The Gray Ghost

by Robert F. Schulkers

  “You’ve chased somebody else away, though,” spoke up our captain, sharply. “You’ve made your brother ashamed of you. Now he’s gone and resigned. He told us to cross his name out of our list, and he ain’t coming down here no more. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  Dick might have been more angry than he should have been. But I think all of us boys thought he said the right thing to the Rolling Stone. Any one of us would have said the same. Rolling Stone John stood up.

  “You mean the kid ain’t coming down here no more?” he asked, slowly.

  “You heard me,” replied Dick. “And you can pack yourself out of this clubhouse right away, and don’t come back. You hear? Don’t—come—back!”

  Rolling Stone John nodded his head.

  “All right,” he said. “But I got to say I’m sorry. Gee whiz, fellas, I didn’t want to make things turn out like this. Listen, you give me a jolt, you did, Dick Ferris. I ain’t never looked at it like that before. Now you listen to me, you and all the other fellas here. You boys treated me fine. I ain’t gon’a forgit you fellas—and you did more’n that, you kinda made me feel ashamed that I spoilt the kid’s fun. And when I leave this here shack, I’m goin’ home and say to pop ‘Here I am, and here I’ll stay, if you’ll let me make a new start all over again,’ and I know what pop will say. But he’ll give in; he always does at last. And maybe I’ll git to be jes’ as good as the kid. Shadow’s a fine kid. I’ll tell him you fellas know that I’m goin’ home. No more roamin’ around for me—I come and seen you fellas, I got to like the way you lived. I’m goin’ to try to live that way, too, darn if I ain’t—”

  And talking that way to himself, he walked out of the door, and we all watched him as if he was some strange kind of a thing we had never seen. Until he reached the river path, we could hear him still talking to himself about what he was going to do, and then he turned and disappeared up the road.

  Bam! Dick’s wooden hammer hit the table. “Meeting is over,” he said.

  The boys all began getting ready to go home. I went back into my little writing office and got out my book and turned to the list of names. I ran my pen down until it came to Shadow’s name. I was about to draw a line through it to cross it out when I looked up and saw our captain looking over my shoulder.

  “I hate to cross him out, Dick,” I said. “Seems like the name of Shadow Loomis ought to stay there all the time, no matter what comes.”

  “Yes,” said Dick. “We ought to leave it stand.”

  “We won’t let him resign,” I said. “Dick, we are gon’a let that name stay in this book.”

  “Yeah,” said Dick, “and we are going to add the name of John Loomis.”

  Which we did.

  CHAPTER 2

  When the Ice Broke

  “THE ice is going out. All you boys keep away from the river till it’s gone.”

  Those were our orders laid down by our captain, Dick Ferris, on Monday when we held our regular meeting after school. Warm weather had come in, and the river that had been frozen over for weeks had a stream of running water showing again in the middle of it. Yet the boys had been skating around the edges of the stream, and even as we went out of the clubhouse after the meeting, we saw the Pelham fellows across the river skating around on their side.

  “Those guys better get off if they know what’s good for ’em,” said Dick to me. “First thing you know, blooey! they’re going to touch a cracked piece of very thin ice and find themselves in the water.”

  “Let ’em alone,” said Jerry Moore, who had begun to build a campfire on the bank. “They’re as big as you are and can take care of ’emselves.”

  “Halloo!” shouted one of the Pelhams to us from across the river. “What’s a matter with you guys—afraid to come out on the ice?”

  “Don’t answer ’em,” said Jerry Moore to us. “They are trying to pick a fight with us. First thing you know they’ll have me runnin’ over there after ’em, and just be my luck to fall in somewhere.”

