THE FACE IN THE FIRE
Ruth let out a little half-suppressed scream. A pasteboard tube slipped
from her grasp and fell to the floor. A purple ball of fire bursting
forth from the tube shot across the floor, climbed a stone wall, then
suddenly blinked out. The yellow gleam of a tallow candle shot downward.
A tin can struck the floor with a dull thud. The candle blinked out. Then
all about the girl’s trembling figure was darkness, darkness so complete
that it seemed you might cut it with a knife.
It was terrifying, that darkness, in an underground place at night. Yet
it was not the darkness that affected her most. Nor was it the ball of
fire that had danced about her feet.
There had been another ball of fire, and through that red ball of fire
she had seen a face.
“The face!” she whispered. “The eyes! I must have blinded him. How
perfectly terrible! Whatever am I to do?”
What, indeed? She could not turn and run. Which way should she run? The
candle was out. She had counted on the candle to show her the way. The
way she had taken was winding, many turns, many corners, and always stone
walls.
“And now,” she thought with a sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach.
“Oh! Why did I come?
“We started out to stage a sham battle. And I have blinded a man.”
A man! Her thoughts were sobering now. Questions arose. What was the man
doing here in the heart of the old abandoned fort on House Island? That
_was_ a question.
“His face was low down, close to the stone floor, as if he were
crawling.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Perhaps he was crawling. Perhaps I did not
injure him after all. He may be at my very feet now. Crawling!” The
thought drove her overwrought nerves into tremors.
“Matches!” she thought suddenly. There was a penny box of them in her
pocket. Until now, in her excitement, she had forgotten them.
The box out, she broke three matches trying to light one. When the fourth
flared up, it so startled her that she dropped it.
In time, however, the candle was lit. Then, with bulging eyes she stared
before her.
“Nothing,” she told herself in surprise.
She took three steps forward. Still nothing. She advanced ten yards.
Nothing.
“Must have been here,” she told herself. “But there is nothing and no
one.” She began to shudder again. Had the Roman candle she had fired into
the dark revealed a lurking ghost? Surely this ancient fort was spooky
enough. But no! Ghosts were nonsense.
“I saw him,” she told herself stoutly.
“A man was here,” she assured herself. “I saw him. I could not have been
mistaken. He is here for no good purpose—couldn’t be. I couldn’t have
blinded him, else he could not have found his way to—to wherever he has
gone. He’s using this fort without permission—perhaps for illegal
purposes.”
No longer able to control herself, she went racing on tip-toe down the
narrow winding corridor.
There came a sudden burst of moonlight, and she found herself standing in
a stone archway, looking out upon a sort of open court grown wild with
tall grass, brambles and rose bushes.
Old Fort Skammel, built before the Civil War, has been abandoned for
years to the rats and bats that have found a home there. Yet there is
something suggestive of grandeur and protecting power hovering over it
still.
Ruth had felt this as she sat with Betty and Pearl at the foot of its
massive masonry and ate her Fourth of July evening lunch.
Following out her plan of the morning, they had rowed over here, she and
Betty Bronson and Pearl Bracket, for a little picnic. Having been brought
up on the island across the bay, the abandoned fort did not inspire in
Ruth the awesome fear that it did in some others.
“Rats in there,” Ruth had said, munching at a bun.
“Big as cats,” said Pearl.
“’Fraid of fire, though,” said Ruth. “Won’t hurt you if you have a
light.”
“Betty,” said Ruth, changing the subject as she watched the red glow of
the sunset, “I never see a sunset but I feel like I’d like to get on a
ship and go and go until I come to where that red begins.”
“Yes,” said Betty, “I sometimes feel that way myself.”
“But you’ve traveled a lot.”
“Not so much.”
“But you’ve lived on the banks of the Chicago River and traveled on the
Great Lakes. And now you’re here. That’s a great deal. I—why I’ve only
been on the sea.”
“The sea is wonderful,” said Betty. “It’s a little world all its own.
When you come to it you feel that you have found something that no one
you know has ever seen before.”
“I suppose so,” said Ruth, “but of course I’ve always known the sea.”
“And been everywhere on it.”
