“But if they did, why should they call the police for your protection?”
“Yes, why? Why? A whole lot of whys. And who would suspect me? I would trust Frank Morrow to keep faith with me. I am sure he trusts me fully. The Portland chart book affair I was not in at all. The bindery would scarcely suspect me. There’s only our own library left. You don’t think—”
“One scarcely knows what to think,” said Florence wearily. “We sometimes forget that we are but two poor girls who are more or less dependent on the university for our support while we secure an education. Perhaps you should have confided in the library authorities in the beginning.”
“Perhaps. But it’s too late now. I must see the thing through.”
“You don’t believe the old Frenchman’s story.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to doubt it. He seems so sincere. There’s something left out, I suppose.”
“Of course there is. In order to keep from starving, he was obliged to sell some of his books. Then, being heartbroken over the loss of them, he has induced the child to steal them back for him. That seems sensible enough, doesn’t it? Of course it’s a pity that he should have been forced to sell them, but they were, in a way, a luxury. We all are obliged to give up some luxuries. For my part, I don’t see how you are going to keep him out of jail. The child will probably come clear because of her age, but there’s not a chance in a million of saving him. There’s got to be a show-down sometime. Why not now? The facts we have in our possession are the rightful property of others, of our library, Frank Morrow, the scientific library, of the Silver-Barnard bindery. Why not pass them on?”
Florence was sitting bolt upright in bed. She pointed her finger at her roommate by way of emphasis.
But, tired and perplexed as she was, Lucile never flinched.
“Your logic is all right save for two things,” she smiled wearily.
“What two?”
“The character of the old man and the character of the child. They could not do the thing you suggest. No, not for far greater reward. Not in a thousand years.” She beat the bed with her hands. “There must be some other explanation. There must. There must!”
For a moment there was silence in the room. Lucile removed her street garments, put on her dream robe, then crept into bed.
“Oh,” she sighed, “I forgot to tell you what that extraordinary child asked me to do.”
“What?”
“She said she had an errand to do for the old Frenchman; that it would take her a long way from home and she was afraid to go alone. She asked me if I would go with her.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I—I told her that both my roommate and I would go.”
“You did!”
“Why, yes.”
“Well,” said Florence, after a moment’s thought, “I’ll go, but if it’s another frightful robbery, if she’s going to break in somewhere and carry away some book worth thousands of dollars, I’m not in on it. I—I’ll drag her to the nearest police station and our fine little mystery will end right there.”
“Oh, I don’t think it can be anything like that,” said Lucile sleepily. “Anyway, we can only wait and see.”
With that she turned her right cheek over on the pillow and was instantly fast asleep.
CHAPTER XV
A STRANGE JOURNEY
The hours of the following day dragged as if on leaden wings. With nerves worn to single strands, Lucile was now literally living on excitement. The fact that she was to go with the mystery child on a night’s trip which held promise of excitement and possible adventure in it, went far toward keeping her eyes open and on their task, but for all this, the hours dragged.
At the library she was startled to note the worn and haggard look on Harry Brock’s face. She wanted to ask him the cause of it and to offer sympathy, but he appeared to actually avoid her. Whenever she found some excuse to move in his direction, he at once found one for moving away to another corner of the library.
“Whatever can be the matter with him?” she asked herself. “I wonder if I could have offended him in any way. I should hate to lose his friendship.”
Night came at last and with it the elevated station and Tyler street.
With her usual promptness, the child led them to a surface car. They rode across the city. From the car they hurried to an inter-urban depot of a steam line.
“So it’s to be out of the city,” Florence whispered to Lucile. “I hadn’t counted on that. It may be more than we bargained for.”
“I hope not,” shivered Lucile. “I’ve been all warmed up over this trip the whole day through and now when we are actually on the way I feel cold as a clam and sort of creepy all over. Do—do you suppose it will be anything very dreadful?”
“Why, no!” laughed Florence. “Far as feelings go mine have been just the opposite to yours. I didn’t want to go and felt that way all day, but now it would take all the conductors in the service to put me off the train.”
With all the seriousness of a grown-up, the child purchased tickets for them all, and now gave them to the conductor without so much as suggesting their destination to the girls.
“I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way,” whispered Florence with a smile.
“Seems strange, doesn’t it?” said Lucile.
“Sh,” warned Florence.
The child had turned a smiling face toward them.
“I think it’s awfully good of you to come,” she beamed. “It’s a long way and I’m afraid we’ll be late getting home, but you won’t have to do anything, not really, just go along with me. It’s a dreadfully lonesome place. There’s a long road you have to go over and the road crosses a river and there is woods on both sides of the river. Woods are awful sort of spooky at night, don’t you think so?”
Florence smiled and nodded. Lucile shivered.
“I don’t mind the city,” the child went on, “not any of it. There are always people everywhere and things can’t be spooky there, but right out on the roads and in the woods and on beaches where the water goes wash-wash-wash at night, I don’t like that, do you?”