  We sat around the fire Jerry had built and talked. We talked mostly about times when the Red Runners used to come down, what fights we had and the fight we fought, and of poor old Harkinson who lost his sight and died of a broken heart. Us boys never tired of talking about that, seemed so pitiful to us that the old hypnotizer couldn’t bear to live after he knew he couldn’t see anymore. I’ve got the old brass horn hanging up in my little writing room behind the clubhouse, and every time I look at it I think of him. He died game, knew he was going and told me so, and yet he wanted to tell me before he went that he was sorry for all the things he had done. Wanted me to remember him, no matter who forgot. And old Androfski, the Silent, where had he gone? No one saw him after the day we cornered Harkinson in the log house. And Jude the Fifth. He, too, had disappeared. Would we ever see them again? Would there come a time when these two strange fellows would pop up again to remind us—

  “For the love of Mike, look a’ that!” exclaimed Bill Darby. We all looked out toward the middle of the river where he pointed. The crack in the ice had grown wider during the day, and logs and wood of all kinds came floating down, as they always did when the ice washed out. But what we saw coming down the stream now was a little house, like a chicken coop or a doghouse, floating down in the middle of a lot of driftwood, and on top of the little house was a black cat standing with his back up and his tail hoisted like a flagpole.

  “The poor dern thing,” said Bill Darby. “Listen at it yowl, will ya?”

  Yowl it did. No mee-yowing for this cat. No. It was scared worse than that. It thought it was in a bad enough fix to yowl, and it kept on yowling as it came. Why the black creature didn’t leap onto the ice, I don’t know. For it was easy for a cat to make the jump. Yet she stood with her humped back on top of that floating thing and yowled as if she weren’t able.

  “I got to save it,” says Bill Darby. “Hawkins, if I don’t save that cat I will worry about it—maybe it will get drowned sooner or later—I better save it.”

  “If you don’t want your eyes scratched out,” said Jerry Moore, “you better stay right here and keep on warming yourself by this fire. ’Cause cats got nine lives, and you only got one, and it don’t hurt if this cat does get dipped in the river and dies once; but if you happen to get dipped you ain’t got no more lives to fall back on, Bill Darby.”

  “I ain’t gon’a get dipped,” said Bill. “Let me go Dick, will you, just to save that poor cat?”

  Our captain didn’t answer; he didn’t even look up, which meant that he didn’t have anything more to say and that if Bill wanted to risk his life for a cat—

  Well, Bill did. Yeah. He skooted out over the ice like a deer and headed off that little floating doghouse and reached out to save the kitty. When Jerry saw that Bill really was going, Jerry shot out after him, and he reached the scene just in time to get the cat from Bill. For when Bill had come, the cat didn’t wait to be taken. No. She just jumped into Bill’s arms—must of been somebody’s pet tabby—and Bill caught her. But oh, boy, how she scratched him on the face and arms, and Bill looked around as Jerry come up and bounced the black animal over onto Jerry’s chest. Jerry grabbed it long enough to get his hands on it, and then he slung it high in the air, and with a yowl that sounded like a bum note on a cracked fiddle, the cat landed on the ice and scooted for the bank. We all jumped up as she neared our place, but she turned and darted into the hollow and disappeared around our clubhouse.

  Before we had time to give any more attention to the cat, there came a cry to us from across the ice. We looked up in time to see a frightful thing—the ice had cracked, split in large pieces, and begun to move. I saw two Pelham fellows leap to the bank as one big piece of ice moved away. And they made the leap safely, but two of their pals couldn’t get up in time. Swiftly, that big sheet of ice moved out into the current with them, and they yelled to us. They were frightened then. They didn’t know what to do.

  It was as if all of us boys thought of the same thing
at the same time. For we hurried to the place where we had our canoes stored. One of the Skinny Guy’s old flatboats lay there, and we grabbed that quick, thinking it was stronger than the canoes and wouldn’t get damaged so easily by ice. It wasn’t three minutes before we slid it over the ice from our bank and got it near the water. Jerry yelled in time, for the ice we were all standing on began to crack and give, and I leaped into the flatboat with Jerry, and Dick came bounding in after me while the other boys beat it for the bank, the ice cracking under their feet as they went.

  Now the ice began to move all around us. We could hear it splitting and moving off with a grinding sound. Great cakes of it came scraping against the sides of our flatboat. Dick and Jerry had taken the oars and begun to get the boat in motion, but oh, boy, it was hard work. For they had to fight the ice and the driftwood and the logs and other floating things that came sweeping down with the washout above.

