The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Mildred A. Wirt

  “Listen!” The other boy’s tone was kindly now. “You seem a decent sort. I don’t know what got you out here. But you go back. Take your traps with you. When people live in a place like this they’ve got a right to make a few laws. Know those Italian fishermen over at the Bay?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes, one of them. Tomingo.”

  “Tomingo. That’s his name. He’s their leader. They tried trapping on the Monhegan shoals. Know what happened? Someone cut their floats. Never found their traps, nor the lobsters in ’em. Goodnight. Wish you luck.” The boy disappeared into the fog.

  So that was it! And that was why Tomingo was so willing to direct him to rich lobster fields! Don sat limply down upon a rock. The two girls stood staring at him in silence.

  “He wanted to keep us off any ground he might wish to trap on, and wanted to repay a debt to these Monheganites,” he said to his companions.

  For five minutes he sat there enshrouded in fog, buried in thought.

  “Closed season!” he exploded at last. “What nonsense! Who ever heard of such a thing? Of course, we won’t pay any attention to it. And if they cut my floats I’ll have them in jail for it. There are laws enough against that.”

  With this resolve firmly fixed in his mind, but with an uneasy feeling lurking there as well, he thought once more of supper and a bed for the night.

  “We’ll go to this Captain Field’s place,” he said to the girls. “I’ll tell him I am a fisherman from Peak’s Island. That’s true. I’ll get an early start in the morning. He need never know about my catch of lobsters.”

  With this settled in his mind he led the way round the bank, across the wharf and up the grass grown path that led to the dimly gleaming light that shone from Captain Field’s window.

  A half hour later, with thoughts of the forbidden lobsters crowded far back in the hidden recesses of their minds, the trio found themselves doing full justice to great steaming bowls of clam chowder topped by a wedge of native blueberry pie.

  All this time and for a long while after, Don talked of sails and fishing, nets, harpoons, and long sea journeys with his smiling, lean-faced and fit appearing host. Captain Field, though still a young man, had earned his papers well, for he had sailed the Atlantic in every type of craft and had once shipped as a harpooner on a swordfishing boat outfitted in Portland harbor.

  As they talked Don’s eyes roved from corner to corner of the cabin. Everything within was scrupulously clean, but painfully plain, much of it hand hewn with rough and ready tools.

  As if reading his thoughts, the young Captain smiled as he said:

  “There’s not a lot of money to be had on Monhegan. The ground’s too rough for farming or cattle. We fish in summer and trap lobsters in winter. But we must have an eye on the purse strings every day of the year.”

  As he said this a curly-haired girl of eight and a brown-faced boy of six came to kneel by their mother’s knee to say their goodnight prayers.

  As he bowed his head with them, something very like a stab ran through Don’s heart and a voice seemed to whisper:

  “You are a thief. You are robbing these little ones and their honest parents of their bread. They endure all the hardships of the year. You come to reap a golden harvest from their lobster fields while their backs are turned.”

  He retired soon after. The bed they gave him was a good one. He was tired, yet he did not sleep. For a full hour he thrashed about. Then a sudden resolve put him to rest.

  As is the way with persons endowed with particularly splendid physique, Ruth, in the broad rope bed beside her cousin, fell asleep at once. She had wrestled long that day with trap lines. The struggle to reach shore had been fatiguing. Her sleep was sweet and dreamless.

  Not so with Pearl. Her mind ever filled with fancy, was now overflowing. She was now on Monhegan, the island of her dreams. She recalled as if they were told yesterday the tales she had heard told of this island by her seafaring uncle before she was old enough to go to school.

  “Oh, Uncle,” she had cried. “Take me there! Take me to Monhegan!”

  “Some day, child,” he had promised.

  Alas, poor man, he had not lived to fulfill his promise. Like many another brave fisherman, he had lost his life on the dreary banks of Newfoundland.

  “Dear Uncle,” she whispered as her throat tightened, “now I am here. Here! And I know you must be glad.”

  The storm was still on. She could hear the distant beat of waves on Black Head, Burnt Head and Skull Rock. The great fog horn still sent out its message from Manana.

