“What’s your schooner?”
“The Elsie C.”
“That turtle shell? You’d be committin’ suicide to go in her. You come along with us. We’re holdin’ you as a material witness and—and to prevent you from committing suicide by trying the lake in that shell.”
Reluctantly Mark obeyed.
“Can’t something be done?” he demanded desperately.
“Not before morning. Not much then, probably. How’d you find a yacht blowin’ round loose in this whirlin’ bag of snow?”
* * * *
There is a bottom to every depth, a state of darkness which cannot be exceeded, a limit even to despair. As Florence looked upon Lucile’s closed eyes she reached the bottom; experienced the utter darkness; found the limit of despair.
And then a strangely joyous thing happened.
Lucile’s eyes opened. She smiled faintly. Strange to say, in the midst of this tumult, she had merely fallen asleep.
Florence took a new and firmer grip on hope.
“How—how do you feel?” she stammered.
“I think I am better,” Lucile whispered. “Where are we?”
“We’re all right,” said Florence quickly. “Day is breaking. The storm will go down as the sun rises. They’ll be after us in a tug. In a few hours we’ll be back on the dock?”
She said all this very quickly, not knowing how much of it she believed herself, but feeling quite sure that Lucile ought to believe it. Just then a chair, pitching across the floor, caught her behind the knees and sent her sprawling.
The very shock of this set her blood tingling. “Believe we could do something about the furniture now it’s getting light,” she told herself.
“Marian,” she called, “come on down and let’s see what we can do to save things. We’re ruined as it is. No more university for us. It will take all the money we have to put this cabin back into condition. But we might as well save what we can.”
A table came lurching at her. She caught it as if it were a piece of gymnasium equipment. Then rescuing a water-soaked sheet from the floor she tied the table to a hand-rail.
Marian joined her in pursuit of the cabin furnishings. It really grew into quite a game. If a chair came at them too viciously they were obliged to vault over it and bring up an attack from the rear. If a whole platoon of tables and chairs leaped at them in the same second, they took to the cots.
Little by little order was restored. When a survey had been made it was found that one table was broken to splinters, two chairs had broken legs and numerous books and pictures had been utterly ruined.
“It might have been worse,” said Florence cheerfully.
“Yes,” agreed Marian, “We might have gone to the bottom. I do believe the storm is letting up.”
She attempted to look out of a porthole. Daylight had come. Snow had ceased falling but a heavy fog was driving over the turbulent waters.
“Fine chance of anyone finding us,” Marian whispered.
“Sh!” Florence warned as she shook a finger at Lucile’s berth, then aloud: “Boo! but I’m cold. Where are our clothes?”
Marian pointed mournfully at a mass of soggy rags in the corner. “No!” she exclaimed suddenly, “no, not all. We put our evening skirts and middies and slippers in the hammock of our berths. And,” she shouted joyously, “they are there still.”
After some desperate struggles at keeping their balance and dressing at the same time, they found themselves warmly clad and immediately matters took on a different aspect.
“I believe,” ventured Florence, “that we might get the generator going. There’s just one place where water would cause a short circuit and that can be dried out by a candle. Then we can put in a new fuse and that little old friend of ours will be chug-chugging as well as ever. Not that I feel any need of heat,” she mocked with a shrug and shiver, “but you know the supplying of warmth to our homes has become a social custom.”
Having taken a candle from a drawer she lighted it, lifted a trap door and descended to the generator. She was relieved to note that the O Moo had shipped very little water.
“She’s a dandy staunch little craft,” she sighed. “It’s a pity to have abused her so. I’d like to have a hand on the person who turned her loose.”
For a quarter of an hour she worked patiently on the generator; then there came a sudden pop-pop-pop and the hardy little machine was doing its work once more.
At once a drowsy warmth began to creep over the cabin.
The storm was really beginning to abate. Waves no longer washed the deck. The O Moo rose high, to fall low again as great, sweeping swells raced across the surface of the lake, but she did not pitch and toss.
Marian brought the electric range up from its hiding. After wiping it dry, she made toast and tea. The first she gave to Lucile. Then, after seeing her eyes close once more in sleep, she shared a scant breakfast with Florence.
“Things are looking better, don’t you think?” she sighed. “I am really beginning to think we’ll get out of this alive. Won’t that be wonderful?”
“Those questions,” smiled Florence, “must be answered one at a time, but I have faith that they will both be answered and that we’ll be back in the dear old city for Christmas.”
“Christmas?”
“Two weeks off. Next week is final exams. We’ve just got to be back for them.”
“In that case let’s have a look at the engine.”
A half hour later the two girls, dressed in greasy overalls, their hair done in knots over their heads, their hands black with oil, might have been seen engaged in the futile attempt to unravel the mysteries of the small gasoline engine, which, in other days, had been used to propel the O Moo when the wind failed to fill her sails.
“We might be able to sail her home,” suggested Marian.
“Might,” said Florence.
Risking a look out on deck, she opened a door. Her eyes swept the space before her. Her lips uttered a low exclamation:
“Gone! Mast, canvas, everything. We can’t sail home, that’s settled.”