  “Hurry up, fellas,” I said. “They’ve gone around the bend.”

  The cake upon which the two Pelhams had been caught was swept out of sight. Dick and Jerry worked those oars as fast as they could; I don’t remember when I saw them work as fast as that before. But when we pulled around the bend, we saw the two Pelhams on their ice, just as far away as before. Jerry turned his head to look.

  “We’ll never catch up with ’em, Hawkins,” he said.

  “Try hard, Jerry,” I said. “They might get drowned. If that piece of ice they are on breaks in half, they’ll go in sure as you’re born.”

  “They can swim,” said Jerry, and then he began to pull hard again on his oars.

  Then I noticed, when I turned to look back, that all of the Pelham boys had come out onto the river with their flatboats and were following us as fast as they could. Our own boys had followed on the bank as far as the cliff, where they went up and watched from that high place.

  I turned and looked again at the cake of ice ahead of us on which the two Pelhams were riding. The two boys were on their hands and knees now, for they could not stand up on that slippery surface as it twisted and turned with the current. Once it bumped into a bunch of logs jammed against the edge of the ice, and it spun around like a top. Every minute, I expected one of the boys to go sliding off into the icy water. But they held on, and although we pulled hard on the oars, it did not seem that we got any nearer to them.

  Well, I never saw such an exciting chase in my life. I believe if there had not been so much floating ice and logs around us we could have got to them, but oh boy, every time you put in an oar, you struck something other than water. I began to think how foolish we were to come out into this stream while the ice was going out. But it was too late now. We were in it, and we had to make the best of it.

  Then, just as we realized that we could never catch up with them, there came a sound to us that gave us the shivers. It was the whistle of the steamboat Hudson Lee. Already we could see the two long black banners of smoke beyond the next bend, and none of us had imagined that she was so close upon us. But the loud sound of that whistle told us that here she was, pushing her way through that floating ice—coming right upon us, and ’cause the stream was too narrow for all of us, we could not pass her.

  “Jerry!” I yelled. “Dick—slow up, stop! We’ve got to get out o’ here, and dern quick too.”

  They realized the danger as soon as I did. We slowed up, and the side of our flatboat ground against the ice. I leaped up on it, knowing that it might break under my feet, but we had to take a chance there. It was one of two things. Risk that or wait till the Hudson Lee ran us down. That would be the worst of the two. So in a few seconds, we were all out upon the left side, hauling our flatboat out onto the ice with us.

  “Come on,” I said. “To the bank before this ice breaks under our feet.”

  We ran for the shore, across that dangerous-looking ice, leaving our flatboat upon the ice near the open water. Before we reached it though, we heard a cry from the two Pelham boys. Then, at the same time, a sharp blast of the steamboat’s whistle. I looked just in time to see the nose of the steamboat come around the bend and crash into that ice cake and crumble it to powder like as if it was made of sugar. The two Pelhams were under.

  No time to think of our own safety now. Back we rushed to the place where we had left the boat. I waited only a second to make sure that that second sharp blast of the Hudson Lee’s whistle really meant that the man in the pilothouse had seen what happened. The Hudson Lee was stopping. We leaped into the boat and shoved off. When we came up to the first Pelham, who was swimming toward us in that freezing water, we reached him an oar, but he couldn’t take it. He was scared stiff and frozen stiff. We had to bear over, and while Dick held the boat there, Jerry and I grabbed him and pulled him in with us. We could hear his teeth chattering.

  “Where’s the other?” I said.

  “They’ve got him, the boat from the Hudson Lee,” said Jerry. And as I looked I saw that one of the lifeboats had gone for the other Pelham fellow. He was worse off than the one we had in our boat. He had fainted. It was lucky they got to him as soon as they did. For by the time we had reached our fellow and had pulled him in, it would have been too late to go after the other. The captain of the steamboat was motioning for us to come aboard. We guided alongside, to the rear, where there was a sort of ladder work on the side of the steamer. The mate and his helpers were there waiting for us. We went aboard after they had lifted the boy we had saved. We all sat around the furnaces in the boiler room while we were waiting for the Pelham boys, who had been taken to the captain’s cabin to get their wet clothes off and to be rubbed warm.

