Delivering the Prisoner
If ever two boys undertook a desperate errand the sandy-haired G-man’s
son and his pal had bitten off a big chunk to chew when Stan proposed
that they take Gagnon to Main Haven and turn him over to John. What
John might do, Stan did not know but he realized that G-men are
extremely resourceful and he had no doubt that the grocer of Main Haven
would find a way to take care of Gagnon till this case was over. The
most important immediate act was to get Gagnon out of that little room,
and to the sloop.
“You mean you’re going to turn me over to the feds?” demanded the
mobster.
“Why not?”
“They’ll kill me!”
“Battling flea-hounds!” roared John, interrupting, “which do you want:
to be murdered by your dear old pals or to end up in a nice warm jail,
alive and with something to eat for the next dozen years or more?”
The man swallowed hard.
“I’ll come with you, boys, only don’t point that arrow at my face all
the time!” he said.
“You’ve got sense!” responded Stan, quietly. “Get a move on, and no
funny business!”
And as the man started off up the corridor, his hands bound behind his
back, he admitted that he had a flashlight in his pocket. John dug it
out and they hurried for the entrance. But on the way they encountered
the sounds of footsteps and the voices of intruders and they retired up
a side aisle.
Dago’s exclamation of alarm was caused by Gagnon’s stumbling effort to
move further from the main aisle as he recognized the swarthy fellow’s
growling voice. Had Dago elected to investigate that noise he would
have received an arrow for his pains--lucky Dago!
The party went on to the room and, the moment they had gone there, the
boys rushed Gagnon for the entrance! It was now or never. The outcry
of voices in the room back there drowned out the hurrying footsteps of
the lads and their prisoner. Gagnon was no trouble. He was as anxious
to get away now as were the boys to have him and he voluntarily took
them away from the entrance and on the trail towards the cove where
the boat was moored as he had been told they would go over the hilltop
trail to the western end of the island. They doused the flashlight,
of course, and apprehensively followed the hurrying prisoner through
the black fog. It was an eerie journey and towards the end Stan took
the lead as he knew just where the boat was. The trail seemed somewhat
unfamiliar as he neared the end but he laid that feeling to the
darkness and hurried on.
They came out upon the beach and he went to the right, leading Gagnon
by the arm so that he would not lose contact with him.
“Don’t worry, boy,” said Gagnon; “I ain’t gonna skip. I’d rather live
in a fed jail than get burnt with slugs!”
An astonished outcry from Stan was the first warning that all was not
well.
“The sloop--gone!” cried Stan.
John groaned.
“By all the bluefish ankles in this--where?” John begged.
The sloop was gone and that was that!
They had to put the flashlight on and then Stan gave a hopeful
exclamation.
“Say, this isn’t the rock where the _Staghound_ was moored! Maybe----”
“Maybe this isn’t the right cove!” cried John.
Investigation by the light of the flashlight and lots of walking along
the fog-bound shore gave forth the astonishing fact that it was not the
cove where the sloop had lain!
“There were several coves around here, John,” admitted Stan, “but how
we got off the main trail, I don’t know.”
“Sweet potatoes!” moaned John. “We get us a prisoner, and then lose our
ship! A fine pair of dicks we are! Are we south or north of our cove?”
“North, no doubt. We’ll go along shore.”
“Hurry!” begged Gagnon.
John was heard to chuckle aloud.
“_Hurry!_” he echoed. “Great spirits of bulrushes--how you going to
hurry through this fog?”
But they did hurry as best they could and after almost a half hour of
scrambling along the beach half in the water and half out, daring not
to use the light more than necessary, and falling over rocks, they all
three fell sprawling over something taut! It was the spare line which
Stan had rigged from the bitt of the sloop over the rock to another
pointed boulder.
Gratefully, tingling with joy, the boys shoved Gagnon aboard and went
below to light their lights. The cabin showed no signs of having been
entered and they were glad of that. In the light of the cabin they made
Gagnon lie on a bunk while they got their brains working.
