Читать книгу The Black Schooner - Roy J. Snell - Страница 8

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After Johnny left him at midnight, Pant sat for a long time thinking and looking away at the bay. He was wondering whether the black streak which Johnny had seen passing across the water could, after all, have anything to do with the mystery they had been set to solve.

“If it has,” he told himself, “and it is truly a black schooner, then that Panther Eye trick of mine will come in handy. Crimson Flash and the White Fire might turn a trick or two also, but that’s not so probable. One uses them when he is in danger, not when he is tracking someone in the dark. I’ll have to drop round at the old fish-house and see what I can find in the locker of the Dust Eater.”

The Dust Eater, you will remember from reading the book, “White Fire,” was a seaplane with a marvelous motor, a motor which used coal dust for fuel instead of gasoline.

“It will take two powerful lenses for the lamp,” Pant went on thinking to himself. “Have to have some special high power batteries and a mess of fine wire. Guess I’ll find it all on the Dust Eater. I may have to connect small batteries in a series to get the power, but I can wear them on my belt. No need to carry them in your cap in a case like this.”

He had thought all these things through and was experiencing great difficulty in keeping awake, when of a sudden he sat up straight and stared. A vision of white foam was driving in from the sea. Hardly had he concluded that it was some rich man’s racing motor boat than he noted that no sound came up to him from it.

“Silent as the night,” he murmured, “The Black Schooner.”

Hardly had he whispered the words, when the thing veered sharply to the right, revealing a dark oblong shape, then shot straight up the river.

“That’s her!” he murmured excitedly. “Wonder what she is and where she’s been. Wonder what her name is and whom she belongs to. Must have a nest up the river there somewhere. I might find her if I took a trip up there in the daytime. Might not, too. A thousand rocky coves up there probably; the mouth of some little stream would be a safe hiding place for her. The thing to do is to rig up old Panther Eye and just lie here and watch. I’ll go up to the Dust Eater for the parts as soon as I’ve had breakfast and ten winks.”

Pant would have been much surprised had he been told that he would, later in the day, discover at least one of the places the Black Schooner had visited that night.

* * * * * * * *

The feats of Tarzan were mere child’s play when compared to the gymnastics performed by Johnny Thompson in climbing the remaining seventy-five feet of that giant fir tree. Time and again, in some dizzy corner with the next safe branch far above him, he was tempted to admit himself defeated. Yet the fact that the squirrel-like creature, that girl, was above him and still climbing, spurred him on.

“Can’t be beaten by a girl,” he mumbled, as he set his teeth hard and, reaching for the limb above him, pulled himself by sheer strength of arm toward the next position.

Blessing the father who had trained him in ways of keeping fit, thankful for every hard muscle, every supple joint in his body, he struggled ever upward until at last with a sigh of relief he dropped into a crow’s nest seat. Woven by the girl out of limber branches and hung from two limbs, this seat offered scant room for two, but for them it had to suffice.

“Hard?” she smiled.

“A little—no, a lot,” Johnny frankly admitted.

“New things are always hard. It will be easy after awhile.”

“You think I’m going to do this often?”

“You can’t tell. I do. It’s grand. Listen.”

For the first time Johnny was conscious of a medley of strange sounds drifting up to him from somewhere. It was strangely musical, yet one could scarcely think how such music might be made. He had once been connected with a circus, as you will remember in the days of Crimson Flash, and the circus had a steam calliope. This was like that, only different.

“What is it?” he breathed.

“It’s what Dad calls the song of the saws.”

“The song of the saws?”

“Yes, all of the saws singing together. He says it’s like a selection played by a great orchestra. Can’t you hear the parts? That thundering sound comes from the big band saws. They’re the bassos. There are trombones and cornets, too—the small crosscut saws and the planers. The tongue-groovers and moulders are the trap drums. You don’t get them all, I suppose, for you haven’t heard the saws all your life as I have.

“And see!” she cried suddenly, putting out her hands and parting the branches as she might have a curtain. “See! There’s the picture.”

For a full five minutes Johnny sat there silently studying the scene that was spread out before him. It was as if he were seeing a moving picture thrown upon a huge screen. In the foreground were groups of sun-browned houses, homes of the mill hands. Flitting back and forth among these were, like white dots, the women and children. In the background were many long, low sheds and behind these a pond filled with great logs. The sheds were the mill; the pond, which was but a bit of still back-water of the river, walled in on one side by a log-boom, was the millpond. Thick as bees about a hive, men worked about this mill. Every now and again a log rose as if by magic from the pond and moved into the mill.

“It’s like a child’s play-world,” he murmured at last.

“It’s a long way off and we are very high up,” she smiled, much pleased by the spell her magic music and her picture had woven about him.

“But supposing,” he said thoughtfully, “suppose this tree should be suddenly uprooted as that one was which you were sitting on a short time ago? And supposing we were up here at the time? What then?”

“Oh!” she laughed, “that one fell during a terrific gale. If there was a gale, we wouldn’t be here. See, there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

All the same, almost in spite of himself, Johnny found himself studying through the possible actions of one who found himself a hundred and fifty feet in air atop a tree which was trembling for a fall.

“I wonder if it would work?” he asked himself.

He was thinking of a time when as a small boy he had climbed with his cousin to the upper branches of willow trees that were being felled by his uncle, and had ridden down upon the branches on the upper side of the tree.

“That was only twenty feet,” he told himself, “and this is nearly a hundred and fifty. Yet I believe it might be done.”

This thinking things through for a possible emergency was a valuable trait of Johnny’s mind. It had saved him from disaster more than once and was destined to in this case. But that is another part of our story.

Johnny was astonished at the time that had passed when he at last looked at his watch.

“Five o’clock,” he exclaimed. “I must hurry back.”

After a hasty scurrying down the tree they shook hands. Johnny pledged himself to help her all he could in solving her father’s problem; she promised him an opportunity to see the mill close up in the very near future; then each hurried on the way home.