  The Hudson Lee kept on her trip after that, going slow up the river, plowing through the ice. She stopped at our wharf to let us off and we saw that the Pelham boys were all right again and were none the worse for their ice-water bath. They had warm, dry clothes on that Captain Lee had given them, and their old wet clothes was hanging down in the boiler room getting dry, and they were so glad to get home safe again that they forgot to take their clothes. So they ran down the gangplank in the steamboat workers’ clothes, and that way they went home, but if their mothers knew ’em or not when they got home, I never heard. Now they will be sitting every day on their bank waiting for the Hudson Lee to come past again so they can get their old clothes back. But most likely the captain of the Hudson Lee threw those clothes away when he saw that the kids ran away without them. They weren’t much good, nohow.

  When Jerry got back the first thing he did was to go to his campfire and get it started again. Then he came up into the clubhouse where I had just begun to write about this funny ice chase.

  “Where’s Bill Darby?” he said. “Let me talk to that kid, right away.”

  “What’s a’ matter, Jerry?” asked Bill from a chair in the corner.

  “Ah,” said Jerry. “So there you are with that old black cat, huh? Well, le’mme tell you, boy, that cat ain’t goin’ a’ stay in this here clubhouse, see? Soon as I saw that cat, I knowed right away some dern trouble was coming with it, and I weren’t wrong. The minute that cat jumped onto me, the ice broke and those Pelham guys went sailing out to sea on a cake of soap—I mean a cake of ice. And you gon’a stand up to my face and tell me that black cat didn’t bring that bad luck to us?”

  Bill was smoothing the fur of the cat as it lay upon his lap, ready and willing to go to sleep as soon as Jerry stopped shouting.

  “It’s a purty thing,” said Bill. “It learned to love me while you fellas were gone—just in that short time it learned to love me, Jerry.”

  “Yeah,” said Jerry. “And in just that short time I learned to hate that cat. I ain’t gon’a kill him, Bill. I ain’t even gon’a hit him, but I’m gon’a chase him outta here the minute I stop talking.”

  “Cats are unhealthy, Bill,” I spoke up; for I saw that it looked like Jerry and Bill would surely have a fight over it. “Doc Waters says cats are unhealthy in the house. That’s why we better take it out and chase it away.”

/>   Which we did.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Note on the Door

  JERRY MOORE built a campfire on the riverbank just as soon as school was out, and all the boys went down there with him and sat around the fire. I had to finish my writing and went up to my little office in the clubhouse. And as I sat there writing, I couldn’t help looking up at the old brass horn, and that made me think again of poor old Harkinson. He had been my worst enemy. I know there was a time when he hated me. Yet it was me he had sent for at the last, before he died, and he gave me that old brass horn to remember him by. I kept the old relic upon a nail on the wall beside my desk. I liked that old horn, somehow. Long ago when I first heard its brassy notes around this riverbank, it belonged to Stoner’s Boy, the fella we all called the Gray Ghost because he wore that old gray Army overcoat and disappeared so fast. He could run faster than any boy we knew, and he’d always blow that horn when he was getting away from us—after playing some kind of trick on us. And when we saw Stoner’s Boy take that fall into the deep pit and make what appeared to be his final disappearance under the dark waters of Cave River, we thought we had heard the last of the old horn. But the horn was heard again when the Red Runners came. How was it, I asked myself, that the horn had not disappeared with Stoner? Most likely he had left it home; he did not have it with him that day. And then Harkinson had got it. Yes, Long Tom most likely gave it to Harkinson when the Red Runners began to run. And at last it had come to me to keep, a token by which to remember Stoner’s Boy and Harkinson—two of the strangest boys I ever knew. And both of ’em hated me too at one time. Yet it was to me the old relic came.

  I finished my writing, and walked down to Jerry’s campfire where the boys sat talking.