“No, only a little way. Why,” Ruth said, sitting up, “right over yonder,
not a hundred miles from here, is one of the most interesting islands in
the world. Monhegan they call it. I’ve never seen it. But I shall some
day, I am sure.
“It’s sixteen miles from shore, a great rock protruding out of the sea.
If there wasn’t a smaller rock standing right in front of it and making
sort of a harbor, no one could ever land there, for most of its headline
is bold, a hundred, two hundred feet high. These rocks have strange
names. Burnt Head, White Head, Black Head and Skull Rock, that’s the
names they’ve given them. They say you can catch beefsteak cod right off
the rocks. It’s got a history, too. Captain John Smith was there once and
Governor Bradford. I want to go there and watch the breakers come
tumbling in. It’s wild, fascinating, you’ve no idea.”
“Must be lonesome,” said Betty.
“Lonesome? Well, perhaps,” Ruth said musingly. “Yes, I guess so. The sea
always makes me feel small and lonesome. Out there almost everything is
ocean.”
That was all they said of Monhegan. Little they dreamed of the part that
bewitching island would play in their lives during the weeks that were to
follow.
Pearl had been timid about taking part in the sham battle. At last the
others talked her over. So, armed each with a bundle of Roman candles and
a tallow candle stuck in a tin can, they had made their way silently down
the long corridor that led to the gun room, from which massive cannons
had once looked down upon the bay.
“Spooky in here at night,” Pearl had said with a shudder. The sound of
her voice awakened dead echoes and live bats.
Betty felt like turning back, but Ruth plodded on. Down a long, steep
stairway, across a circular court, then into a narrow passage they went,
until Ruth with a sudden pause whispered:
“There! There! I hear ’em.”
“Here,” she said, holding out her burning candle. “Get a light from this
and shoot straight ahead.”
With trembling fingers Ruth lighted a Roman candle, watched the fuse
sputter for a second, then jumped as pop-pop-pop, three balls of fire
went shooting down between stone walls to send an astonishing number of
rats scurrying for shelter.
It would be difficult indeed to find a more exciting game than the one
that followed. And such a setting! An ancient and abandoned fort. Down
these narrow passageways and resounding corridors had sounded the
tramp-tramp-tramp of marching soldiers. Through long night watches in
time of peace, in stress of war, weary night guards had patrolled their
solemn beats. From these narrow windows eyes had scanned the bay, while
like giant watch dogs, grim cannons loomed at the gunner’s side.
In this small room, where chains, lifted and dropped, give out a
lugubrious sound, some prisoner has sat in solitary confinement to
meditate upon his act of desertion or of treachery against the land that
offered him food and shelter.
The three girls thought little of these things as they parted to go each
her own way down separate corridors to meet sooner or later with screams
of terror and laughter as one stealing a march upon another set balls of
fire dancing about her feet.
A move in the dark or the slightest sound called forth a volley of red,
blue, green and yellow fire. More often than not it was a rat or a bat
that drew the fire, but there is quite as much sport in sending a huge
rat scurrying for cover as in surprising a friendly enemy.
So the battle had gone merrily on until Ruth, finding herself alone in a
remote corner of the fort and, hearing a sound, had fired a volley with
the result we have already seen.
“And now, here I am all alone,” she told herself. “Wonder where the
others are?”
“They are in there alone with that strange man,” she told herself.
“How—how terrible!”
That she could do nothing about it she knew well enough, and was troubled
about their safety.
“If anything serious should happen to them I never could forgive myself!”
she thought with a little tightening at the throat. “They are such good
pals. And it was I who proposed that we go on that wild chase, I who
really insisted.”
She was beginning to feel very uncomfortable indeed about the whole
affair.
She and Pearl had been pals for a long time. In the same Sunday School
class and the same grade at school, they were always together. At the
beach, swimming, boating and fishing in summer, tramping and skating in
winter, they shared their joys and sorrows.
“And now,” she asked herself, “where is she? And where is Betty?”
Relighting her candle, she turned about to go inside and search for them.
“No use,” she told herself. “Place is a perfect labyrinth, passages
running up and down, this way and that. Never would find them. Have to
wait. Have—”
She broke short off. Had she caught some sound? Were they coming? Or, was
it some other person, the man of the face in the fire? She shrank back
against the wall, then called softly:
“Girls! Betty! Pearl! Are you there?” There came no answer. “Have to
wait,” she told herself.
