THOSE BAD GREMLINS
This House of Magic she discovered was really a home and a spotter shed
combined. Originally it had been a well-built summer home made of pine
logs that had broken from a jam and drifted to the rocky shore of Black
Knob. Since this cabin had been built on a high point, overlooking the
sea, it was necessary to erect only a twenty-foot tower with a winding
stairway. This led up from the front porch. Atop this tower was a room
eight feet square with windows on every side. Outside was a two foot
walk, railed in, which gave the watcher a view of every spot on the
island and, on a clear day, many square miles of sea.
“It’s an admirable spot for a lookout,” Lieutenant Warren exclaimed.
“But what about your force? Have you enough to do a really good job?”
“No-o,” the little old man hesitated. “The Misses Morrison, Jane and
Mildred, retired school teachers of uncertain age, who like myself have
come to love the privacy of this rock, do their best to aid me, but
Jane, I fear, is becoming hard of hearing.”
“Not so good for night watching,” the Lieutenant smiled.
“Oh! I have a way of—” The old man paused, studied the circle of eyes
about him, then ended lamely, “a way, er—of using the help that is at
hand.”
“He doesn’t trust us,” Norma whispered to Betty. “At least not all of
us.” She glanced at Lena who was all eyes and ears.
“He was going to tell us of some secret hearing device,” Betty agreed.
“There are other and more interesting secrets,” Norma half confided.
She had never told Betty of the talking hands.
“If there are,” Betty whispered, “we’ll have to wait for another time
to learn about them.”
At that moment the little girl came dancing up. Pulling Norma’s head
low, she whispered:
“My name’s Patsy. I’d like to take you around the island and show you
where I saw the sub.”
“Oh! A sub!” Norma whispered. “I guess you must have imagined that!”
“No, a really, truly sub.” The girl pulled at her hand.
“Patsy and I are going exploring,” Norma explained to her commander.
“Quite all right,” was the smiling reply. “If you sight an enemy plane,
let us know.”
Norma and Patsy were away.
“It’s an awful little island,” Patsy said as they marched along. “I can
walk clear to the end of it in ten minutes.”
“Then it won’t take us long,” Norma said. “But don’t you get lonesome
here?” she asked.
“Oh, no! There are three fishermen and two Miss Morrisons without any
husbands, and Grandfather, and all the good Gremlins. Oh! there are a
lot of us—
“Besides,” she added a moment later, “I’d have to stay here anyway.
Daddy’s an officer in the Navy. And Momsie’s helping make machine guns
in a big factory. She makes good machine guns, good, good ones. No bad
Gremlin can keep the bullets from coming out of her machine guns.”
“I’ll bet they can’t,” Norma said seriously.
“Grandfather says we couldn’t beat our enemies at all if it wasn’t for
the women of America.”
“I’m sure of that,” Norma agreed again.
They were passing through a grove of pines that whispered over their
heads.
“That’s the bad Gremlins whispering.” A note of mystery crept into
Patsy’s voice. “They’re fixing up a storm, a really bad storm. They
always whisper like that before a storm.”
“Oh! then we had better hurry,” Norma exclaimed. “My chum, Betty, and I
piloted the boat. It’s neither fast nor large. We don’t know much about
boats so we wouldn’t like to get caught in a storm.”
“Oh, we’ll get back before they are through talking,” was the quick
reply. “We’ll hurry. You just must see Black Head, Gray Head, and Bald
Head.”
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[Illustration: _“Oh, We’ll Get Back Before They Are Through Talking.”_]
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“Who are they? People?”
“No, they’re huge rocks that slant away into the sea. When there’s a
bad storm it’s just terrible to see the way the waves come roaring in.
“When that sub came up out of the water,” the child’s voice dropped to
a whisper, “I laid right down on Black Head and—and hid my face behind
a little bush.”
“That was a wise thing to do.” Had this child really seen a German
submarine rise close to this island? Norma wondered. “It makes it all
seem so close and so real,” she whispered to herself.
“There they are!” the child cried as they emerged from the pines.
“That’s Black Head.” She pointed. “That’s Gray Head—”
“And the other must be Bald Head,” Norma laughed.
“Yes, and right out there was where the sub came up.” Again the girl
pointed. “Come on!” Seizing her companion’s hand, she dragged her along
at a furious pace.
“Right here,” she said, vastly excited. “I was just sitting here
watching for planes, when I looked down—”
Suddenly she broke off. There came the whir of wings and then, just
before them in the water at the foot of Black Head, two beautiful eider
ducks came to rest.
“Going north,” Patsy whispered. “The first ones I’ve seen this year.”
In her excitement she allowed her voice to rise and suddenly the ducks
were gone.
“Did you see that?” Patsy exclaimed. “They crash dived, just the way
the sub did, only it didn’t crash dive right away. Oh, no! You can’t
think how scared I was. Three men came up from the conning tower. They
had a rubber boat and were blowing it up.”
“Coming ashore,” Norma whispered.
“Yes, that’s what I thought. And was I scared! If they had seen me they
would have shot me. Grandfather would have heard and there would have
been a battle.”
“A battle?”
“Oh, sure! We can fight a battle, a real battle. Grandfather has two
tommy-guns. You ought to see him shoot them. Even Miss Jane Morrison
can shoot them, and so can I.”
How strange all this seemed to Norma as she sat there in the glorious
sunshine watching the eider ducks who had come up again some distance
away.
“Why did they crash dive?” she asked at last.
