THREE GRAY WITCHES
The next afternoon Pearl Bracket went fishing. She felt the need of an
opportunity for quiet thought. The events of the past few days had
stirred her to the very depths. A quiet, dreamy girl, she was given to
sitting across the prow of her brother’s fishing boat or the stern of her
ancient dory as it drifted on a placid bay. But this day only Witches
Cove would do.
To this imaginative girl Witches Cove had ever been a haunting place of
many mysteries. A deep dark pool on three sides by the darkest of firs
and hemlocks, on the north of the island where no sunbeams ever fell, it
had always cast a spell of enchantment about her.
There, when the tide was coming in, water rushed over half submerged
rocks to go booming against the granite wall, then to return murmuring
and whispering of many things.
Pearl sat in the stern of her dory on this particular afternoon and
recalled all the strange tales that had been woven about the cove.
At one time, so the story ran, it had been a smugglers’ cove. Here in the
days of long ago, dark gray, low lying crafts came to anchor at dead of
night to bring ashore cargoes of rich silks, tea, coffee and spices.
Still farther back it had been a pirates’ retreat. Even the renowned
Captain Kidd had been associated with the place.
“On a very still day,” Uncle Jermy Trott had told her once in deepest
secrecy, “you can still see a spar lyin’ amongst the rocks. That spar
came from a Spanish Gallion. I’ve seen it. I know. An’ I’ve always held
that a treasure chest were lashed to it an’ that it were left there as a
markin’ thing, like skulls and cross-bones were on land.”
Pearl had never seen the spar. But more than once her fish-hook had
snagged on something down there that was soft like wood and she had lost
the hook and part of her line.
To-day, however, she thought little of the spar at the bottom of the
cove. She thought instead of the strange doings aboard the _Black Gull_
and of Ruth’s face in the fire.
“I’m going back to the old fort,” she told herself stoutly. “There’s more
to that than we think.”
“And still,” she thought, as she dragged a larger cunner from the water,
“that’s Ruth’s discovery. It’s only fair to let her go to the bottom of
it. Nothing important ever happens to me. I—”
She paused to look at the cunner she had caught. Its coloring was
curious, all red, blue, green and purple.
“Like he’d been dipped in burning sulphur,” she told herself. “Nothing in
Witches Cove is the same as anywhere else. They say it’s the three gray
witches. Tom McTag saw ’em once, three gray witches coming up out of the
water behind the fog. Boo! It’s spooky here even in daytime. Seems like
eyes were peering at you. Seems—”
Her glance strayed to the bank. Then she did receive a shock. Eyes were
staring at her, two pairs of glaring red eyes.
For a full moment she sat there petrified. Then, as her senses returned
to her, she made out the figures of two huge black cats half hidden in
the green shrubs that capped the rocky wall of Witches Cove.
“They’re not real,” she told herself. “They’re witches’ cats.”
To prove this, she caught up the blue, green, purple cunner and sent it
flying toward the cats.
That settled it. Growling, snarling, sending fur flying, they were upon
the fish and at one another, tooth and nail in an instant.
“Here, you greedy things!” she exclaimed. “Stop that! Here’s another and
yet another!” Two cunners followed the first.
It was just as the cats settled down to their feast that her ear caught a
movement farther up the bank and a quick look showed her a very small
man, wearing great horn rimmed glasses. Squatting there on the steep
bank, he was staring at her, then at the cats. For a moment he remained
there. The next he turned and disappeared.
“Someone living in the old Hornaby Place,” she told herself with a quick
intake of breath. “Must be. Cats wouldn’t be here. Nobody’s been there
for more than six years, and it’s the only place on the island. I
wonder—”
She wondered many things before she was through. And in the meantime she
caught some fish; not the sort she had hoped to catch, however. Pearl, as
has been said, was a dreamer. One often dreams of bigger and better
things. It was so with her fishing.
Then, of a sudden, she caught her breath and set her teeth hard as she
tugged at the stout codfish line.
“It’s a big one,” she told herself as the look of determination on her
round freckled face deepened. “A big cod, or maybe a chicken halibut. If
only I can land him!”
Two fathoms of line shot through her fingers, cutting them till they
bled.
“Can’t hold him—but I’ve got to!” she told herself as, wrapping the line
about her hands, she braced herself against the gunwale, tipping her dory
to a rakish angle.
“I’ll land him,” she avowed through tight set teeth. “Don won’t laugh at
me to-night.”
