KIDNAPPED
The dull gray of evening hung over a calm sea. From out the west came
threats of sudden storm that, sweeping in with the speed of thought,
might at any moment turn twilight into darkest night.
The two boys, Don and the city boy, Lester Hilton, had just completed the
laborious task of dragging a heavy dory up a rock-strewn beach. Don had
left some lobster traps here. He had come ashore to pick them up.
Shading his eyes, Don gazed out to sea. Some object out there caught his
eye.
“It can’t be a barrel,” he said in a puzzled drawl. “It’s too big. Can’t
be a sailboat, nor a motorboat, nor a punt, unless it is adrift. No one
is staying out while such clouds are threatening.”
Climbing to a higher level, he paused to look again, and at once there
came over his face a look of deep concern.
“It can’t be,” he muttered. “How could it happen on a calm sea?” Closing
his eyes for a moment to secure a clearer vision, he stood there erect,
motionless.
Then, with the suddenness of one who has received a terrible revelation,
he exclaimed:
“It’s Pearl and Ruth and your sister in the _Flyaway_. Their mast is
gone. They are powerless. In five minutes it will be dark. Soon the sea
will be white with foam. They are out there, your sister and mine, out
there! Just think!”
Lester did think. One instant his mind sped, the next his hand was on the
dory.
“Yes,” said Don, “but you must go alone.”
“Alone?” The younger boy stood appalled.
“The dory will ride almost any storm. You must reach them, take them off
the schooner and bring them round the island to the lee side.”
All the time he talked Don was helping to shove the dory off. “You can’t
possibly reach them before the storm and complete darkness come. Both of
us couldn’t, not half way.
“I will guide you. I’ll find you a light so strong you’ll see all the
way.”
The younger boy stared as if he thought his companion mad.
“In the center of the island,” Don spoke rapidly, “there is a powerful
searchlight, a government light for use only in time of war or a great
emergency. You have no idea of its power, hundreds of thousands of candle
power. The keeper is away, but I know how to swing it into place, to put
on the power, to direct its rays. Go! Quickly!” He gave the dory a stout
shove, then went racing up the bank.
The impossible sometimes happens. That a thirty-foot sailing vessel, as
staunch a craft as ever sailed the rock-ribbed sea, with a mast twice the
required thickness, should be drifting helpless with mast and sail cast
off and lost from sight, should lie helpless in a calm sea while a storm
came tearing in from off the land was, in time of peace, you might say,
impossible. Yet all this was just what was happening. The _Flyaway_ was
hopelessly adrift. What was more, Pearl Bracket, the golden-haired,
freckle-faced girl of Peak’s Island, and Ruth with her city friends,
twelve-year-old Jessie Hilton and Betty, were aboard. How could all this
happen in one calm afternoon?
It had all come about so suddenly that even the four girls shuddering
there on the mastless schooner could scarcely believe it had happened at
all. They had sailed to Witches Cove. Having dropped anchor within the
shadows of the overhanging rocks, they had tried their hand at fishing.
It had been a curious afternoon, not exactly cloudy, yet not exactly
clear. A haze, a lazy mist, drifted here and there. Never did Witches
Cove seem so spooky as now. Once as Pearl looked up from her fishing she
saw a film of gray rise in the darkest corner of the pool. As if
fashioned by an invisible hand it took the form of a witch with high hat
and hooked nose. She was even riding a broom.
Pearl touched Ruth’s arm and pointed. Ruth saw and shuddered.
“Gray Witch is riding to-day,” she said. “Something is sure to happen.”
In this she was not wrong.
The fishing was unusually good. Soon the deck of the _Flyaway_ was alive
with flapping fish. In the excitement the Gray Witch and all else was
forgotten.
Then had come the supreme moment. Jessie had hooked a twelve-pound rock
cod. The cod had showed fight. Before she could draw him in he had fouled
the line among the kelp. So securely was he hooked that even then he
could not escape. So, with three girls tugging at one line and the fish
at the other, the red kelp went swinging and swaying back and forth at
the bottom of the pool.
It was just at the moment when the kelp seemed about to lose its hold on
the rock and to come floating to the top with the magnificent fish in its
wake, that Pearl, chancing to look away, dropped the line to spring back
in an attitude of fear.
She found herself looking into a pair of dark eyes. Instinct told her to
whom those eyes belonged. “The face-in-the-fire,” her mind registered.