  “Hoo-who-ee-Whoo-oo!” Sometimes rising, sometimes falling, it seemed a measureless human voice shouting in the night. The sound of it was haunting.

  Rising and wrapping a blanket about her, the girl went to the low window sill, to drop upon the floor and sit there staring into the night.

  There was little enough to see. The night was black. But across the crest of that great rock, the spot of light played incessantly.

  “Fifteen miles out to sea,” she thought. “Seems strange. One does not feel that this house rested on land. It is more as if this were a ship’s cabin, the lighthouse our search light, the fog horn our signal, and we sail on and on into the night. We—”

  She was awakened from this dream by an unfamiliar sound, thundering that was not waves beating a shore, that might have been the roar of the distant battle front.

  A moment passed, and then she knew.

  “A seaplane,” she thought suddenly. “And on such a night! Why, that can mean only one thing, a trans-Atlantic flyer!”

  How her heart leaped at the thought! She recalled with a tremor the day she got news of “Lindy’s marvelous achievement.”

  Such flyers had become fairly common now. Yet she had never seen one in his flight.

  “If he comes near enough,” she said to herself, straining her eyes in a vain attempt to pierce the inky blackness of the night.

  Then a new thought striking her all of a heap set her shuddering. “What if he does not realize he is near Monhegan? If he is flying low, he will crash.”

  Involuntarily a little prayer went up for the lone navigator of the night air.

  Nor was the prayer unheeded. As she looked a dark spot appeared over Manana. Then the plane came into full view. As if set to the task, the light from the island beacon followed the aviator in his flight. Ten seconds he was in full view. Then he was gone, passed on into the night.

  “Why!” the girl exclaimed, catching her breath, “How—how strange!”

  The thing she had seen was strange. A broad-winged seaplane with a wide fuselage that might have been a cabin for carrying three or four passengers, had passed. The strange part of it all was that it was painted the dull gray-green of a cloudy sea, and carried not one single insignia of any nation.

  “The Flying Dutchman of the air,” she thought as a thrill ran up her spine.

  For a long time she sat there staring at the darkness of night that had swallowed up the mysterious ship of the air.

  At last, with a shudder, for the night air of Monhegan is chill even in summer, she rose to creep beneath the blankets beside her sleeping companion.

  She was about to drift away to the land of dreams, when she thought of Captain O’Connor and what he had told her of smugglers along the Maine coast.

  “Can it be?” she thought. “But no! One would not risk his life crossing the ocean in a seaplane just to smuggle in a few hundred dollars’ worth of lace or silk or whatever it might be. ’Twouldn’t be worth the cost.

  “But men,” she thought quite suddenly. “He said something about smuggling men into the country. It might be—”

  Her eyes were drooping. The day had been long. The salt sea air lay heavy upon her. She fell asleep.

  It was a little dark when Don arose. The girls were still asleep. Somewhat to his surprise, as he reached the beach he found the boy of the previous night there before him.

  “Sleep here?” he asked good-naturedly
.

  “Nope.” There was something in Don’s look that made this boy like him. “Going so soon? Want me to take you out?”

  “Thanks. Yes.”

  “Where is Captain Field’s lobster pond?” Don asked as the punt bumped the side of his boat.

  “That green one.” The boy opened his eyes wide. “Why?”

  “Nothing. Give me a lift, will you?” Don was tugging at the crate of lobsters in the bottom of his motor boat.

  “There!” he sighed as the crate dropped into the punt. “Just row me over to the Field lobster pond, will you?”

  Once there, to the boy’s astonishment, Don loosed the lacings of the canvas on Field’s lobster pond, then one at a time he took the lobsters from his crate and dropped them into the pond.

  “He buy them from you?” The younger boy was incredulous.

  “No.”

  “You quitting?”

  Don nodded.

  “I like you for that.” The other boy put out a hand. For a second Don gripped it. Then, together they rowed back to the motor boat.

