Читать книгу The Black Schooner - Roy J. Snell - Страница 4

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Two nights later Johnny Thompson found himself lying flat on his stomach where a bed of pine needles, mosses and decaying ferns gave him a soft and silent watching place. Not ten feet before him a steep, shelving bank brought the forest to an abrupt end. Through a thin fringe of ferns which concealed him he could catch a glimpse of the onrushing river, while the bay into which it flowed, like the inside of a horseshoe, lay spread out before him. Nothing of importance could pass out of that river without his knowledge and nothing could enter the river from the bay. To watch was his task. To lie there and wonder just what it might be he was watching for was his privilege. And wonder he did.

It was ten o’clock. The moon was just rising. At a certain spot, like black pearls, a line of dark spots lay stretched across the water.

“Salmon trap out there,” he told himself. “Sockeye salmon are running. Wonder if someone is stealing the salmon from the trap? Wonder if we’re hired just as guards to that trap? Don’t seem probable. Just any old chap could keep such a watch. You can’t tell though. You never know what these rich fellows will do. They think some of their little affairs are mighty important. Look at the money they pay dog doctors to see that their favorite poodles don’t go to the happy hunting ground.”

His thoughts strayed to a certain spot in the stream where, two hours before, he had seen a trout cut a graceful arc out of the sunset-lit bay.

“Bet he was a rainbow. Bet he weighed twenty pounds. Bet I could get him. And bet I will,” he told himself.

The moon was rising higher. Here and there he caught a straight silver line which cut squarely across the moonbeams.

“Bits of slab,” he told himself. “Big sawmill up there somewhere. I’ll have to row up some day and have a look. Wonderful things, these Pacific Coast mills, they say. Wonder if we’re here to spot some crookedness connected with that mill. Wonder—”

His wondering was cut short. His eye had been arrested in its wanderings by some dark object in the river.

For a half hour he studied it, but with no result.

“Give it up,” he told himself at last. “Looks like there were two others over to the right and one to the left. They might be big sawlogs. But who would be fool enough to turn ’em loose to ride the tide? And how could they possibly escape from a boom at this time of year when the water’s low and there’s not been a rain for a month. Might be—”

Again his thoughts were arrested. He looked. He stared. He rubbed his eyes to look again.

Yes, it was true. His eyes had not deceived him. A long, black streak was thrusting its way down the river at terrific speed.

“Like a torpedo,” he told himself. “Forty miles an hour, and no sound, no smoke. Just like it had been shot from a gun.”

So low did the thing lie in the water he was unable to discover what type of craft it was, nor whether indeed it was a craft at all. Now he saw it and now it was gone. The darkness which hung over the bay had swallowed it.

“Oh, glory!” he whispered, propping himself up on his elbow. “Was she beast, bird or fish, or was she a craft of some sort? If a craft, what kind of power did she use? There was no smoke from coal and no noise from a gasoline engine. And yet she went at terrific speed.

“Tell you what; I’ll name her and find out what she is later. I’ll call her ‘The Black Schooner.’”

Three hours longer with eyes fixed on that dark stretch of water he lay there waiting the return of the mysterious object.

At the end of the third hour, he rose and stretched himself.

“Might have been mistaken,” he murmured. “Could have been some creature of the sea. But only a whale is as big and black as that, and what would a whale be doing up there in fresh water?”

His reflections were cut short by the appearance of Pant. As he came creeping through the ferns he whispered:

“Twelve o’clock and all’s well.”

“All’s well,” Johnny repeated. “Sit down; I want to tell you something.”

Listening attentively to his account of the night’s happening, Pant now and then gave forth a grunted, “Oh! Ah!” When the tale was finished he said with a chuckle, “Looks like a job for one of my old tricks.”

“How’s that?”

“Schooner passes in the dark, doesn’t she?”

“Sure does.”

“Then how about the Panther’s Eye?”

“Grand idea. See in the dark, eh? But can you see that far?”

“Think I can.”

“Got—got the—” Johnny was stumped for a way to finish his question. He had known Pant in Russia, as you will remember, he had known that Pant at that time possessed the power of seeing in the dark, but just how he accomplished that mysterious feat, he had not been told.

“Why, yes,” said Pant, sensing his companion’s embarrassment, “I can rig her up again. It’s absurdly simple when you know how. A Swiss watchmaker discovered the trick and taught it to me. You know the old saying, ‘The hand is quicker than the eye’? Well, so is the eyelid. You wear a pair of heavy glasses and a cap to conceal your instruments. You fix a small but very powerful flashlight behind one corner of the right lens of your glasses. You connect this with batteries inside your cap. You cut in a switch and connect this to a small cord as a cut-out. You glue one end of this cut-out to your left eyelid and you are all set. When you suddenly wink your left eye the light flashes on for the least fraction of a second. You are looking for it and get the full benefit of it. You see what you want to see in the place you are looking for it. Other persons are not aware that anything is going to happen, and because the eyelid is quicker than the eye, they see nothing, do not even realize that a light has been flashed, no, not even when the light falls directly upon them. Great, isn’t it?”

“Great!”

“But simple. All inventions and discoveries are simple. Think I can get it going in a day or two. Then, if our black friend returns, we’ll see what we see.”

“Perhaps that Black Schooner is hiding the secret we’re after, the mystery we are to solve.”

“Perhaps. But you can’t be sure.”

“Might be smugglers. Canadian line is only a few miles up the coast.”

“Might.”

“Might be bootleggers.”

“Might be anything. Only way we can do is to wait and see.”