OFF FOR FURTHER ADVENTURE
Pearl returned home that evening to find a door to new and strange
adventure standing wide open before her.
Donald, her brother, was seated before a small fire in the low
old-fashioned fireplace at the back of their living room.
“Don!” she cried joyously. “You home?”
“Yep.” Big, broad shouldered, sea tanned, Don turned to smile at her.
“Don, I caught a halibut, a twenty-five pounder!”
“No?”
“I did.”
“Let’s see it.”
“I—I can’t. It went out to sea in my dory. But Don! I’ve got a new dory
and a bigger halibut.”
“No?” Don rose.
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
“That,” said Don after inspecting the dory fore and aft, and listening to
her story, “is a right fine dory, staunch and seaworthy. I’d like to take
it to Monhegan.”
“Monhegan?” Pearl’s heart gave a great leap. Monhegan! The dream island
of every coast child’s heart. Don was going there.
“Yes,” said Don. “Swordfishing is played out, and the canners have all
the horse mackeral they can use this season. I’ve decided to pack my
lobster traps on the sloop and go up about there somewhere, mebby only
Booth Bay Harbor. All depends. They say lobster catches are fine on the
shoals up there.”
“But Don,” Pearl’s eyes shone with a new hope, “if you take my dory,
you’ll take me. You won’t spend all your time tending lobster pots.
There’s fine fishing up there. I caught a halibut. You’ll take me, won’t
you?”
“Well,” said Don, thoughtfully, “I might. You’d get lonesome, though.
Nobody but me and you and the sea; that is, nobody that we know.”
“Take Ruth, too,” Pearl said quickly. “You should have heard her talk
about Monhegan over there by the old fort. She’ll be wild to go. And she
is considerable of a fisherman, good as most men.”
Don considered the proposition. Ruth was his cousin. They had been much
together on the sea. Unlike his dreamy little sister, she had always been
able and practical.
“Why, yes,” he said at last, “I don’t see why she shouldn’t go, if she
wants to.”
Ruth was overjoyed at the prospect. She had no trouble in obtaining
permission to go, for, though Don had barely turned twenty, he was known
as one of the ablest seamen on all Casco Bay, and no one feared to sail
with him.
So, one day when the sky was clear and the water a sheet of blue, they
rounded the island and went scudding away toward the island of many
dreams.
As old Fort Skammel faded from their sight, Ruth thought of the unsolved
mystery hidden there and resolved to delve more deeply into it as soon as
she returned from this trip.
Someone has said that all of life is closely interwoven, that warp and
woof, it is all one. Certainly this at times appears to be true. There
was that lurking in the immediate future which was to connect experiences
at Monhegan with the old fort’s hidden secret. But this for a time was
hidden by the veil of the future which ever hangs like a fog just before
us.