THE STRANGER AT THE MILL
There was a pause as Sally struggled with an obstinate latch, then she
opened the door at the head of the stairs and disappeared. The removal
of the light seemed to soothe the old sailor, since he lay still, while
Billy stood listening—listening, for what, he did not quite know.
What he did hear was the sound that of all others he least expected.
With a sharp crack that echoed throughout the frail old building, a
rifle went off directly overhead. An instant later he heard Sally’s
voice, upraised in the terrified screaming of a thoroughly frightened
child. He forgot Captain Saulsby completely, forgot everything except
that he must run to help Sally. The door on the stairs had swung shut in
the draft: it had slammed and latched itself so that he had a moment’s
struggle to get it open. When he did so finally and plunged into the
room above, he had again to wait for the passage of a second to make out
just what was there.
An oil lamp stood upon the table in the middle of the room, but its
light beneath the green shade fell in a narrow circle and left all the
corners in darkness. He was vaguely aware that there was a man over
yonder by the window, and that he held something in his hand over which
he worked and muttered. It was a rifle, in whose magazine the cartridge
evidently had jammed and had prevented the immediate firing of a second
shot. Yet, even as Billy realized that this must be the case, the thing
snapped into place and the hammer once more was drawn back with a sharp
click. Sally, standing near him, dropped her candle, which fortunately
went out, put her hands to her ears, and shrieked aloud,
“Stop him, Billy; he’s going to do it again!” It was not their lives the
man was threatening. He crouched over the window sill, steadied the
barrel of his weapon against the ledge and took long, deliberate aim.
Billy, as he ran across the room, could see over the stranger’s
shoulder, down between the trees to the creek and the high rocks at the
edge of the little harbour. There on the point in a patch of brilliant
moonlight, stood one of the bluejackets who had landed with them. He
held a flag in each hand and was spelling out some signalled message in
frantic haste. The ship showed vaguely in the dark nearly half a mile
away to the eastward, but the moon hung low in the west and evidently
formed a sharp background against which the moving flags could be
plainly read. It seemed as though the sailor must know what danger
threatened to bring his message to an end for he glanced backward over
his shoulder more than once, yet never failed to continue swinging his
flags with steady precision.
Billy was only quick enough to jerk at the stranger’s arm just as the
rifle went off again with a startling crash and a quick spurt of flame.
He saw the sailor on the point stagger and drop the flag from his hand;
at the same moment he felt a stunning blow upon the side of his head and
his shoulder so that he seemed to see, for a second, room, lamp and
Sally, all go around and around in confusing circles. He recovered
himself quickly, but not in time to intercept the enemy’s next move.
It was one of retreat, for evidently discovery was the thing most
dreaded by this hidden stranger of the mill. Billy had only an instant’s
view of his face, but he recognized, in that instant, the narrow,
black-eyed countenance that had once peered at him from behind the rocks
and that had so frightened Johann Happs when it rose above the wall. The
man leaped over the window sill and dropped upon the ladder-like stairs
outside, but the rotten timbers gave way beneath him and he fell heavily
to the ground. The thick bushes below must have broken his fall,
however, for he jumped up and made off into the dense undergrowth, while
shouts on either hand showed that he was being watched for, and a
crashing and tearing of branches indicated that the pursuit was hot.
Billy turned back from the window and went over to Sally.
“Are you hurt?” they both asked each other in the same breath. On being
assured that the glancing blow Billy had received was “nothing, just
nothing at all,” Sally sighed deeply with relief and picked up her
fallen candle.
“It was lucky I did not set us all on fire,” she said shamefacedly. “I—I
never could abide things that go off all of a sudden like that. Oh,
Billy, what about the Captain?”
This reminder sent Billy downstairs almost as rapidly as he had come up.
Captain Saulsby had been struggling to leave his couch again, but so
firmly had Sally wrapped him up in blankets that he had only just
succeeded in getting free of them and so had managed to do himself no
harm. He was very querulous in his complaints when they laid him back
upon the pillows, but submitted rather more meekly than before.