Like many another girl born and bred on the rugged coast of Maine, Pearl
was fond of hand-line fishing. Time and again she had begged her big
brother, Don, to take her deep-sea fishing in his sloop.
“Why, little girl,” he would laugh, “look at you! You’re no bigger than a
fair-sized beefsteak cod yourself. If you got one on a line he’d pull you
overboard. Then we’d have an awful time telling which was you and which
the fish, one or t’other. You just stay and wash your dishes, sister.
We’ll catch the fish.”
Pearl did wash her dishes. She did a great many other things besides. But
when the work was done and the tide was right, she would dig a pail of
clams for bait and go rowing away to the Witches Cove.
Usually she returned with a string of cunners and shiny polloks.
That there were some wary old rock cod hiding away in the secret watery
recesses at the bottom of Witches Cove she had always known. That a
halibut weighing fifty pounds had once been caught there she knew also.
So to-night, with hopes high and nerves all a-tingle, she tugged at the
line.
“Tire him out,” she told herself grimly. She threw her shoulders back and
gave a tremendous tug. Without warning the line went dead slack.
“Lost him,” she all but sobbed.
“But no.” As she reeled rapidly in, there came another tug. Not so strong
now. She had no difficulty pulling the catch toward her.
“Tangled round some kelp before,” she told herself disappointedly. “Only
a small one after all.”
That she was partly wrong, she knew in a moment. A broad spot of white
appeared in the dark waters beneath her, and a moment later she was
landing a halibut weighing perhaps twenty-five pounds.
“Oh, you beauty!” she exclaimed. “Now they can’t say I’m not a
fisherman!”
The two kinds of fish most relished by the coast of Maine people are
sword fish and young halibut. Pearl’s mother would be delighted. Don and
some of the other boys were off on a long fishing cruise. There had been
no really fine fish in the house for more than a week.
For some little time, while she regained her poise, Pearl sat admiring
her catch.
“I got you,” she said at last.
Then of a sudden her face clouded. “After all,” she told herself, “it’s
nothing, catching a fish. The grand old times are gone. Nothing ever
really happens. If only I’d lived in the days of great, great, great
grandfather Josia Bracket. Those were the brave days!”
As she closed her eyes she seemed to see Casco Bay as it had been in the
pioneer times when the first Bracket landed there.
“No houses, no stores, no steamships,” she told herself. “No city of
Portland, no summer tourists, no ferry boats. Only a cabin here, another
there, woods and water and skulking Indians, and the whole wide world to
live and fight in. What wonderful days!”
As she opened her eyes she started. As if willing to conform to her
wishes, nature had blotted out the present as far as that might be done.
A heavy fog drifting silently in from the sea had hidden the wharves and
storage houses in Portland Harbor, and the homes that line the shore of
Peak’s Island. Even the cliffs that formed Witches Cove were growing
shadowy and unreal.
A fog, however, be it ever so dense, cannot shut out all signs of
progress. A moment had passed when the ding-dong of a bell reached her
ears.
“There!” she exclaimed, shaking her fist at the bell buoy which, however
invisible through the fog, kept up its steady ding-dong. “There now!
You’ve gone and spoiled it all. I’d like to tie my sweater about your
noisy tongue!
“But of course that won’t do. The boat from Booth Bay Harbor will be
passing in an hour or two. If this fog keeps up, the pilot will need your
noisy voice to guide him through.”
“Oh, well,” she sighed, “what’s the use of fussing? Fish a little longer,
then go home.”
She settled back in the bow of her light dory, with the prow tilting at a
rakish angle, baited her hook and cast the line overboard.
Fishing wasn’t likely to be over exciting now. She had made her record
catch. Never before had she landed one so large and fine. What she wanted
most of all was to sit and dream a while, to dream of the brave deeds of
long ago.
And such a time to dream! Even the cliffs twenty yards away were lost to
her sight now. A ring of white fog, her boat and her own little self,
that was all there was to her present world.
“Indians over there on Peak’s Island,” she told herself, still dreaming.
“Indians and some French. Settlers on Portland Head all crowded into the
stockade. Going to be a battle. Some soldiers in a big ship anchored far
out. They don’t know. A message is needed. I’ll go in my little dory.
“Will you please be still!” she exclaimed as the bell buoy clanged louder
than ever as a great swell came sweeping in from the sea.
The bell did not keep still. _Ding-dong, Ding-dong, Ding-dong_, it spoke
of cliffs and shallows and of a channel between that was safe, wide and
deep.