* * * *
Mark Pence, after his strange adventures at the old scow, was marched off to the police station, where he was allowed to doze beside the radiator until morning.
Soon after daybreak he was motioned to a desk, where a sergeant questioned him closely regarding his knowledge of the events of the night and of the Orientals who lived in the old scow.
He was able to tell little enough and to explain next to nothing. When he had told of the disappearance of the O Moo, of the grease on the tracks, of the sample he had saved and of the block of wood with the cross embossed upon it, the officer proposed that they should together make a trip to the beach and go over the grounds.
“But these friends of mine? These girls in the O Moo?” he protested.
“Oh! That!” exclaimed the sergeant. “What could you do? That was reported to the life-saving station hours ago. Best thing you can do is to help us track down the rascals who played such an inhuman trick on your friends.”
“What could have been their motive?” demanded Mark suddenly.
“That,” said the officer, “is a mystery which must be cleared up. We think we know. But you never can tell. Are you ready? We’ll have a cup of coffee before we go.”
A half hour later Mark found himself standing once more before the old scow. In the broad light of day it had lost much of its air of mystery. The door had been left open and had been blown half full of snow. Having climbed over this pile of snow, they entered the hallway and descended the narrow, circular stairs.
A hasty search told them that the place was deserted. A careful examination revealed the fact that the bottom of the scow had been cut away; that a cellar had been dug beneath it, then walled up with cement.
“Regular underground den,” the officer exclaimed. “Must have been a swarm of them.”
“Twenty or thirty, I guess,” said Mark absent-mindedly. He had picked up
a clumsily hand-forged ax.
“Guess I’ll take that along,” he said presently.
In another room he found a large iron pot one-third full of a peculiar grease.
“That settles it,” he murmured. “Come on over to my schooner.”
They went to his schooner. A comparison of his sample of grease with that in the iron pot left no doubt as to who had greased the track over which the O Moo had glided to the water. The ax he had brought from the scow had a cross on one side of it, cut no doubt with a chisel when the steel was still hot. The cross embossed on the wood exactly fitted in the cross on the side of the ax.
“They drove the ax in to pull the nails,” Mark explained. “Then when the cleats didn’t give way, they used something to pry the ax loose. That’s how the ax came to leave its mark.”
“You’d have thought the noise would have wakened your friends,” said the officer.
“There was a wild storm. Couldn’t hear anything.”
“Well,” said the sergeant, yawning as he rose, “that fixes something definitely on them. That’s what we’ve been trying to do for some time. Next thing is to catch them.”
“But why did they do it?” insisted Mark.
“Well,” replied the sergeant, “since you’ve helped us and I know you won’t go blabbing, I’ll tell you what we think.”
It was a long story, a story so absorbingly mysterious that Mark started when he looked at the clock and saw that a whole hour had been consumed in the telling of it.
“So that’s that,” smiled the officer as he rose to go. “Tell your lady friends on this O Moo if you like but not anybody else. They’ve got a right to know, I guess, and they’ll keep quiet about it until the thing’s settled for good and all.”
CHAPTER XIII
LAND AT LAST
Florence stood upon the deck. The storm had swept it clean. She was clinging to a hand rail at the side of the cabin. The water was still rolling about in great sweeping swells. Fog hung low over all. Strain her eyes as she might, she could see but a hundred yards. The boat, she discovered, had no horn or siren attached to it.
“If only we had one,” she told Marian, “we could keep it going. Then, if anyone is searching for us, he would be able to locate us by the sound.”
She stood there trying to imagine where they were, and what was to be the next scene in their little drama. All efforts to start the engine had been futile. There are a thousand types of gasoline engines. Marian had at one time managed a small motor on Lucile’s boat but that one had been of quite a different type.
“’Tisn’t any use,” Marian had sighed at last. “We can’t get it going.”
So there Florence stood thinking. Marian was in the cabin preparing some hot soup for Lucile. Lucile’s condition was much improved. She was sitting up in her berth. That much was good. But where were they and whither were they bound?
They had gone over their supplies and had found in all about eight pounds of flour and part of a tin of baking powder, three pounds of sugar, a half pound of coffee and a quarter pound of tea, two tins of sardines, a few dried prunes and peaches, two glasses of preserves and a few other odds and ends. Beside these there were still twelve cans of the “unlabeled and unknown” vegetables and fruit.
“I hope,” Marian had smiled, “that they are all corn. One can live much longer on corn than on pineapple.”
“But we can’t live long on that supply,” Florence had said soberly. “Something has just got to happen. And,” she had added, “perhaps it won’t. If it were summer, things would be different, for at that time of the year the lake is dotted with vessels. But now they are all holed up or in dry dock. Only now and then one ventures out. We may have been blown out a long way from shore too; probably were.”
She was thinking of all this now. At the same time her eyes were squinting, half closed. She was trying to pierce the fog.
Suddenly she started. Had she seen something off to the left? A whitish bulk rising out of the fog?
She could not be sure. Well aware that one’s eyes play tricks on him when out at sea, she looked away, then turned her gaze once more to the left.
“Gone!” she muttered. “Never was there at all.”
Again she struck that listless, drooping pose which gave her whole body rest.