“The—the bombers!” she had whispered to Ruth.
Like a flash all that the little man of Witches Cove had told her passed
through her mind. He, the man of the rocky island, was a Secret Service
man in the employ of his government. He had been stationed there to trace
and if possible capture two men who had been stealing high explosives
from the Army and Navy store houses. These men were supposed to belong to
a band that was opposed to all organized society. Several disastrous
explosions had been laid to their door.
“If you can assist me in capturing them,” the Secret Service man had
said, “you will not alone perform a great service to your country, but
may save many lives as well.”
And here were the very men! Pearl could not doubt it. She shot one wild
glance toward the cabin on the rocks. No one was in sight. Little hope
for aid.
“No use,” she said aloud as she recognized the second man. It was one of
the men who had stolen Ruth’s punt and loaded it with dynamite. A cold
shudder ran up her spine.
“Not a bit of use in the world,” the man went on in a cold voice. “We got
you. We’ll teach you to meddle!”
At that, to her great terror, he produced a long whip such as was once
used by cruel slave owners. Cracking this about their ankles, he ordered
them down into the _Flyaway’s_ cabin. Once they were down, he closed the
door behind them.
For a whole hour, feeling the gentle roll of the boat, knowing they were
going somewhere but having no notion what the destination might be, they
cowered in great fear. Finding courage only by praying to the great
Father of all, they waited they knew not what.
At the end of that time they caught the sound of the strokes of an axe.
This was followed by a sickening splash.
“The mast is gone!” Pearl thought to herself. “Will they sink our boat
and leave us to drown?”
The two men had evidently planned for them a more cruel fate. Having cut
away the mast and taken the oars, they set the motor boat in which they
had reached the schooner going once more, and left the _Flyaway_ and her
crew to drift helpless in the storm.
“Be broken up on the rocks!” Pearl’s eyes were dry, but in her heart was
a solid weight of sorrow.
* * * * * * * *
Don was racing up a rocky trail while Lester was tugging with all his
might at the long oars, driving the heavy dory farther and farther out
into the face of the oncoming storm.
Then, like the dropping of a purple curtain on a stage, came wind, rain
and deep darkness.
The testing of Lester Hilton, the reckless and daring city boy who
believed that life was a joke, was at hand. He now stood face to face
with triple peril—night, the sea and the storm. He had no compass. There
was no light to guide him. There was now only to wait and hope. This was
hardest of all.
With unfaltering footsteps Don hastened on into the dark until just
before him a long low bulk loomed. This was the power house. In this
house was the hoisting machine and the powerful dynamos that lifted the
great searchlight. To break a window, to crawl through, to touch a lever
setting a dynamo purring, to switch on a light, to throw a second lever,
was but the work of a moment.
Then again, he was outside. A little up the hill, like a gigantic black
ghost, some object was rearing itself upward. This was a frame on which
the powerful searchlight rested. When not in use it lay prone. It must
now be raised to an upright position. Powerful machinery was doing this.
It was still leaning at a rakish angle when the boy sprang up the ladder.
By the time it snapped into position he was in the small cabin above.
Here again he threw on an incandescent lamp. One moment of suspense and a
great light flashed far out over the sea.
“Ah!” he breathed.
With skillful hand he began spraying the sea with light as a gardener
sprays a lawn. Here, there, everywhere the light traveled. Once, for ten
seconds his eyes were fixed upon a small gasoline boat ploughing its way
through the tossing waves. Then that spot went dark. As yet his search
was unrewarded.
But now, as the light swung closer in, it fell upon a boy in a large
dory. He was battling the storm to keep his dory afloat.
“Lester.” Don’s heart swelled.
Swift as the flight of a gull, the light shot outward until it fell upon
a mastless boat wallowing in the trough of a wave. There it came to rest.
How the young city boy, little accustomed to the sea, pulling for the
spot marked by that light, battled his way forward until at last,
drenched, hands blistered, well nigh senseless with fatigue, he
overhauled the crippled boat, and how after that three girls and a boy
fought the storm and won will remain one of the tales to be told round
island cottage fires on stormy nights.
One incident of that night will always remain burned on Don’s brain. As
he held his light steadily in its place, there struck his ears a
deafening crash that was not thunder, and instantly the sky was illumined
by a glare that was not lightning. When, a half hour later, he was free
to search the sea for the floundering motor boat which his light had
first picked up, it had disappeared.