The girl gave her attention to fishing. Cunners took her bait. She caught
a small one, but threw him back. A great old cod, red with iodine from
the kelp, gave her a thrill. He snapped at her bait, snagged on the hook,
then shook himself free.
“Go it!” she exclaimed. “What’s cod beside chicken halibut? Wouldn’t—”
She broke short off. The ding-dong of that buoy bell never had sounded so
near before.
_Ding-dong, Ding-dong._ It seemed to be at her very side. She gave a pull
at her anchor line.
“Fast enough,” she told herself. “Not drifting toward the buoy. Besides,
wouldn’t drift that way. Tide’s setting out.”
The big red cod or another of his sort claimed her attention. She teased
him by bobbing bait up and down. She loaded the hook with juicy clams and
tried again. This time it seemed that success must crown her efforts. The
fish was hooked. She began reeling in.
“A beauty!” she whispered as a great red head appeared close to the
surface. And then, with a last mighty effort, the fish tore himself free.
“Oh!” she cried, “You—”
_Ding-dong, Ding-dong._
She started, looked about, then stood straight up to stare open mouthed
at what she saw.
And at that moment, faint and from far away there came the hoarse hoot of
the fog horn on the steamer from Booth Bay Harbor.
“A hundred passengers on that boat,” she thought as her heart stood
still, “perhaps two hundred, three hundred people, men, women and
children, many little children coming home from a joyous vacation.”
She looked again at the thing she had seen and could scarcely believe her
eyes.
Dim, indistinct but unmistakable, had appeared the outline of a steel
frame, and at its center a large bell.
“Like a ghost,” she told herself.
“But it’s no ghost!” Instantly she sprang into action. Cutting her fish
line, she allowed it to drift. Dragging up her dripping anchor, she
dropped it into the boat. Then, gripping the oars, she put all her
strength into a dozen strokes that brought her with a bump against the
side of the steel frame from which the bell hung suspended.
The next thing she did was strange, indeed. Having removed her heavy wool
sweater, she wrapped it tightly about the clapper of the bell, then tied
it securely there with a stout cod line.
“There now,” she said, breathing heavily as she sank to a sitting
position on one of the hollow steel floats that prevented the bell and
its frame from sinking. “Now, perhaps you will keep still and let me
dream.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, suddenly attempting to stand up. “The dory’s gone!”
It was true. In her haste to muffle the bell, she had failed to tie her
painter securely. Now it had drifted away into the fog.
“Time to dream now,” she told herself ruefully. “May never do anything
else.”
To one who knows little of the ways of boats and buoys and other things
belonging to the sea, the girl’s acts might seem madness.
They were not. By some mischance, the chain fastened to a huge rock at
the bottom of the channel, which held the bell buoy to its place, had
given way. The bell buoy still clanging its message, now a false message
indeed, was drifting out to sea. If the S. S. Standish, the Booth Bay
Harbor steamer, were guided by this false message catastrophe would
befall her. With all on board she would go crashing into a cliff or be
piled upon some rocky shoal.
Pearl could see it all, just as it would happen. A terrible crash, then
unutterable confusion. Men shouting, children crying, women praying,
seamen struggling and the black sea closing down upon a sinking ship.
“But now, thank God,” she said fervently, “it shall not be. Not hearing
the bell, having no sure guide, they will stand away till the fog lifts.”
Then of a sudden her heart went cold and beads of perspiration started
out on her forehead. What was to come of her? With her dory gone, she was
going straight out to sea on the frame of a drifting buoy. What chance
could there be?
A moment of calm thought, a whispered prayer, and she shut the thought
from her mind. She was doing her plain duty. She was in God’s care. That
was enough.
The hoot of the steamer’s fog horn sounded louder. Nearer and nearer they
came. They had passed the Witch Rock bell in safety. There was need of
Pearl’s bell buoy now.
Of a sudden she caught the clang of the bell, the pilot’s signal for half
speed.
“He’s missed the bell. They are safe. They’ll lay outside until the fog
lifts. Thank-thank God!”
Still she drifted out to sea. But her own peril was lost in great joy
because of the safety of others.
Another jangling of bells. Quarter speed.
A thought struck her all of a heap. Hastily unwrapping the bell clapper
of the buoy, she struck the bell a sharp tap. Again, again and yet again
this strange signal sounded. It was the pilot’s signal for half speed.
Three times she repeated it. Then came the ship’s bell with the same
signal.
“They heard,” she whispered tensely.
Then, with a throbbing heart, she sent out in Morse signals the call for
help, S. O. S.