  The sea was calm now. Twirling the wheel to his motor, Don went pop-popping away to his lobster traps. Having lifted these, he piled them high on the deck, then turned his prow once more toward Monhegan. His lobster fishing days on Monhegan shoals were at an end. But he was not going to leave Monhegan, not just yet. The wild charm of the place had got him. Strange and startling things were yet to greet him there.

  CHAPTER VIII

  FROM OUT THE FOG

  Despite the fog that lay low over the water, the sea was choppy. The fisherman who rode in the improvised crow’s nest in the forward rigging of the fishing sloop rose ten feet in air to fall, then to rise and fall again. There was a tossing, whirling motion that would have made most girls deathly sick. Not so this one; for the fisherman who stood there ever gripping the harpoon, with alert eyes watching, ever watching the narrow circle of fogbound ocean, was Ruth.

  Swordfish had been reported off Monhegan; in fact Captain Field had brought in a modest-sized one only the day before.

  Although Don and the two girls had decided that lobster trapping on the Monhegan shoals was unfair to those daring souls who made their home on these wave-beaten shores, they were spending a few days on the island.

  “May never be here again,” Don had said. “From all I can see, it’s not quite like anything on earth.

  “I’m going to Booth Bay on the mail tug. The sea has calmed down quite a bit. If you girls want to have a try at something, deep sea cod, horse mackerel, or even swordfish, why there’s the sloop. Safe enough as long’s you keep in sound of the fog horn or sight of the island. Go ahead.”

  Because swordfishing is quite the most thrilling type of fishing on all the coast, and because these huge battlers of the deep bring a marvelous price when caught, Ruth had elected to go swordfishing. And here they were.

  There was some fog, but as long as the hoarse Whoo-whooo-oo of the fog horn on Manana sounded in their ears, they were safe. That sound would guide them back.

  Dressed as she was in faded knickers and a ragged lumberjack, with a boy’s cap pulled down tight over her unruly locks, one might easily have taken this stalwart girl of the Maine coast for a boy, or, at the distance, even for a man.

  “Guess we won’t see any today,” she shouted back to Pearl at the wheel.

  “Thickening up,” Pearl replied.

  “May burn off later.”

  “May.”

  “We might drop anchor and try for cod,” said Ruth. “There are lines and bait in the forward cabin. We—”

  She broke short off to stare away to the right. The next second she gripped her harpoon more securely as she uttered a command almost in a whisper.

  The capable hands of her sixteen-year-old cousin gave the wheel a turn. The boat bore away to the right. The look on Pearl’s face became animated. She knew what the command meant. A great fish of one sort or another had broken water.

  “Probably a horse mackerel,” she told herself. “Might be a swordfish, though. If it is—if she gets him! Oh, boy!”

  The two girls had not been harpooning often, so this little adventure was a real treat. Even a horse mackerel would be worth something.

  “But a swordfish,” Pearl told herself with a real thrill, “one of them may be worth a hundred dollars. And oh, boy! think of the thrill of the chase!”

  The big girl in the crow’s nest was not dreaming. With blue eyes intent, with the color in her cheek heightened with excitement, she was studying an object that, now lifting on the crest of a wave, showed black against the skyline and now, with scarcely a perceptible motion, disappeared beneath the sea.

  “Never saw a fish behave like that,” she told herself. “Acts like a log—almost—not quite. A log does not go under unless a wave hits it. This thing does. Shaped like a swordfish. But whoever heard of a swordfish acting that way?”

  Once more she turned her head to broadcast an order in a tone that was all but a whisper.

  “It is a swordfish,” she whispered back, ten seconds later. “I saw his sword. He’s a monster!”

  A swordfish! Her mind was in a whirl. Suppose they got him! A hundred dollars. What did it not mean to those fisherfolk! A new suit for her father, a dress for herself, a new stove for the kitchen and perhaps a new punt. They needed a new one badly.

  “A swordfish! It is! It is!” Her heart pounded furiously against her ribs as the boat came closer, ever closer to that languid black monster that now rising, now sinking, seemed half asleep.

  A moment passed. Pearl caught the black gleam before her, and her eyes shone as her tense muscles gripped the wheel. Pearl was standing up now. Breathlessly she waited.

