Читать книгу The Twisted Shadow - Edith Dorian - Страница 8

TIM JOCKEYED THE CAR OUT OF ITS PARKING SLOT and they headed back up Ship Street for Gallows Road.

“Even Miss Leonard’s committee finally went home, I see,” Judy said as they passed the dark buildings on the Mall, “but at the rate this town’s concentrating on Bold Dick, he’ll probably walk’ before the summer’s over! What do you do if you meet a ghost waving a cutlass? Use a silver bullet on him?”

“And get strung up on their gallows by the irate citizens?” Tim asked. “Any time I meet Bold Dick I say ‘aye, aye, sir’ and knuckle my forehead in a hurry.”

“At least your uniform’s green, not scarlet,” Judy said with a comforting grin. “Maybe you’ll survive—which is more than the citizens are likely to do before this celebration’s over. Barry St. Leger is even putting on a musical version of Rogue’s Hour, book and lyrics by Runner and Harne, no less. They’re here already. He had them with him in the library tonight, working like mad on costumes and scenery.”

Tim whistled. “That’s something we see,” he announced with determination. “Don’t make any other dates for Bold Dick Week till I find out what night I can get us tickets. Right?”

Judy nodded but she looked a bit skeptical. “If you can get us tickets, you mean,” she amended. “This place is going to be snowed. Tourists will queue up outside that theater like the tail of a kite every time the box office is open.”

“Then I’ll wear my dirk in my teeth and elbow them aside,” Tim assured her.

“Or you could take a few lessons in pocket picking,” she suggested helpfully. “A dirk in your teeth must taste disgustingly metallic.”

“Then I might as well save energy and just lean on the theater door,” he said. “Unless its lock is different from all the others in this town, it’ll swing open and I can help myself. What could be simpler?”

“I know,” Judy agreed. “The lock on the library door would make a burglar laugh himself sick. I bet you could open it with a hairpin!”

“You probably could,” Tim said placidly. “The trouble with you, Miss Carrington, is that you’re a city slicker. Unless everything is nailed down, you expect the worst.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Just the same, that library owns the longhand draft of Rogue’s Hour and goodness knows how many other valuable manuscripts, Tim. I found eight of them tonight when I was straightening up. Stuck casually in file drawers! There weren’t any locks on them either, and the names on those manuscripts sounded like a course in American lit. You can argue all you want, but I still think it would make more sense if Mr. Winter had built in a few burglarproof cabinets instead of some of those office-workshops he put in that wing for Sinnett Harbor’s literary lights!”

“It would make sense to me, too,” Tim admitted. “I’m another city slicker. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if he put a few good locks on his own place either. Every time he goes away I wonder why he expects to find anything when he comes back.”

“And in his New York apartment he probably has one of those safety steel bars that run from a slot in the floor up against the door,” Judy exclaimed.

“Sure, he does,” Tim said, “but around here a locked door only means the family’s gone calling or the shop’s closed for the night. It isn’t supposed to keep out burglars. Sinnett Harbor’s never had any, so Mr. Winter doesn’t bother to worry. It’s the Ranger Station that gets the jitters. We haven’t seen anything yet in his house, except the kitchen sink, that couldn’t be peddled at a fancy price to some museum.”

“You mean you’re supposed to keep an eye on his place, too?” Judy asked in surprise. “I should think you’d have all you could handle with those cabins.”

“You wouldn’t get far selling that idea to the Chief Ranger,” Tim said drily. “When a man gives the land for a national park and then makes a will adding his house and its contents for a maritime museum, the Chief figures the whole works is our responsibility. You can’t hate him for that either. The three ships are our newest babies. They’re part of the museum project.”

“No wonder there’s a Winter-ish aura over Sinnett Harbor,” Judy said thoughtfully. “A park, a museum, and a library wing! He doesn’t exactly hand out peanuts, does he? What’s he really like, Tim? I’ve seen his picture often enough, but I’ve been wondering ever since I hit this place.”

