthur Jeffries. “Holloway would get word in New York at his office, probably, when a liner carrying contraband was expected off Fire Island light. Then he’d come out here and signal the time to Tracey in his airplane, by means of these flags. I’ll bet the old boy never went near that Castle. Some alibi! He and Tracey probably never saw each other from the time he went to the city in the morning until he came home for dinner at night.”
“Are you going to arrest him now?” she asked breathlessly.
“As soon as I can get out on the beach. I’ll do it as quietly as possible, of course. No use in causing a disturbance with his friends around. So long, Bill. Glad to have met you, Miss Dixon—and many thanks. See you both later on.”
They left the cabana with him, but turned back toward the plane as he went down the beach.
“That ties it, I guess,” she smiled.
“It certainly does!” agreed Bill.
“Now—didn’t I tell you it would be hot stuff?”
He looked at her and they both burst out laughing.
“And the best of it is that the government will probably pin a medal on you for it!” he declared.
“Oh, Bill! Do you really think that?”
Bill grinned at her excitement. “You get into that plane and take me home to dinner. That was the bargain, and I’m famished!”
“Dinner!” exclaimed Dorothy in disgust. “My word! We’ve caught those diamond smugglers when the whole of the Secret Service couldn’t do it—and all you think of is food! Gee, I’m glad I’m not a mere man. Hop aboard. I’ll give her the gun and fly you home to your dinner.”
3 See Bill Bolton and The Winged Cartwheels.
BETTY GORDON AT BRAMBLE FARM, by Alice B. Emerson
CHAPTER I
WAITING FOR WORD
“I do wish you’d wear a sunbonnet, Betty,” said Mrs. Arnold, glancing up from her ironing board as Betty Gordon came into the kitchen. “You’re getting old enough now to think a little about your complexion.”
Betty’s brown eyes laughed over the rim of the glass of water she had drawn at the sink.
“I can’t stand a sunbonnet,” she declared vehemently, returning the glass to the nickel holder under the shelf. “I know just how a horse feels with blinders on. You know you wouldn’t like it, Mrs. Arnold, if I pulled up half your onion sets in mistake for weeds because I couldn’t see what I was doing.”
Mrs. Arnold shook her head over the white ruffle she was fluting with nervous, skillful fingers.
“There’s no call for you to go grubbing in that onion bed,” she said. “I’d like you to have nice hands and not be burnt black as an Indian when your uncle comes. But then, nobody pays any attention to what I say.”
There was more truth in this statement than Mrs. Arnold herself suspected. She was one of these patient, anxious women who unconsciously nag every one about them and whose stream of complaint never rises above a constant murmur. Her family were so used to Mrs. Arnold’s monotonous fault-finding that they rarely if ever knew what she was complaining about. They did not mean to be disrespectful, but they had fallen into the habit of not listening.
“Uncle Dick won’t mind if I’m as black as an Indian,” said Betty confidently, spreading out her strong little brown right hand and eyeing it critically. “With all the traveling he’s done, I guess he’s seen people more tanned than I am. You’re sure there wasn’t a letter this morning?”
“The young ones said there wasn’t,” returned Mrs. Arnold, changing her cool iron for a hot one, and testing it by holding it close to her flushed face. “But I don’t know that Ted and George would know a letter if they saw it, their heads are so full of fishing.”
“I thought Uncle Dick would write again,” observed Betty wistfully. “But perhaps there wasn’t time. He said he might come any day.”
“I don’t know what he’ll say,” worried Mrs. Arnold, her eyes surveying the slender figure leaning against the sink. “Your not being in mourning will certainly seem queer to him. I hope you’ll tell him Sally Pettit and I offered to make you black frocks.”
Betty smiled, her peculiarly vivid, rich smile.
“Dear Mrs. Arnold!” she said, affection warm in her voice. “Of course I’ll tell him. He will understand, and not blame you. And now I’m going to tackle those weeds.”
The screen door banged behind her.
Betty Gordon was an orphan, her mother having died in March (it was now June) and her father two years before. The twelve-year-old girl had to her knowledge but one single living relative in the world, her father’s brother, Richard Gordon. Betty had never seen this uncle. For years he had traveled about the country, wherever his work called him, sometimes spending months in large cities, sometimes living for weeks in the desert. Mr. Gordon was a promoter of various industrial enterprises and was frequently sent for to investigate new mines, oil wells and other large developments.
“I’d love to travel,” thought Betty, pulling at an especially stubborn weed. “I hope Uncle Dick will like me and take me with him wherever he goes. Wouldn’t it be just like a fairy story if he should come here and scoop me out of Pineville and take me hundreds of miles away to beautiful and exciting adventures!”
This enchanting prospect so thrilled the energetic young gardener that she sat down comfortably in the middle of the row to dream a little more. While her father lived, Betty’s home had been in a small, bustling city where she had gone to school in the winter. The family had always gone to the seashore in the summer; but the only exciting adventure she could recall had been a tedious attack of the measles when she was six years old. Mrs. Gordon, upon her husband’s sudden death, had taken her little daughter and come back
to Pineville, the only home she had known as a lonely young orphan girl. She had many kind friends in the sleepy country town, and when she died these same friends had taken loving charge of Betty.
The girl’s grief for the loss of her mother baffled the villagers who would have known how to deal with sorrow that expressed itself in words or flowed out in tears. Betty’s long silences, her desire to be left quite alone in her mother’s room, above all her determination not to wear mourning, puzzled them. That she had sustained a great shock no one could doubt. White and miserable, she went about, the shadow of her former gay-hearted self. For the first time in her life she was experiencing a real bereavement.
When Betty’s father had died, the girl’s grieving was principally for her mother’s evident pain. She had always been her mother’s confidante and chum, and the bond between them, naturally close, had been strengthened by Mr. Gordon’s frequent absences on the road as a salesman. It was Betty and her mother who locked up the house at night, Betty and her mother who discussed household finances and planned to surprise the husband and father. The daughter felt his death keenly, but she could never miss his actual presence as she did that of the mother from whom she had never been separated for one night from the time she was born.
The neighbors took turns staying with the stricken girl in the little brown house that had been home for the two weeks following Mrs. Gordon’s death. Then, as Betty seemed to be recovering her natural poise, a discussion of her affairs was instigated. The house had been a rented one and Betty owned practically nothing in the world except the simple articles of furniture that had been her mother’s household effects. These Mrs. Arnold stored for her in a vacant loft over a store, and Mrs. Arnold, her mother’s closest friend, bore the lonely child off to stay with them till Richard Gordon could be heard from and some arrangement made for the future.
Communication with Mr. Gordon was necessarily slow, since he moved about so frequently, but when the news of his sister-in-law’s death reached him, he wrote immediately to Betty, promising to come to Pineville as soon as he could plan his business affairs to release him.
“Betty!” a shrill whisper, apparently in the lilac bushes down by the fence, startled Betty from her day dreams.
The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 184