  As for the girl in the crow’s nest, for the first time in her life she was experiencing “buck fever.” Little wonder. Never before had she cast for a swordfish, yet here before her a monster cut the waves. His five-foot sword dripped with foam as he rolled lazily over and sank.

  “Gone!” The tense muscles that had frozen her hands to the harpoon relaxed.

  A minute passed. And then—

  “There! There he is!” came in a tense whisper from the stern.

  Towering above the sea, her bronze face alight, the girl in the crow’s nest lifted an arm. With skill and precision she poised her harpoon, then let fly.

  “Got him!” came from the stern.

  Something splashed into the water. An empty keg sealed up tight and fastened securely to the harpoon rope, had been thrown overboard. It would mark the progress of the struggling fish.

  But, strangely enough, the great fish did not struggle overmuch. After a few wallowing flounders in an unavailing attempt to break away from the harpoon line, he went down in a swirl of foam. A moment later he rose to the top and swam heavily away.

  Pearl knew what to do. She followed the fish.

  “Acts awful queer,” was the big girl’s comment. A cold dread was gripping her heart. What if this fish was sick?

  “People don’t eat sick fish,” she told herself. “He’d be a dead loss.”

  No food from the sea is more highly prized than is the steak of a swordfish. None brings a higher price in the market. But if the fish was not sound, then all their work went for nothing.

  What was this? Some strange object was moving across the surface of the water. Now on the crest of a wave, it plunged into the trough, then, like some living thing, climbed the next wave.

  “But it can’t be alive,” she told herself. “It’s only a mass of cloth and twisted stick. Something tailing behind.”

  For a moment she stared at this extraordinary phenomenon, an inanimate object moving like a living thing across the water. Then of a sudden she realized that this curious object was following the swordfish.

  Like a flash it came over her, and her heart sank. This was a marker, just as her floating barrel was. Someone had caught the fish before her.

  “It’s some of those city folks who make their summer hom
e on Monhegan,” she told herself. “Been fishing with a kite. That’s the remains of their kite gliding along down there. They got a fish and have been playing him, tiring him out. That’s why he’s so sort of dead. Oh! Gee!” She rested her head on her arm and wanted to cry.

  Angling for swordfish with a kite is a sport indulged in by expert fishermen all along the Atlantic coast. A live herring or other fish of its size is attached to a hook on a line hanging from a kite. The kite is then sailed from a boat over the water in such a manner that the live bait, now beneath the water, now above it, moves along over the surface like a small flying fish. The quarry, seeing this tempting prize, strikes it, then the fight begins. The task of the sportsman is to tire the great fish out. Of course, if the slender line is broken the prize is lost. The battle sometimes lasts for hours.

  It was no sad face that Ruth presented to the yellow oilskin-clad city boy and girl whose motor boat, the Speed King, soon hove into view. She wasn’t sorry she had spoiled their game. She was glad. She felt that they had no right to make play out of what was work to her and had been to her ancestors for generations.

  “What did you do that for?” The city boy in the prow of the boat lifted a clouded and angry face to Ruth. To do him full justice, he had taken her for a boy.

  “Do what?” Ruth asked belligerently.

  “Harpoon our fish.”

  “How’d I know it was your fish?”

  “Had a line on him.”

  “Couldn’t see your line.”

  “He was about done for. We’d have had him in another half hour. We’ve been after him for five hours.” The boy held up hands that were cut and bleeding from handling the line. “It’s our first one, too.”

  “Well,” said Ruth, and her tone was cold, “since you claim the fish, take him. He won’t give you much trouble now. All I want is my line and keg. That ought to satisfy you.”

  Ruth knew that it wouldn’t satisfy. She knew all about this sportsman’s ideas of catches. She had murdered their prize. That’s the way they would look at it. If they didn’t take the fish with such and such tackle, so heavy a line and pole, just such a reel, they had nothing to boast of. She had spoiled their game. But she didn’t care. They had spoiled hers, too, and it was more than just a silly game, it was bread and butter, a new stove, some new clothes, a—