The Gray Ghost

by Robert F. Schulkers

  I ran for him. I leaped up those steps as fast as I could. I mounted the top deck not more than ten feet behind him—yet he fooled me—he turned suddenly and darted for the pilothouse. I turned as quickly as I could, but I was too late. He had run up the pilothouse steps and slammed the door in my face, just as he had done the last time. But I shoved open the door and jumped inside.

  The place was empty as before!

  “Ah,” I said. “Not this time.”

  No, he couldn’t fool me twice in the same place. I had examined the walls and the floor last time. So I did not trouble about them. I simply stood and kept my eyes before me, and then, as luck would have it, I heard a sound—it was just a trifle of a sound—but it was enough for me.

  I turned my eyes up. Up to the roof I looked. It was a simple roof made of a fancy metal design, each side tapering up to a round metal ball that stood out on the roof as most pilothouses have. Nothing strange about that. But I put my foot on the windowsill and pulled myself up. The pilothouse was low, and I could reach from this place the fancy metal roof. I shoved on the base of the ball ornament in the center of the roof, and my heart gave a jump—the ball moved. The next instant I had shoved it aside and there was an opening just big enough to climb through.

  I poked my head out. There was Three-Finger Fred, lying flat on his stomach on the roof of the pilothouse. No wonder we could not see him last week when he had disappeared so mysteriously. I raised myself upon my hands, through the opening made by the removal of the metal ball ornament, and he jumped to his feet.

  “Seckatary Hawkins!” he cried.

  Then, without another sound and before I could pull myself fully out onto the roof, he leaped—He leaped!

  I shut my eyes. Never before in my life did I see a boy take such a chance. Once I had seen Harkinson leap off the cliff, a dive of thirty feet into the river. But this—ah, boy how could he break his fall on the bank below—the water was too far away.

  I fell flat on my stomach to see how badly he was hurt. But I was wrong. There was Three-Finger Fred whole and sound on the bank, running for the river—and he gave a shrill, trilling whistle, followed immediately by the sound of the old brass horn, and then the chug-chug-chug of a motor. The gray launch swung into view from somewhere behind the wreck of the old steamboat. As it passed, Three-Finger Fred made a flying leap and landed on his hands and knees in the middle of the launch. Stoner stood at the engine. His face was covered by the gray handkerchief, but I imagined I could see him laughing at us, and they shot up the river like an arrow from a bow. Within a few moments they had turned the first bend.

  There I stood on the top of the pilothouse when Link and the Rolling Stone came running up.

  “Come on, Hawkins,” shouted Link. “Let’s take out after ’em in the long canoe!”

  But I couldn’t see that. I shook my head.

  “What’s the use?” I said. “That motor can beat our paddling all hollow. You’d never catch up with ’em. We might as well take our time as we go back.”

  Which we did.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Secret Post Office

  ON Monday right after school, I went down to the clubhouse in the hollow, and the boys were all waiting around the table to begin the meeting. So I took my place quickly, and the meeting began. They talked mostly about Stoner’s Boy and about Three-Finger Fred’s doings on the wrecked steamboat. The Skinny Guy was not at the meeting, which did not surprise any of us much. No doubt, he was still out hunting for signs of Stoner’s headquarters.

  As soon at the meeting was over, the boys went out to practice baseball, and I went back into my little office to write the minutes, which were not much. Just as I sat down, I noticed a little piece of paper about four inches square standing up against my inkwell. I picked it up quickly, wondering who had put it there. This is what I read:

  When he left boat Was not here Did not Wait long for trunks Send me Them at once to Hobbs

  I read it over three or four times, and then I laughed. It sounded funny. The handwriting was that of a boy, the words being spelled all right, but there were some with capital letters that shouldn’t have been spelled with capitals, and there were no periods or commas, but it was written so as to give a fellow an idea that somebody had gone without his baggage, and the writer was asking for them to be sent to him at Hobbs’s, which most likely meant Hobbs’s Ferry.