There followed a wait; it would have been hard for them to tell whether
it lasted the half of an hour, or for five whole ones. The black shadows
outside turned slowly to grey, the moonlight faded and disappeared, a
fresh wind began to blow the fog away in shore. Somewhere out yonder in
the woods a bird began to sing, offering them their first hope that the
night with its desperate anxieties and terrors was at last giving place
to day. Billy went to the window and threw it open so that Sally too,
from her place beside Captain Saulsby, might hear the promise of the
dawn.
The door pushed open and there came slowly in the bluejacket whom Billy
had last seen signalling on the beach, a target for the stranger’s
rifle.
“Been quite a night, hasn’t it?” the man said cheerfully as he sat down
on the stool and wiped his face.
“Did he hit you?” “Did he hurt you?” the two children asked in a single
breath.
“Never touched me,” was the answer. “The first bullet went over my head
and the second struck the staff of the flag and knocked it out of my
hand—jarred my elbow something horrid, and nearly threw me down—but
that’s all the harm it did. The real mischief is that I’m afraid the man
has got away.”
“But he can’t get off the Island,” Billy objected.
“That is just what he has done,” the sailor answered. “He knew the paths
too well and left us tangled up in the thickets. We gave him a hot
chase, until he got over to a house that stands on the shore beyond the
woods, helped himself to the owner’s catboat, and put off before we
could get anywhere near. We have signalled to the ship, though, and
they’ll see that he doesn’t get clear away. We have his friend Jarreth
in jail, and this man should be joining him there before very long.”
“It was your father’s boat he got away in, Sally,” exclaimed the boy,
“and she can sail pretty fast.”
“I believe Uncle Sam has something that can catch her,” the sailor said.
“The fellow won’t get off so easy as all that.”
“And you have put Harvey Jarreth in jail?” Sally questioned.
“Yes; you should see him, fuming and fussing and strutting up and down
like a mad turkey-cock, telling every one that ‘his friend’ will bail
him out; that ‘his friend’ will make us all suffer for such insults.
Much ‘his friend’ will ever help him! There really isn’t a thing to hold
Jarreth for, I’m afraid, unless we catch the other one. Harvey has just
been made a tool of, but he won’t believe it.”
“How did you know the man was down here at the mill?” Billy asked.
“We didn’t, for at first we had no notion that he was even on the
Island. When he used to make his visits to Jarreth he always apparently
came over from the mainland so that it was quite a time before it dawned
on us that he was staying here all the while. He had covered up his
tracks pretty well, but I don’t quite know how he meant to keep himself
hid after he took to shooting. I suppose he was so excited that he
hardly knew what he was about.”
Captain Saulsby moved and groaned a little. The sailor came over and
stood looking down on him with good-natured and troubled sympathy.
“I ought to have made some one come back for you,” he said, “but the
orders we landed with, were to hunt this fellow out, and we had no time
to think of any one else. The two officers that were ashore had got wind
of him already, so we had a time finding them, even, before we got after
the German. We finally traced him down to the point here, but when we
looked in at the window of the mill and heard the old captain swearing
and shouting and saw only you two bending over him, we didn’t think our
friend could possibly be there. I knew you had been here since morning
and the fellow had been seen at the crossroads in the afternoon.”
“He must have come in when I was asleep,” said Billy. It seemed more and
more that his nap had been an especially unfortunate one.
“I had orders to go down and signal to the ship that we hadn’t found
him,” the sailor went on, “and as soon as I had finished the message I
was coming back to find out if we could help you. I looked back over my
shoulder to see if the others were coming, and it was then I happened to
glance up and see our German friend in the window. He was so interested
in trying to make out the message I was sending that he must have
forgotten everything else. He had not even put out the lamp when he
pushed the window wide open, so I could see him clear and black against
the lighted room, and I guessed in a second who he was. I broke off my
message and instead began telling the ship as quickly as I could that we
had found him. He must have been able to read that, for the next
minute—ping—a bullet went by me and stuck in the sand.”
One of the officers now appeared in the doorway, come to inquire into
the welfare of Captain Saulsby.
“We will get him home,” he said; “the tide is off the causeway now and
my men can carry him across to his own house, or perhaps on to the
hospital in the village. I am afraid he is pretty sick after all these
adventures! I wish we could have had time to help you sooner.”