“We’ve got to get out of this cove right off, John!” Stan explained.
“No time to lose and--”
“--The tide, Stan!”
“The tide is o.k., dropping towards low, but still high enough to float
us out into the cove where we can lower our centerboard! Main thing
is--where’s the cove entrance?”
“Here’s your chart!” said John, putting it on the table and handing
the skipper a pencil. “I’ll get the sails up and ready and the lines
aboard.”
“O.k.,” said Stan, even as he started studying the chart and laying a
compass course that would clear the rocks at the cove’s entrance. “Let
her drift away from the rock so we can get the centerboard down to stop
sideways.”
The tall youth was on deck by now and raising the sails. He was
grateful for the Marconi rig now, for the mainsail was up by pulling
one line instead of the two required for the old rig. There was one
jib to raise instead of two. The sails were up in a minute or two and
he was ashore releasing the lines holding her to the big rock. Luckily
the cove had been very quiet and the single old tire used as a buffer
between the _Staghound_ and the rock had kept the sloop from damage by
chafing.
The boat drifted away from the rock with the tide and a vagrant puff
or two of wind, while John slacked the sheets so that the sails were
not curved yet to the breeze. He lit the little electric light in the
binnacle and studied the compass as it swung slowly while the boat
drifted.
“Steer W.S.W. a bit to the south, John,” came Stan’s voice.
“Hey, you kids!” came a raucous and cursing voice out of the dark.
“Stop, do you hear, or we’ll slug you plenty!”
In the cabin of the _Staghound_ a trembling gangster opened his mouth
in terror. Stan knew that Gagnon was about to scream for help on the
theory that, when captured, his friends would think he’d been carried
away forcibly! But the skipper of the _Staghound_ gagged the prisoner
instantly with a length of towel!
“Can’t hear you!” yelled John, and he trimmed the sheets of the sloop!
Then a voice which was none other than Mr. Sandborn’s bellowed, “You
kids better come back here. You’ll get slugged if you don’t! We ain’t
fooling!”
Did Mr. Sandborn mean for them to really surrender? Or was he
_bluffing_ to convince the other men. John knew no answer, and Stan,
who came on deck just then, was hesitant.
A blast of tommy-gun fire, familiar thunder to the boys who had heard
those guns used at Cedar Island in the Hogan case, reverberated among
the hills! Water spattered about the sloop and slugs sang whining into
the wake! Then the blast moved away to the left! It have been lucky
shooting for the men could not have seen the sloop in the fog!
That decided the boys and with all sail crowded on, praying that the
compass course was right, they headed on a course W.S.W. a little
south! The wind had shifted to the east during the night and was almost
dead aft, flowing over the hills of Porpoise Island, as they coursed
with wings spread for the open sea!
“I told-a you they was-a at one of these coves!” yelled Dago back on
the beach. “Gallagher, you gotta get those kids or we’ll all be in
trouble!”
“Let’s get back and use the speedboats, men!” ordered Gallagher,
rejoicing inwardly that his boy and the brave Tallman lad had escaped
this present danger and taken Gagnon with them! He suspected they would
head for Main Haven and he was proud of them for their grit and brains.
Such conduct was worthy of G-men themselves!
The gangsters raced overland to the cabin and the boat-shed where,
roundly cursed by a wild and purplish Nevada, the men put off in two
gray speedboats on a weird chase! Mr. Sandborn longed for a chance to
get at the wiring on those two boats and so stop the chase but realized
it might look suspicious and end his activities. So he calmly took his
seat with Butch and Dago in a boat and they hummed with bright lights
for the entrance to Black Cove. They came out of that in the wet fog
at forty miles an hour, thankful for sound knowledge of the lay-out of
rocks and headlands.