“Maine Yankee covers it,” Tim said. “Salty and independent, though I guess he isn’t too rugged any more. He’s seventy-eight, and the Chief says he had some kind of heart attack in November. You’d never know it from him, though. He hates having people fuss over him. Not that that gets him anywhere with his housekeeper, Elvira Snow.” Tim’s grin grew wide. “Elvira inherited Mr. Winter. She was his mother’s last ‘hired girl’ and she says she aims to keep him and the house in the same shape his mother left them.”

He turned the Ford in between the Park gateposts and flapped his hand at the Ranger Station. “Mr. Winter’s house was still there where our quarters are when his mother died, and according to one of Captain Matt’s yams, Elvira Snow sat tight in her rocking chair in the kitchen the whole time it took to move it down to the Ridge. That’s the house, Judy, just ahead of us where the road stops. Bold Dick’s Anchorage is off to the left.”

He parked by a clump of bayberry and gave her a hand out. “Good night! I didn’t even warn you about heels. Can you make it? From here on in, there’s only a path.”

Judy held a slender foot out in the moonlight “Shells,” she said, nonchalantly. “Lead on, Ranger. I’m the Tall Gal type.”

But when the path sloped down to the beach, her feet shot out from under her, and she landed ignominiously in Tim’s arms.

“Just about the right height, at that,” he remarked, smiling at her. “Almost to the top of my nose.”

“Then I’ll remember not to eat the wrong side of the mushroom like Alice in Wonderland,” Judy promised demurely, but she pushed herself back on her own feet in a hurry and got busy helping launch the skiff.

“We’re heading for the Ellen B.,” Tim told her as they rowed across the path of the moon. “She’s not as beautiful as the Golden Falcon—the raking spars of that clipper would be hard to beat—but she’s an interesting old gal. She’s practically a twin of Bold Dick’s Sea Hawk.”

Shipping his oars, he let the skiff drift in toward the sturdy hull of the old schooner, and Judy studied it curiously.

“I wonder how anyone knows,” she speculated. “Would it be from the design, Tim?”

“That would tell an expert like Captain Matt,” he said, nodding, “but the captain didn’t have to do any brooding over this one. His ancestors built both ships, and he has their specifications in the old shipyard records. Besides, Mr. Winter has an oil painting of the Sea Hawk, done the year she finally went down off the Grand Banks, and the Ellen’s a dead ringer for her. There were only five years between the end of the Sea Hawk and the launching of the Ellen. This tough old lady dates back to 1830.”

Judy caught her breath. “A hundred and twenty-five years and still afloat!” she said, awed.

“Well, the Constitution and the Charles Morgan are still afloat, too,” Tim reminded her. “The Morgan had been chasing whales for eighty years when she retired in 1921, and Old Ironsides fought in the War of 1812. If a Yankee built a ship, he put backbone in her.”

“You can say that again,” Judy conceded, but she raised a quizzical eyebrow as she looked from the old schooner back to Tim. “I’m drinking all this in avidly,” she assured him. “Only curiosity is killing me. I thought you were a snake man! How come the seagoing lore?”

“Captain Matt,” Tim admitted, grinning. “The Chief got him to come over here and lecture to us so we wouldn’t sound like morons about ‘iron men and wooden ships.’ We took notes, no less. Just scratch me anywhere and I’ll exude information!” They were rowing past the Golden Falcon’s figurehead on their way back to the beach, and he nodded up at her lofty spars. “Get your landlord to show you the scale model of this clipper he’s building for Mr. Winter, Judy. He brought it over here to use for demonstration, and its rigging drove us all plain nuts.”

“So that’s what Miss Leonard meant when she said Captain Matt’s hobby was ship models,” Judy exclaimed. “I thought she meant he just collected them.”

“It’s the other way around,” Tim assured her. “People collect his—and how! When you get aboard the Ellen sometime, take a look at a little model of a fishing schooner with a nest of dories on her deck. It’s one of his, and a yachtsman over in the Harbor offered eight hundred dollars for it last week. All I hope is that some light-fingered tourist doesn’t get a notion that it’d make a swell souvenir.”