“But no,” she murmured, “there it is again. They have come for us. They have found us!”
She wanted to scream, to tell the other girls that help was near, but “No, no!” she decided, “not too soon. It might not be. If it is, they’ll see us. The O Moo stands well out of the water.”
To still her wildly beating heart, she allowed her gaze to wander off to the right.
Instantly she blinked her eyes.
“It can’t be,” she exclaimed, then, “Yes it is—it is! Another.”
Turning once more to the left, she found still another surprise. Two of them off there.
Fear began to assail her. Her forehead grew cold. Her hands trembled. Was it, after all, a false hope?
She had but a moment to wait. Then she knew. The fog had lifted slightly. She could see farther, could tell what was closing down upon them.
The shock was too much for her. She sank limply to the deck. It was as if she had been wandering in a fog on a rocky hillside searching for sheep, had thought she saw them coming out of the fog, only to discover that the creatures she saw were prowling wolves. The white bulks on the surface of the water were not boats searching for them but cakes of ice. And these, there could be no doubt about it, were fast closing in upon the O Moo. With the water still heaving, this meant danger—might indeed mean the destruction of their craft.
“I ought,” she struggled to her feet, “I ought to tell the girls.”
Yet she did not tell them. What was the use? she reasoned. There was nothing to do but wait, and that she could do very well alone.
There is something awe-inspiring about the gathering of great bodies of ice which have been scattered by a storm. They come together as if each had a motor, an engineer and a pilot on board. And yet their coming is in absolute silence. If one cake chances to touch another, the contact is so slight that there is no sound.
And so they assemble. Coming from all points of the compass, they reunite as a great fleet might after a mighty and victorious battle.
The O Moo chanced to be in the very midst of this particular gathering. As Florence watched she was thrilled and fascinated. Now the surface was a field of blue cloth with a white patch here and there. Now the white covered half, now two-thirds, now three-fourths of the field. And now a cake brushed the hull of the yacht ever so gently.
Suddenly she realized that a strange thing had happened. The water which had been rolling had ceased to roll.
“The ice did that,” she whispered. “Perhaps it’s not dangerous after all.”
She watched until the cloth of blue had been almost completely changed to one of white, then burst into the cabin.
To her unbounded surprise, she found her companions sitting on Lucile’s berth with rapt attention staring out of the window.
“Isn’t it wonderful!” whispered Lucile.
“I—I thought it would be terribly dangerous,” said Florence.
“Not now,” said Marian. “It may be if we come to shore and the wind crowds the ice, but even then we’ll be safe enough. We can escape over the ice to shore. Only,” she added thoughtfully, “in that case the O Moo will be crushed. And that would be too sad after she has carried us through the storm so bravely.”
Florence still looked puzzled.
“You see,” smiled Marian, “Lucile and I have been in the ice-packs on the Arctic, so we know. Don’t we, old dear?” She patted Lucile on the shoulder.
“Uh—huh,” smiled Lucile as she settled back on her pillow.
Ice, as Marian had said, is quite a safe convoy of the sea until some shore is reached.
For twenty-four hours they drifted in the midst of the floe. Now a sea gull ca
me soaring and screaming about the yacht. And now he went skimming away, leaving them to the vast silence of the conquered waters. Fog hung low over the water and the ice. No long-drawn hoot of a fog horn, no shrill siren’s scream greeted their anxious ears. A great silence hung over all.
Then Florence, who was standing on deck, noticed that, almost imperceptibly, the fog was lifting. She had been thinking of the last twenty-four hours. Lucile, who was much better, had left her berth and was sitting on one of the upholstered chairs. Marian was trying for the hundredth time to start the engine.
As Florence thought this through, she found herself at the same time wondering what the lifting of the fog would mean to them. Had they, after all, drifted only a short distance from the city? Would they be able, once the fog had cleared, to distinguish the jagged shore which the city’s sky line cut out of the blue? Would there be some boat nearer than they had dreamed? Or had they really drifted a long way? Would they look upon a shoreless expanse of water or would the irregular tree-line of some unknown shore greet them?
The fog was slow in passing. She was eager for the unveiling of this mystery. Impatiently she paced the deck.
Then, suddenly, she paused, shaded her eyes, and looked directly before her. Was there some, low, dark bulk appearing off there before the very course the ice was taking?
For a long time she could not be sure. Then with a startled exclamation she leaped to the door of the cabin crying:
“Girls! Marian! Lucile! Look! Land! Land ahead of the ice-floe.”
Marian came racing out on deck, followed more slowly by Lucile. For a moment they all stood there looking.
“It’s land all right,” said Marian at last, “but not much land. A little sandy island with a great many small evergreen trees growing on it, I should say.”
“Or perhaps a point,” suggested Lucile hopefully. “You see, if it’s a point we can go back just a little way and find people, people with plenty of food and—and everything.” Lucile had had quite enough of this adventure.
“It’s better not to hope for too much,” smiled Marian, “‘Hope for the best, be prepared for the worst,’ is my motto. And the worst!” she exclaimed suddenly, “is that the ice will begin to buckle and pile when it touches that shore.”
The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 65