“Sometimes I do,” said Florence. “I think I’m going to like it a lot tonight.”
“Oh, are you?” exclaimed the child. “Then I’m glad, because it was awfully nice of you to come.”
“A long road, woods and a river,” Florence repeated in Lucile’s ear. “Wherever can we be going? I supposed we would get off at one of the near-in suburbs.”
“Evidently,” said Lucile, forcing a smile, “we are in for a night of it. I’m going to catch forty winks. Call me when we get to the road that crosses the river in the woods.” She bent her head down upon one hand and was soon fast asleep.
She was awakened by a shake from Florence. “We’re here. Come on, get off.”
What they saw on alighting was not reassuring. A small red depot, a narrow, irregular platform, a square of light through which they saw a young man with a green shade over his eyes bending before a table filled with telegraph instruments; this was all they saw. Beyond these, like the entrance to some huge, magical cave, the darkness loomed at them.
The child appeared to know the way, even in the dark, for she pulled at Florence’s sleeve as she whispered:
“This way please. Keep close to me.”
There was not the least danger of the girls’ failing to keep close, for, once they had passed beyond sight of that friendly square of light and the green-shaded figure, they were hopelessly lost.
True, the darkness shaded off a trifle as their eyes became more accustomed to it; they could tell that they were going down a badly kept, sandy road; they could see the dim outline of trees on either side; but that was all. The trees seemed a wall which shut them in on either side.
“Trees are spooky at night,” Lucile whispered as she gripped her companion’s arm a little more tightly.
“Where are we?” Florence whispered.
“I
couldn’t guess.”
“Pretty far out. I counted five stops after the lights of the city disappeared.”
“Listen.”
“What is it?”
“Water rushing along somewhere.”
“Might be the river. She said there was one.”
“Rivers rush like that in the mountains but not here. Must be the lake shore.”
“Hist—”
The child was whispering back at them. “We are coming to the bridge. It’s a very long bridge, and spooky. I think we better tiptoe across it, but we mustn’t run. The gallopin’ goblins’ll come after us if we do; besides, there’s an old rusty sign on the bridge that says, ‘No trotting across the bridge.’”
The next moment they felt a plank surface beneath their feet and knew they were on the bridge. It must have been a very ancient bridge. This road had never been remodeled to fit the need of automobiles. The planks rattled and creaked in an ominous manner in spite of their tiptoeing.
“I wonder how much more there is of it,” Florence groaned in a whisper when they had gone on tiptoes for what seemed an endless space of time. “If my toes don’t break, I’m sure my shoes will.”
As for Lucile, she was thinking her own thoughts. She was telling herself that if it were not for the fact that this night’s performance gave promise of being a link in the chain of circumstances which were to be used in dragging the gargoyle’s secret from its lair, she would demand that the child turn about and lead them straight back to the city.
Since she had faith that somehow the mystery was to be solved and her many worries and perplexities brought to an end, she tiptoed doggedly on. And it was well that she did, for the events of this one night were destined to bring about strange and astounding revelations. She was not to see the light of day again before the gargoyle’s secret would be fully revealed, but had she known the series of thrilling events which would lead up to that triumphant hour, she would have shrunk back and whispered, “No, no, I can’t go all that way.”
Often and often we find this true in life; we face seemingly unbearable situations—something is to happen to us, we are to go somewhere, be something different, do some seemingly undoable thing and we say, “We cannot endure it,” yet we pass through it as through a fog to come out smiling on the other side. We are better, happier and stronger for the experience. It was to be so with Lucile.
The bridge was crossed at last. More dark and silent woods came to flank their path. Then out of the distance there loomed great bulks of darker masses.
“Mountains, I’d say they were,” whispered Lucile, “if it weren’t for the fact that I know there are none within five hundred miles.”
For a time they trudged along in silence. Then suddenly Florence whispered:
“Oh, I know! Dunes! Sand dunes! Now I know where we are. We are near the lake shore. I was out here somewhere for a week last summer. By day it’s wonderful; regular mountains of sand that has been washed up and blown up from the bed of the lake. Some of them are hundreds of feet above the level of the lake. There are trees growing on them and everything.”
“But what are we doing out here?”
“I can’t guess. There is a wonderful beach everywhere and cottages here and there.”
“But it’s too late for summer cottages. They must all be closed.”
“Yes, of course they must.”
Again they trudged on in silence. Now they left the road to strike away across the soft, yielding surface of the sand. They sank in to their ankles. Some of the sand got into their shoes and hurt their feet, but still they trudged on.
The rush of waters on the shore grew louder.
“I love it,” Florence whispered. “I like sleeping where I can hear the rush of water. I’ve slept beside the Arctic Ocean, the Behring Sea and the Pacific. I’ve slept by the shore of this old lake. Once in the Rocky Mountains I climbed to the timber-line and there slept for five nights in a tent where all night long you could hear the rush of icy water over rocks which were more like a stony stairway than the bed of a stream. It was grand.