She fell to wondering about that mysterious face, and what in time she
should do about it.
She and Pearl were fortunate in having as a day teacher a splendid
patriotic woman. That very day they had come upon her sitting on the
grassy bank of their island that overlooks Portland harbor. They had
dropped to places beside her, and together for a time they had listened
to the _bang-bang_ of fireworks and the _boom-boom_ of cannons, had
watched flags on ships and forts and towers flapping in the breeze. Then
Pearl, who was at times very thoughtful, had said:
“It makes me feel all thrilly inside and somehow I think we should be
able to do something for our country, something as brave and useful as
Betsy Ross, Martha Washington and Barbara Fletcher did.”
“You can,” the teacher had said quietly. “You can honor these by helping
to make this the finest land in the world in which to live.
“One thing more you can do, wherever there is an old fort, a soldiers’
home, or a monument dedicated to our hallowed dead, you can help prevent
their being defaced or defiled or used for any purpose that would bring a
reproach upon the memory of those who lived and died that we might be
free.”
“I wonder,” Ruth said to herself, “what sort of den I came upon just now
in this grand old fort?”
Then, very quietly, very solemnly, she made the resolve that, come what
might, the whole affair should be gone into, the mystery solved.
“If only they would come!” she whispered impatiently.
“Ruth! Ruth! Is that you?” sounded out in a shrill whisper from the
right.
“Yes! Yes! Here I am.”
“Shsh! Don’t talk,” she warned as Pearl began to babble excitedly. “We
must get out of here at once.”
“Why? Wha—”
“Don’t talk. Come on!”
A moment later a punt with three dark forms in it crept away from the
shadowy shore.
They rowed across the bay in awed silence. Having reached the shore of
their own island, they breathed with greater freedom; but even here, as
they climbed the steep board stairway that led from the beach to the
street above, they found themselves casting apprehensive backward
glances.
Once in the main street of their straggling village, with house lights
blinking at them from here and there, they paused for a moment to whisper
together, then to talk in low tones of the probable outcome of their
recent mysterious adventure.
“I fully expected to see the _Black Gull_ gone when I looked out of the
window this morning,” said Ruth. “But she wasn’t.”
“Still chafing at her chains. Poor old _Black Gull_!” Pearl always felt
this way about the discarded ship of other days.
“What did you think?” said Ruth. “You wouldn’t expect the owner of the
boat to steal it himself. And he was a member of that terrifying band.”
“But the old wood-hauling boat and the silks in her hold, (they were all
sure the bolts of cloth were silk by this time) and the dory from her
that passed us in the night,” said Betty. “They’re different.”
“And the face I saw in the fire,” said Ruth with a shudder. “Such a
strange face it was, dark and hairy and eyes that gleamed sort of red and
black. Oh! I tell you it was terrible! I am glad we’re all here!”
“You—you wouldn’t go back,” said Pearl. “Not for worlds.”
“Yes,” Ruth said slowly, “I think I would, but in the daytime. Daytime
would be different. And someone should go. If that grand old fort is
being used by rascals they should be found out.”
“And there’s been _so_ many whispers about smugglers this summer,” said
Pearl. “Smuggling in goods and men, they say. All sorts of men that
shouldn’t be allowed to come to America at all.”
“That’s it!” said Pearl excitedly. “That’s what he was! One of them, one
of the men America don’t want.”
“Who?”
“That man, the face in the fire!”
“You can’t be sure,” said Betty.
“No,” said Ruth, “not until we go back there. Then perhaps we won’t.”
They parted a moment later, Ruth to go to her cottage on the slope, Pearl
to her home on the water front, and Betty to the big summer cottage that
tops the hill.
As Ruth lay in her bed by the window, looking out over the bay that
night, she felt that the cozy and comfortable little world she knew, the
bay, the cluster of little islands, the all enclosing sea, had suddenly
become greatly agitated.
“It’s as if a great storm had come sweeping down upon us,” she told
herself.
“Mystery, thrills, adventure,” she said a moment later. “I have always
longed for these, but now they have begun to come I—I somehow feel that I
should like to put out my two hands and push them away.”
With that she fell asleep.