“Because they heard a plane. I heard it, too. It was coming from the
land, an American fighter plane. I can tell them when I hear them, yes,
and when I see them, too.
“You should have heard those men on the sub,” Patsy laughed. “How they
jabbered! They went down below, then they crash dived.”
“What did you do?”
“I jumped up and told Grandfather, and he told Beth and Bess and they
told the fort. Pretty soon there were just lots and lots of planes, but
just no sub at all.”
“Too bad,” said Norma, “but how did your grandfather tell Beth and
Bess?”
“Shish!” Patsy put a finger to her lips. “That’s a military secret.”
“Not bad for a nine-year-old,” Norma thought. “She’ll be a lady soldier
some day.”
Of a sudden the calm sea appeared to have been lashed by ten thousand
tiny whips. Then there came a race of a million tiny waves.
“That’s the bad Gremlins,” Patsy sprang to her feet. “They are whipping
the sea. Soon the sea will be very, very angry and then—”
“Yes—yes, let’s go. I’ll race you back!” Norma exclaimed. “Now get set.
One! Two! Three! Go!”
They were away like a flash.
Because she knew a short cut, Patsy was first in.
“Oh, good! Here you are!” Lieutenant Warren exclaimed. “We’ve been
thinking of starting back.”
“Yes, yes!” Norma panted. “We must go at once. The Gremlins are
whipping the water and—” she broke off short. “What nonsense!” she
thought.
“So she’s got you believing in the Gremlins!” the gray-haired man of
magic chuckled. “She’s got all of us here on the island converted to
belief in those little people.”
There was little enough to make anyone believe in the bad Gremlins as
they took off from the small dock. Now and then little flurries of wind
rose and raced across the sea. That was all. Betty was at the wheel.
“I’m going to send three of you over there to help out, at least for a
while,” Miss Warren confided to Norma.
“Oh! I’m glad!” Norma exclaimed. “It’s really not safe for them there,
three old fishermen, an aged inventor, two spinsters, and a child.”
“And if you were there, you would protect them!” the Lieutenant
laughed. “However, I wasn’t thinking of safety, but of the rare
opportunity they have for airplane spotting.
“Of course,” she added after a moment, “it will, at best, be only an
outpost. Our main station will always be at Indian Harbor.”
If her superior was not, at that moment, thinking of the possible
dangers of life on Black Knob, Norma most surely was. After recalling
Patsy’s words, she thought, “Spies have been landed on American shores
from submarines and may try again. Black Knob would make a marvelous
hideout if only—”
At that moment she was seeing a picture of herself and the aged
inventor standing at the log cabin’s windows that were like loop-holes,
and firing tommy-guns while Patsy dragged up fresh belts of ammunition.
Real danger replaced her dreams and that in a very short time for, as
if by magic, the sea began rolling in a most alarming manner and the
wind began to tear at them like mad.
“I—I can’t hold her on her course,” Betty panted. “It’s a
quar—quartering wind and every wave thro—throws—”
At that a wave, larger than the rest, came splashing across the deck.
Half drowned Norma sprung to her feet, but Lena was before her.
Crowding Betty aside, she seized the wheel and, bracing herself like a
veteran, she brought the boat about to head it squarely into the storm.
She held it to this course until there came a brief lull. Then again
she took up a direct course toward the shore.
The lull was short-lived. Soon the wind was once again cracking about
their ears and the boat was bouncing like a cork.
With lips set in a straight line and every muscle drawn tight as a bow
string, Lena braced herself for the task that lay before her.
Dark clouds engulfed them like a shroud. Waves, reaching for the boat
and missing, gave forth serpent-like hisses as they broke into foam.
Suddenly Norma’s lips parted for a scream of warning. The scream
failed. A fierce gust of wind drove it down her throat. Before them, so
close it seemed they could not miss, were two jagged piles of gray rock.
“Like the jaws of a giant sea serpent,” she told herself with a shudder.
She stole a look at Lena. She was like a statue. Her strong arms were
rigid. One moment they raced toward one reef, the next they had whirled
half about and were racing for the other. Then, as a great wave, white
with foam, hit them, they were lifted high to be shot forward in a mass
of foam.
“Made it,” Norma heard the astonishing Lena murmur.
It became apparent at once that this reef formed a barrier that held
the water back for, once across it, they found themselves in calmer
waters.
Lena’s answer to this was full speed ahead and not one of them dared
cry:
“Lena! You are wrong!”
All too well Lieutenant Warren, who had spent many months on the New
England coast, knew that they had been caught in one of those brief but
terrific storms that from time to time ravage the coast.
A quarter hour passed, then again they were in the midst of the storm.
For a full hour after that, never flinching, nor asking for quarter,
the stout Lena held to her post until with a deep breath that was half
groan and half a sigh of relief she slid the small boat into the narrow
slip by the dock. Here, behind the breakwater, they were safe.
Sergeant Tom, who had been anxiously awaiting word from them, caught
the line. Lena leaped to the dock, then, drenched as she was by cold
salt water spray, went racing for Harbor Bells.
At that moment words were running through Norma’s mind, the words of a
child:
“The bad Gremlins do that.”
As she trudged up the hill toward the spot where dry clothes, a
roaring, open fire, and steaming coffee awaited them, Norma said to her
Lieutenant:
“Lena was magnificent!”
“Yes,” was the quiet reply. “We all have our big moments. Your big
moment too will arrive, perhaps sooner than you think.”
“Will it?” Norma asked herself. There was no answer.
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