There sounded the rattle of chains. They were lowering a boat.
Moments of silence followed, then from out the fog there came,
“Ahoy there!”
Sweeter words were never heard by any girl.
“Ahoy there!” she called back.
A moment more, and four astonished seamen stared at a girl riding a
drifting buoy.
* * * * * * * *
“What you doing on the buoy?” said the kind-hearted and grateful captain
as Pearl climbed aboard the steamer and was surrounded by curious
passengers.
“Why I—I was fishing. I caught a chicken halibut and——”
Of a sudden her eyes went wide; her dory and chicken halibut were gone.
“Yes, yes, go on,” said the eager members of the group. She succeeded in
finishing her story, but all through the telling there flashed into her
mind the picture of her dory and the only chicken halibut she had ever
caught, drifting out to sea.
All up and down the deck, as they waited for the fog to lift, grateful
passengers and crew repeated the girl’s story. And always at the end they
added, “Lost her fish. Lost her dory. Too bad!”
“Well, young lady,” a gruff Irish voice said as Pearl spun round to
listen, “you seem born to adventure.”
The girl found herself looking into the eyes of Captain Patrick O’Connor,
he of the pirate crew of the _Black Gull_.
“Yes, I do,” she replied in uncertain tones.
“Lay by this, young lady,” the Captain went on, “that buoy chain was
cut.”
“Cut?”
“Certain was. Them buoys are inspected regular. Look! They’ve brought the
buoy alongside. They’re hoistin’ her on board. Mark my word, the chain’s
not worn much, not enough to cause her to break.”
It was not. As they examined the end of the chain, they found no marks of
hammer, file or hack-saw, but the last link was nearly as perfect as when
first forged.
“Of course, they wouldn’t leave the cut link to tell on ’em,” O’Connor
leaned over to whisper in the girl’s ear. “They’re told on sure enough,
all the same.”
“But-but—” the girl stammered, trying in vain to understand, “if I hadn’t
found it, if I hadn’t silenced its lying tongue, you’d have gone on the
rocks.”
“So we would, young lady. And there’s them hidin’ away along these here
waters as would have been glad to see it. There’s twenty-four men aboard
this ship, that’s hated worse than death by some.
“Come over here in the corner,” he bent low to whisper in her ear, “an’
I’ll tell you a few things. You’re old enough to know ’em, old enough and
wise enough to help some, I’ll be bound.”
The story he told her was one of smugglers uncaught, of goods brought in
without duty, and of men refused right of entry into the United States
who, nevertheless, were here.
“They land from somewhere, somehow, in Portland Harbor, or in Casco Bay,”
he added. “It’s our duty, the duty of every good American, to find out
how and where they come from.
“I suppose your cousin Ruth told you about seeing us pirates the other
night?” he said, leaning close.
“Yes.” The girl’s heart leaped. Was a secret to be told? Yes, here it
came.
“We wasn’t real pirates; you guessed that. It was only a blind, a
masquerade party, but a party with as firm a purpose as ever American
patriot ever held. We’re bound together, us twenty-four, in a solemn vow
to rid Casco Bay of this menace to our land. And you can help, for a girl
sees things sometimes that men never get near.”
“Yes,” said Pearl.
She wanted to tell of the bolts of cloth on the wood schooner, of the
dory in the night and the face in the fire. “But those,” she told
herself, “are more Ruth’s secrets than mine. I’ll wait and ask her
first.”
Meanwhile the fog was clearing. The rocks of Cushing’s Island and the
shore line of Peak’s Island were showing through. Very soon they were
moving slowly forward. Before Pearl knew it, they were at the dock in
Portland Harbor.
“Young lady,” said the Captain of the _Standish_, “we’d like a few facts
to enter in our log. Will you please come to my cabin?”
Very much confused at being the guest of so great a man, Pearl found it
hard to answer questions intelligently.
When at last the ordeal was over, the Captain led her to the steamer’s
side.
“Look down there,” he said, smiling.
“A new dory, all green and red!” said Pearl.
“And a halibut,” said the Captain. “You lost a halibut, didn’t you say?”
“Why yes, I——”
“The dory and fish are yours,” he said gruffly. “Present from passengers
and crew. Little token of—of—Oh, hang it, girl! Climb down and show us
you can row her.”
Pearl went down a rope ladder like a monkey. A moment later, waving a
joyous, tearful farewell to her new friends, she turned the shining
dory’s prow toward home and rowed away.