Читать книгу Pee-wee Harris and the Sunken Treasure - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 5

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Here was a mystery after Pee-wee’s own heart, a mystery for Boy Scouts to solve. It was not the less diverting because there was a young heroine connected with it. He wondered if she was a girl scout. He loved to show Girl Scouts what Boy Scouts (that is, real scouts) can do.

He forgot all about the fire. He had intended to linger in that devastated area feasting upon the ruins, prowling about, arousing the envy of less favored boys beyond the rope. But now he did not see the broken and saturated memorials of the old court-house at all. He saw a new court-house in which a pair of ruffians tracked by Boy Scouts were being sentenced to twenty years in state prison. He saw Eleanor Gardiner looking on, awed by the prowess of the scouts, and tenderly grateful to the head Chipmunk.

“Anyway, one sure thing, that’s a lot of nonsense,” Pee-wee said aloud. “Because anyway, if that boat didn’t go back past the bridge again, then it’s up the river and I know all the places up the river, geeeee whiz! Because anyway, it’s got to be somewhere.” There was no doubt that it was somewhere and to Pee-wee it was as good as found. Here was just the sort of task that scouts revel in.

First he would go down to the drawbridge and see Haley Austin and make “double sure” that the boat did not return downstream after the robbery. If it did not, why then it was upstream. And Pee-wee knew upstream as he knew the pantry in his own home. Why, you couldn’t possibly get farther upstream than North Bridgeboro with a power boat even at high tide! There was no escape for a launch upstream. Either Haley Austin was mistaken or else the boat was still upstream.

As for the authorities exploring all the possible hiding places upstream, Pee-wee had his doubts about that. He knew a place upstream, a dim, dank place completely enclosed by thick bramble bushes and utterly undiscoverable by passersby on the narrowing river. It was a kind of marine cave without any entrance upon the stream. For a third of a mile or more, thick interwoven brush covered the west shore. It was unbroken and almost as impenetrable as solid earth. Your sharp canoe could not nose into it. Paddle directly toward it and your narrow, pointed craft would push against it, then bounce gently back as if thrust by a woven spring. There was no suggestion of an entrance along the whole length of this natural revetment mattress of closely interwoven growth. And indeed there was nothing behind it but solid shore.

Yet there was a spot along the network of facing concealing the precipitous bank which would not resist much if you nosed into it. And it was not backed by solid earth. Push your boat through the gently resisting but parting brush and you found yourself in a little watery cave completely roofed by brush. You would be somewhat the worse from the scraping growth, but this admitted you into an enchanted spot quite removed from the world. It was as if Dame Nature kept an ill resort and cautiously opened the door upon a password.

This dank, dark nook was not approachable by land and the huckleberries which grew in the treacherous swamp beyond went to waste because there were none to venture into that tangled morass which stretched away west of the river.

In the little nook the water was green and still, and the leaves and rotted bits of wood that lay upon it looked as if they might have been there for years. Bullfrogs and lizards sat motionless in that eternal twilight and busy little skippers made their jerky, aimless pilgrimages to and fro.

It had to storm very hard for the rain to penetrate that solemn grotto.

And the authorities had investigated every place up the river where a boat might be moored. How smug and reassuring that sounded! Wonderful. Left no stone unturned as usual. Why Pee-wee had only chanced into that secret cove by the merest accident while paddling his canoe. Of course, he had told the scouts about it, but the place was not known to the world of men. And a man would stand a better chance of being struck by lightning than of finding it.

How, then, had the men with the launch found it? Here was a poser for Pee-wee. He had found an old cartridge in it, evidently somebody had sometime or other stumbled into it. Well, that was that. But here was the main point. An iron box with about seven thousand dollars in it had been taken from the old Gardiner mansion and carried down to the shore. Earlier that same night a launch had passed upstream, its occupants seeming disinclined to attract the notice of the bridge-tender. It was positively stated that it had not passed downstream again. Thereupon every possible mooring place upstream had been investigated and the boat had not been found.

Here indeed was a mystery. Perhaps Pee-wee was reasoning well when he assumed straightway that the mysterious launch might still be in his little cove. If its occupants had been afraid to encounter the bridge-tender and demand his customary service on their way upstream, might they not (now that he knew of their passing) refrain from returning and seek a hiding place up the river? And if they were known to be nowhere else, might they not be in that secret cove?

“That shows how much detectives don’t know,” he said, highly elated. “I bet maybe we can surely positively find that boat and maybe the money even, I bet we can.”

With this altogether scoutish enterprise in view and bubbling over with enthusiasm to be about it, Pee-wee tore out the article (it did not occupy as much space in the paper as it did in his mind) and taking it home with him, pasted it in his scout book which was a weird collection of recipes for making hunter’s stew, camp crullers, birchbark ornaments, Indian trail signs, and contained a list of his own triumphs in the scouting field. He felt that he was now well launched upon the greatest enterprise of his career and he could hardly wait for his comrades to return from their hike so that he could mobilize them for the first move which was a hike down to the drawbridge below the old Gardiner mansion.