One boat turned east, round the snout of Porpoise Island and down the
north coast. The other flung itself into the rollers of the sea down
the southern side. Both boats traveled at top speed but the fog ruined
any chance of overtaking the fleet sloop which was somewhere out there,
silently winging its way with a mobster prisoner! Naturally the boys
were not showing any side-lights and thus, even without the fog, as
Dago well knew from past experience, it would have been hard to locate
and get them. Then, too, as Dago admitted privately to himself--the
boys were pretty nifty with them arrow things!
They did have a chance, just one slim possibility of finding that
sloop, but only the G-man saw it and he said nothing. For one instant,
they were running by the close stern of a white sloop, for he saw both
a faint shape of the sloop and the glitter of white water from her
wake as she capped a big roller, but the light from the searchlight
was being flung straight ahead and no one else knew that two boys had
definitely escaped their pursuers!
About ten minutes later the light glittered softly through the fog upon
a sail and, with a coarse exclamation of delight, Dago had Butch swing
to the boat. The cursing, shouting speedboat’s crew slid alongside, and
aboard, guns out and hands ready!
“What is this?” demanded a big sailor in blue at the wheel of the great
forty-meter yacht. “What do you want?”
One look was sufficient to establish the fact that a mistake had been
made! Mr. Sandborn wanted to laugh out loud, but couldn’t. He kept a
firm mouth while a flustered Dago did some quick explaining to the
bulging sailor at the wheel. From below came a stern-faced man in a
robe. He had a shiny object in his right hand.
“What’s up?” demanded he, sharply.
“Looks like pirates, sir!” shot back the helmsman who had not been
fooled by Dago’s stuttered apologies.
“Pirates?” demanded the owner. “Let me at them!”
* * * * *
At that moment, not a mile away in the wind-blown waters of the ocean,
a Marconi-rigged sloop was racing through the fog on a compass course
of S.E. at her best gait, taking the rollers in her stride, while her
mast strained and her rigging hummed! The fog seemed clear as they
neared Main Haven and soon they could make out the cottages along the
shore, and then the town itself. It was starlit in that harbor as they
drove in, lighting side-lights as they came.
“There’s an abandoned wharf on the shore over there,” Stan said,
pointing to one side of the entrance. “We’ll tie up there and walk
Gagnon round to the town. That way, we may keep our identity hid,
John!”
“You’re right! Somebody’ll have to buy me more arrows when this case is
over--if Gagnon tries any stunts!”
But Gagnon, who had heard that remark, did not mean to try any stunts
now that his deliverance was near, and he meekly climbed ashore from
the wharf and marched ahead of the boys towards town. They both had
their bows along but, to a casual observer, they having untied his
hands, Mr. Gagnon appeared like an older brother, hiking into town with
his two kid-brothers after a bow-and-arrow hike.
Gagnon was as good as his word and they made town in good shape and
walked right into John’s store! The grocer was just going to close up,
for it was very late.
“Sorry, boys, too late for groceries,” grinned John.
“Too late for a prisoner, too?” demanded John Tallman.
Now the Federal agent, John, had never realized how really effective
these two boys were before. He’d laid their supposed prowess to
newspaper accounts and Mr. Sandborn’s praise to fatherly affection
for Stan and friendly regard for the Tallman boy. But he had to think
fast in the next ten minutes or the whole town would know something was
wrong down at the grocery store!
He whisked Gagnon into the cellar, bound and gagged him and then went
to the phone. He called a number and said, “Hello, Jim, old boy?”
“Why, hello, John!” came the rejoinder. “How’s the grocery business?”
“Pretty swell. How about coming down--over the week-end with your bags?”
A whistle of surprise came over the wire.
“Like that, eh? I’ll drop in, old boy!”
And that meant that Mr. Gagnon would shortly be in the hands of a squad
of G-men and that that same squad would make a net about Porpoise
Island, by land and sea, ready for the big showdown on Thursday next!
“I’m hungry, Stan,” confessed John, as they started back for the yacht.
“What I mean is--I’m actually HUNGRY!”
Stan didn’t seem surprised.