Four of the sailors bore the old captain down to the shore while Billy
went home with Sally Shute through the woods. The fog was clearing and
it was getting light at last; the stars were growing dimmer and dimmer
and the eastern horizon showed a streak of gold. The two stumbled along,
too weary to watch the coming dawn, to hear the birds that were
beginning to sing, or even to say much to each other. They plodded down
the lane in silence and reached Sally’s gate at last.
“You’re a fine, brave girl, Sally,” Billy said, as they came up the
path. But she would have none of his praise.
“I was just so curious to see what was up there,” she said, “that I
could not possibly help going to find out. I—I wish I hadn’t screamed so
when the rifle went off.”
Early as it was, there proved to be a visitor there before them. Some
one was sitting on the doorstone with his face buried in his hands, some
one whose shock of rumpled yellow hair told plainly that it could be no
other than Johann Happs.
“I—I came to see about the clocks, if they were running—” he began to
explain lamely.
“It is rather a queer time to come,” Sally commented severely, regarding
him with some suspicion. The look of utter misery that he gave her,
however, melted her warm little heart and she sat down impulsively upon
the step beside him.
“What is the matter, Joe, tell me,” she urged.
Johann shook his head in mute anguish, and said nothing.
“It is not anything,” he finally managed to get out; “not anything at
all.”
Billy’s mind had been rapidly putting two and two together so that he
broke forth now with the question:
“Johann, did you see that German go by here and take the catboat?”
“No—no,” Johann began earnestly. “I don’t know whom you mean.” But his
face belied his words.
“You did see him, you did!” exclaimed Billy. “Why in the world didn’t
you stop him?”
Sally added gently, patting his knee to reassure him:
“Don’t be so upset, Johann. Tell us why you didn’t stop him.”
“How could I stop him?” Johann replied.
[Illustration: Johann shook his head in mute anguish.]
“It was not my place to do so. And anyway, he had a revolver.”
“Did you see it?” Billy asked mercilessly.
“No,” was the answer, “but he carried one in his pocket: he always
does.”
Then, seeing how utterly he had betrayed himself by this last speech, he
got up and walked slowly away down toward the shore, his one object
being apparently to hide his stricken face from them.
The boy was about to hurry after him, but Sally put her hand upon his
arm.
“Let him alone,” she said; “the German is gone and we can’t do anything
now. No, Billy, don’t go after him.”
Billy hesitated, feeling, in spite of himself, that his anger was
beginning to change to sympathy. He would still have followed, had not
Sally’s hand restrained him and Sally’s voice become insistent.
“I know him better than you do,” she maintained, “and I won’t believe
any harm of Johann. No, let him go.”
Billy walked slowly back through the woods, across the causeway and up
past the meadow to Captain Saulsby’s little house. The opening poppies
were blowing in the morning wind, matching with their pink and scarlet
the colors spreading across the sky. The fresh breeze felt pleasant on
Billy’s face, and made him breathe more quickly. He was weary beyond
words, dead tired to the utmost limit; but he felt that for two nights
and a day he had been living indeed. The very last vessels of the big
battle fleet were still trailing away across the horizon, and he stopped
to watch until the final line of smoke had disappeared.
He turned and went slowly up to the cottage. The old captain had revived
enough to insist that he should be carried nowhere else, and had had the
force to get his own way. A doctor had already been summoned and a nurse
installed, so that he would have no lack of proper care. The doctor had
finished his inspection, and was just coming out as Billy reached the
doorstep.
“He certainly has had enough to kill any three ordinary men of his age,”
Billy heard him say, “but an old sailor like that is made of iron and
rubber and rhinoceros hide. I think we will pull him through.”
Billy walked on, down the path, out between the willows and along the
road toward the hotel. He heard a deep whistle as he turned the corner
by the wharf, and saw a steamer landing at the pier. It was the night
boat from Boston, bringing Aunt Mattie home. As he drew near a little
group of people disembarked and his aunt came toward him looking very
pale and bedraggled.
“It was good of you to get up so early, and come down to meet me,
Billy,” she said faintly. “We had such a rough passage, and the
stewardess was so inattentive. It has really been a terrible night!”