Читать книгу The Black Schooner - Roy J. Snell - Страница 3

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“The thing I like about it,” said Pant, squinting his eyes as if in anticipation of events of absorbing interest, “is the straight out-and-out mystery of it.”

Eager for the story which he had crossed the continent to hear, Johnny Thompson, lightweight champion boxer and hero of many thrilling adventures, leaned forward in his chair.

“Oh, there’s no story yet,” smiled Pant, “but unless I miss my guess, there’s going to be; and you and I are going to have a hand in it.

“You see,” his eyes narrowed again, “this Colonel Remmington owns about all the country on both sides of the Katekomb River, which is twenty miles up the bay from here. It’s timber—the most wonderful you ever saw—big yellow pines eight feet through and all that. He’s just beginning to log it. Been holding it for the wonderful boom in lumber prices that has just arrived.

“But that,” Pant put two fingers solemnly together, tip to tip, “that hasn’t got a thing to do with the mystery as far as I know. In fact nothing has. It’s just a step out into the dark.

“You see,” he grinned, “this Colonel Remmington meets me in the lobby of the hotel, and he says right away, ‘You’re the boy they call Pant. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

“‘Huh,’ I grunts, not knowing what else to do.

“‘Yes, I have,’ he insists, as if I’d denied it. ‘I’ve heard how you and Johnny Thompson got the best of those Russians when they tried to make away with the gold you had mined, and how you outwitted the Bolsheviki spies. There was some stunt in a circus, too, and this last thing—helping that professor save his priceless medicine from the wreck—and about that Dust Eater of yours. That was a great invention. I shouldn’t wonder if you’re going to need that Dust Eater on your next adventure.’

“‘I see you’re a fortune teller,’ I says, smiling right at him. ‘If you can tell the future as well as the past, I’d be obliged to you if you’d reel off the next twenty years of my life.’

“‘I can’t do that,’ he laughs, ‘but I think I can tell you about the next twenty days, or even as many as forty. But as far as the past is concerned, that’s all been written down. Yes, and printed. Half the boys in the country have read about your adventures, and the other half are going to soon.’

“I stared when the colonel said that.

“‘You didn’t know it?’ he smiled. ‘Well, perhaps that was best. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in telling you now. Many a good football game has been spoiled because the players remembered that the game would be written up in the paper next day. Wanted to do something spectacular, you see, the players did; then their names would be in the paper. That made monkeys of them and they lost the game. Think you can forget that fellow that writes you up if I let you in on this new thing?’

“‘I can tell you better when I know what it is,’ I grinned back. ‘I think I might stand the shock though. Johnny Thompson and I get more fun in hooking a big bass and landing him in the boat than we do in talking about it afterward. It’s pretty much the same way with our adventures.’

“‘You’ll think it strange,’ the colonel said, sort of hitching his chair up close to mine and dropping his voice to a whisper as if he was really going to tell me something, ‘but the truth of the matter is, I’m not planning to tell you anything about the case in advance. I am just going to set you down in a certain spot with your eyes and ears open and ask you to make a record of the things you hear and see.’

“‘Where’s the spot?’ I sort of gasped.

“‘Not too far from here,’ he flashes back. ‘Question is, do you take the job? You’ll be paid for the information you bring me. If you bring me nothing, you get nothing, except your board and lodging. If you deliver valuable information you will be liberally rewarded.

“‘You see,’ he went on as I sort of hesitated, ‘I’m not a boy any more. I’m sixty and I’ve been living all the time. Naturally, I’ve had other things I’ve wanted to find out. I’ve generally managed to find them out, but my experience has been that if I told the fellow who went after the facts just what he was to look for, he kept seeing it every way he turned and more than half the time it wasn’t what I was looking for at all.

“‘Now this thing I’m looking for up there at the mouth of the Katekomb River is a big thing and very unusual too. Unless I miss my guess, you and that pal of yours, Johnny Thompson, will know it when you see it, so there’s no use my telling you what to look for. In fact, I’d better not tell you; you might go blundering right in and spill the beans before they’re half soaked.’

“Well, Johnny, when he’d told me that much,” Pant’s eyes were mere slits by now, “I was awfully interested, for there’s no mystery like a mystery without a tail to it. That’s the kind of mystery this one is.”

“What did you say to him?” Johnny asked.

“I said, ‘What do you want us to do?’ and here’s his answer: ‘There’s a sort of shack close to the mouth of the Katekomb River. It’s well back in the pines where no one will see you unless you have a light, and you must not have one. I want you and Johnny Thompson to go up there and shack it for a while. I’ll give you an order on my company store at Wall’s End for all the supplies you need. There’s an abandoned salmon cannery which belongs to me, four miles down the coast in a little, land-locked bay. It has a pair of big double doors, opening right out over the water; used to run schooners in there to unload them. Since the Dust Eater is a seaplane, she ought to run in there without a bit of trouble. You can tie her up there, like a fire engine in its house, ready for any emergency.

“‘You’ll find a clinker-built rowboat in there. You’d better use that for going to the mouth of the river. You can draw it clear up to the cabin when you’re not using it. There’s nothing tells stories quicker than a boat left on the beach. What say? Is it a go?’

“‘That depends on Johnny Thompson,’ I answered back. ‘If he’ll come in, I’m for it. Looks like a good outing, anyway.’

“‘It’ll be that,’ he says. ‘The river is full of fine fish and there’s no harm in your rowing about in the river in the daytime. Go as far as you like. Night is when you must keep your watch on the woods, river and bay.’

“‘I’ll wire Johnny,’ I says.

“And you did,” smiled Johnny.

“I did, and here we are. Are you sorry?”

“Sorry!” Johnny sprang to his feet. “When do we give the Dust Eater her next breakfast?”

“To-morrow morning if you say so.”

“I say so. Mystery at night and rainbow trout in the daytime. Who could ask for more?”

Johnny sprang forward to drag his partner across the floor in a wild Indian war dance.

“But this fellow that’s writing us up,” he panted as he dropped into a chair. “I—I sort of hope we don’t disappoint him—give him something more worth telling.”

He need not have worried along that line. The adventure upon which they were about to enter was destined to be well worthy a place beside the Panther Eye, the Crimson Flash and the White Fire of other days.