  “Well,” I said to myself. “I got the note alright, but if I only knew where the trunks were, I’d be able to—but who in the world wrote this stuff, anyhow?”

  I sometimes speak my thoughts out loud. I was talking loud enough, anyway, and I got an answer. Yeah, the Skinny Guy stood in the door.

  “I’d like to know that myself,” he said. “I put that note on your desk, Hawkins.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “What for?”

  “For you to figure out,” answered Link.

  “Ah,” I said. “I thought so. First I was gon’a think that this note didn’t need any figurin’ out—”

  “It does, though,” said Link. “Where do you think I got it?”

  “I wish you’d a left it there,” I said.

  “Put your cap on,” said Link, “and go down with me.”

  “I got to write, Link,” I said, for I didn’t feel like going out, and this was my only excuse.

  “You can write when we come back,” he said. “Besides, you’ll want to know this. Come on.”

  So I put on my cap and followed Link. We slipped past the hollow where the boys were playing ball and ran down the river path till we reached the cliff. Here Link turned and led me around the base of the cliffs to the woods on the other side of the hollow. We walked about ten minutes without saying a word. When we came to a pretty thickly wooded spot, Link stopped and, turning, looked in all directions and then walked quickly over to a tree.

  “A pretty rotten old sycamore,” I said. “What’s a matter with it?”

  Link suddenly put the tip of his finger into a crack and pulled it back, and there was the finest little cheese hole you ever saw, with its door cut so cleverly into the bark of the tree that you would never have found it unless somebody had shown it to you. Link reached in his hand and pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. I looked at it and saw that it was the same note that I had found on my desk.

  “I put a copy of this note on your desk,” said Link. “I didn’t want to take this one away. It would let them know their secret post office had been discovered if they found it missing.”

  “That was good,” I said. “But who put this here? How did you find this cheese hole, Link?”

  “I followed the kid,” he said. “I was on my way down to the clubhouse this morning when I spied him. He didn’t know I was following him. He opened the little door in the tree here and dropped this note in. When he was gone, I snuck up and copied it.”

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “Never saw him before in my life,” said Link. “He was a nice-looking fella, light hair, cut close to his head, sort of a pleasant face with something of a pug nose and eyes like a rat. He kept on looking around every step he went. While he opened this little hiding place, he kept on turning and looking over his shoulder. But I was hiding on the right, there. He never suspected. He left right away.”

  I tried to think who it might have been. But from the description Link gave me, I could not place the boy.

  “Come on, Link,” I said. “Shut that post office up and let’s get away from here. No telling what trouble we might get into if somebody knows we have discovered their secret.”

  So we went back to the clubhouse.

  *  *  *

  As soon as we reached my little writing room, I took up the copy of the note again and studied it. From the message it carried, I could not connect it with Stoner’s Boy. It sounded more like somebody was expecting a traveler, maybe, to come on a boat or maybe like somebody had been waiting for a boat to bring some trunks to be taken to Hobbs’s Ferry. T
hat’s all I could make of it. So I said to Link:

  “It sure is strange that this message should be placed in a hollow tree, but I don’t think it will interest us, Link. Only about a fella’s baggage which is to be sent by some other fella to Hobbs’s Ferry.”

  “Who’s going to Hobbs’s Ferry?” asked a voice at the door. It was Shadow Loomis. “If anybody’s going down, I’d like to go, too. I’m just aching to see the wreck of the old Smokey City, Hawkins—inside, you know. You fellas went aboard her, but you wouldn’t let us boys in. Now, I want to take a good look—”

  “Take a good look at that,” I said, tossing over to him the note.

  He picked it off the desk and read it.

  “Nothing funny about this,” he said. “Just a message to somebody about luggage, trunks, and all that. What’s exciting about that?”

  “Oh, nothing, only that I found it in a secret post office in a hollow tree,” said Link.