“When I am sleeping where I can hear the rush of water I sometimes half awaken at night and imagine I am once more on the shore of the Arctic or in a tent at the timber-line of the Rockies.”
While she was whispering this they felt the sand suddenly harden beneath their feet and knew that they had reached the beach.
“You know,” the child whispered suddenly and mysteriously back at them, “I don’t like beaches at night. I lived by one when I was a very little girl. There was a very, very old woman lived there too. She told me many terrible stories of the sea. And do you know, once she told me something that has made me afraid to be by the shore at night. It makes it spooky.”
She suddenly seized Lucile’s arm with a grip that hurt while she whispered, “That’s why I wanted you to come.
“She told me,” she went on, “that old woman told me,” Lucile fancied she could see the child’s frightened eyes gleaming out of the night, “about the men who were lost at sea; brave seamen who go on ships and brave soldiers too. Their bodies get washed all about on the bottom of the water; the fishes eat them and by and by they are all gone. But their souls can’t be eaten. No sir, no one can eat them. The old woman told me that.”
The child paused. Her breath was coming quick. Her grip tightened on Lucile’s arm as she whispered:
“And sometimes I’m afraid one of their souls will get washed right up on the sand at night. That’s what frightens me so. What do you think it would look like? What do you? Would it be all yellow and fiery like a glowworm or would it be just white, like a sheet?”
“Florence,” whispered Lucile, with a shiver, “tell her to be quiet. She’ll drive me mad.”
But there was no need. There is much courage to be gained by telling our secret fears to others. The child had apparently relieved her soul of a great burden, for she tramped on once more in silence.
Several moments had passed when she suddenly paused before some dark object which stood out above the sand.
“A boat,” whispered Lucile.
“If you’ll just help me,” said the child, “we can push it into the water.”
“What for?” Florence asked.
“Why, to go in, of course. It’s the only way.”
For a moment the two girls stood there undecided. Then Florence whispered:
“Oh, come on. It’s not rough. Might as well see it through.”
CHAPTER XVI
NIGHT VISITORS
A moment later they were listening to the creak of rusty oarlocks and the almost inaudible dip-dip of the oars as the child herself sent the boat out from the beach to bring it half about and skirt the shore.
The boat was some sixteen feet long. A clinker-built craft, it was light and buoyant, but for all that, with three persons aboard, the rowing of it was a tax on the strength of the child’s slender arms. To add to her troubles, the water began to rubber up a bit. Small waves came slap-slapping the boat’s side. Once a bit of spray broke in Florence’s face.
“Here,” she whispered, “it’s too heavy for you. Let me have the oars, then you tell me which way to go.”
“Straight ahead, only not too close in. There’s a wall.”
“A wall?” Lucile thought to herself. “Sounds like a prison. There’s a parole camp out here somewhere. It can’t be!” she shuddered. “No, of course not. What would that old man and child have to do with prisons?”
Then, suddenly an ugly thought forced its way into her mind. Perhaps after all these two were members of a gang of robbers. Perhaps a member of the gang had been in prison and was at this moment in the parole camp. What if this turned out to be a jail-breaking expedition?
“No, no!” she whispered as she shook herself to free her mind of the thought.
“There’s the wall,” whispered Florence, as a gray bulk loomed up to the right of them.
They passed it in silence. To Lucile they seemed like ma
rines running a blockade in time of war.
But Florence was busy with other thoughts. That wall seemed vaguely familiar to her. It was as if she had seen it in a dream, yet could not recall the details of the dream.
A storm was brewing off in the west. Now and then a distant flash of lightning lighted up the surrounding waters. Of a sudden one of these, more brilliant than the rest, lighted up the shore, which, at a word from the child, they were now nearing. What Florence saw was a small, artificially dredged buoy with a dock and large boathouse at the back.
Instantly what had been a dream became a reality. She had seen that wall and the little buoy and boathouse as well. Only the summer before she had spent two nights and a day with a party on the dunes. They had hired a motor boat and had skirted the shore. This place had been pointed out to her and described as the most elaborate and beautiful summer cottage on the shore.
“Why,” she whispered, with a sigh of relief, “this is the summer cottage of your friend, R. Stanley Ramsey, Jr., the young man you saw at Frank Morrow’s place and whom we saw later at the mystery cottage. This isn’t any brigandish thieving expedition. It is merely a business trip. Probably the old man has sold him one of his books.”
Lucile’s first reaction to this news was intense relief. This was not a jail-breaking expedition; in fact, was not to be in any way an adventure. But the next instant doubt came.
“What would that young man be doing in a summer cottage at this time of year?” she demanded. “All the cottages must have been closed for nearly a month. Society flies back to the city in September. Besides, if it’s plain business, why all this slipping in at the lake front instead of passing through the gate?”
Florence was silent at that. She had no answer.
“Does seem strange,” she mused. “There’s a very high fence all about the place, but of course there must be a gate.”
The next instant the boat grated on the sandy beach and they were all climbing out.
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