  “You did!” exclaimed Shadow. “Let me take another look, Hawkins.”

  I handed back the note, and he studied it for some minutes. We waited there in silence while he pondered over the scribbled words, and finally he looked up.

  “There’s a secret in this note,” he said. “The fella who wrote it put too many words in it.”

  “What you mean?” I asked.

  “Why, it’s a code or a cipher,” replied Shadow Loomis. “I saw something like it back in Watertown a year or so ago, when I used to have my fights with—”

  He stopped suddenly and turned his eyes again to the note. But before he had time to read through, Link jumped up and snatched it out of his hand.

  “Excuse me, Shad,” he said. “I just want to see how much you know about this. Do you know a fella—”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” broke in Shadow, and he was a little bit hot under the collar for the way Link had snatched the note from him. “I’ll tell you this, Link Lambert. I ain’t had a chance to find this out for myself because you snatched the note away, but if it is what I think it is, I know whose message it is.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, then,” said Shadow. “You boys take that note and read it as I tell you. Take the first word—”

  “Alright,” I said. “First word is ‘when.’”

  “Now then, skip a word and take the next—”

  “That would be ‘left.’”

  “Then skip a word and take the next—”

  “That would be ‘was,’” I said. “You now have ‘When left was.’”

  Shadow stopped and scratched his head.

  “That doesn’t sound like anything,” he said. “Let’s start over. Skip the first word and take the second.”

  “That would be the word ‘he,’ ” I said.

  “Skip another.”

  “And that gives us ‘boat,’” I said. “And that doesn’t make any sense either, Shadow. Who ever heard of a he-boat.”

  And so we fussed and fumed over the note, trying this and that, and nothing came out right. It seemed to me that there was only one meaning in it, and that was just exactly what was written on it. I couldn’t get any sense out of it any other way. So I left Shadow and Link to study over it and went to writing my minutes of the meeting.

  When I had finished my writing, I found Shadow Loomis and Link Lambert talking to the Rolling Stone out in the meeting room. Rolling Stone John sat in his place behind the stove, although there was no longer a fire kept in it, and he was telling them of an adventure that he had had when he was roving—think of that kid roving, will you, and only seventeen years old. Yeah, he was older than any of us boys, and by rights he ought not to have been in our club. But it was our club that had broken him of his running-away habit, so we didn’t make any kick about him hanging around. In fact, all of us boys had come to like the Rolling Stone as well as any of the other boys. He was a good scout.

  I left them there with their storytelling, and I went back to the desk and once more studied the note. Perhaps Shadow was right, I said to myself. Perhaps there was something in this old message that was only for eyes that knew how to figure it out. And if there is anything that does take my interest, it’s something that takes a little figuring.

  So I sat myself down again at my desk with that little note in front of me. Once more I took that “skip-a-word” plan and tried to work it out. Then I took to skipping two words, but there was no sense to the result I got. But all of a sudden—

  “Fellas!” I yelled. “I’ve got it, fellas. Come here, quick.”

  “Got what?” asked Link.

  “The message!” I cried. “I got something out of it—”

  “How’d you work it?” asked Shadow. “Show me your way of —”

  “Skip the first word,” I said.

  “Alright,” said Shadow in an excited voice. “Start with the word ‘he.’”

  “Then skip two,” I said.

  “Alright, that makes it ‘he was.’”

  “Then skip one word.”

  “That gives us the word ‘here.’ We now have ‘he was here.’”

  “Skip two,” I said. “Then keep on skipping one and then two until the end.”

  Together Shadow and Link bent over the desk and crossed out the words as I had told them to do. At length Shadow looked up at me and said:

  “I take my hat off to you, Seckatary Hawkins. You’ve got it. But I told you it reminded me—”

  “Read what you got,” said Link. “Let’s see what it says after we crossed out those words.”

  Shadow picked up the note, which now had the skipped words crossed out, and read the words which remained. They formed the following message:

  He was here. Wait for me at Hobbs.

  Shadow read it out loud and then stopped. For a moment there was a silence. Then—

  “That message was not meant for us,” he said. “What do you think it means?”

  “It means,” said Link, “that somebody is sending word to somebody else that Stoner’s Boy was here—”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “It might mean—”

  “Just one moment,” said the Rolling Stone, holding up his hands. “Link, please if I may ask you this question, what did this guy look like who dropped this note in the tree hole?”

  “Nice looking,” said Link. “Light hair cut short, had a bright face, but his eyes were shifty—”

  “You think he was good looking?” I asked.

  “Of a certain he was,” said Link. “As boys go, he was good lookin’ and he—”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Shadow. “Simon Bleaker! Hawkins, I’ll bet you any money.”

  “You won’t bet me anything,” I broke in, “because I won’t take a chance on whoever it was. But I’ll tell you this, Link, we will have to sneak down and watch who comes for the note in the secret post office in that old sycamore tree.”

  For somehow back in my mind somewhere, while they were talking about bright-looking faces, one particular boy’s face had come in my mind. I did not say who it was. I was satisfied to wait and see.

  “Well,” said Link. “If we’re going to go down and wait, we’d better go right now.”

  Which we did.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Mysterious Code

  AND so, we went down again to the old sycamore tree in which Link had discovered the secret post office. Shadow and Link and I went down together. The Rolling Stone stayed behind long enough to tell all the other boys about it, and they broke up their ball game in the hollow and came following us. When we saw them coming, we waited till they caught up with us. Our captain, Dick Ferris, was a little bit sore about it.

  “Say,” he said. “You fellas must ’av’ forgot who’s captain of this bunch. If anything happens, the old judge will jump on me and say I ought to ’av’ known better and not let you fellas get in any trouble. You had a right to tell me about this secret post office before I got it from somebody else.”

  “Excuse me, Dick,” I said. “We just fo
und out about it half an hour ago. Link came and told me. See, here’s the note. You have to skip a word and then skip two, all the way through. We got the words crossed out that don’t mean anything.”

  Dick looked at the note.

  “Ha!” he said. “Why, this is the Skinny Guy’s handwriting. What you trying to put over on us, Link?”

  “I copied the real note on that paper,” said Link. “I didn’t want to take the real note out of the tree hole, because I didn’t want any one to know that the secret post office was discovered by us fellas.”

  “I saw the real note myself, Dick,” I said. “Link copied it alright. He’s not trying any of his tricks. Come on.”

  “Alright,” said Dick. “But I want all you fellas to mind the orders I give you.”

  “For goodness sake,” said Jerry Moore. “Go on and give your orders and be done with it. I never see such a fella to give orders as you.”

  “If you don’t like it,” said Dick angrily, “you can pick out another captain. I ain’t crazy about this job. But until you pick out someone else, I’m goin’ right ahead and keep you fellas out of trouble. And what’s more, Jerry, you’re going to mind the orders I give too, as long as you call me captain. You’d ought to call me the goat, by rights.”

  “Come on,” I broke in. “We are losing time standing here and fussing.”

  No more was said, and we continued on our way. I noticed, too that the boys all fell in line, two by two, in their regular places that Dick had given them whenever we were out going someplace, and Jerry was right in his very own place too.

  Well, we came at last to the place where the sycamore tree stood. There were plenty of trees in this spot, and we had no trouble getting places to hide in, and Dick went about giving his orders, and putting the boys behind the trees and bushes where they would not be seen.

  “Now,” said Dick. “No matter what happens, you boys will all stay in your hiding places till I give the order to come out or run. It might be we will have to run. Maybe the Pelham fellas got something to do with this secret post office and these funny notes. And mind this order too: nobody is to say a word above a whisper. No use hiding yourself behind a tree and giving yourself away by the sound of your voice. We will stay here about fifteen minutes and watch. If nothing happens by that time, we will go back and finish our ball game.”