The Cruise Of The O Moo Part 12

"A sled!" she whispered.

"What of it?" Florence's tone was impatient. "You are seeing things to-night."

The sled, drawn by two men without skates, was pa.s.sing diagonally across the lagoon. It was seven or eight feet long and stood a full three feet above the ice. The runners, of solid boards, were exceedingly broad.

"What a strange sled," said Marian as they cut across the path of the two men.

"Sled seems heavy," remarked Florence. "At least one would think it was by the way they slip and slide as they pull it."

They had pa.s.sed a hundred yards beyond that spot when Florence turned to glance back.

"Why! Look!" she exclaimed. "There's a man sitting on the ice, back there a hundred yards or so."

"One of the men with the sled?"

"No, there they go."

"Some skater tightening his strap."

"Wasn't one in sight a moment ago. Tell you what," Florence exclaimed; "let's circle back!"

Marian was not keen for this adventure, but accompanied her companion without comment.

Nothing really came of it, not at that time. The man sat all humped over on the ice, as if mending a broken skate. He did not move nor look up.

Florence thought she saw beside him a somewhat bulky package but could not quite tell. His coat almost concealed it, if, indeed, there was a package.

"Two men drawing a strange sled," she mused. "One man on the ice alone.

Possibly a package." Turning to Marian she asked:

"What do you make of it?"

"Why, nothing," said Marian in surprise. "Why should I?"

"Well, perhaps you shouldn't," said Florence thoughtfully.

There was something to it after all and what this something was they were destined to learn in the days that were to follow.

Out among the ice-piles between the breakwaters, cowering in the shadows too frightened to scream, Lucile was seeing things. Hardly had the policemen disappeared behind the boats on the dry dock than the dark figures began to reappear.

"And so many of them!" she breathed.

She was tempted to believe she was in a trance. To the right of her, to the left, before, behind, she saw them. Ten, twenty, thirty, perhaps forty darkly enshrouded heads peered out from the shadows.

"As if in a fairy book!" she thrilled. "What can it mean? What are all these people doing out here at this ghostly hour?"

Suddenly she was seized with a fit of calm, desperate courage. Gliding from her shadow, she walked boldly out into the moonlight. Her heart was racing madly; her knees trembled. She could scarcely walk, yet walk she did, with a steady determined tread. Past this ice-pile, round this row of up-ended cakes, across this broad, open spot she moved. No one sprang out to intercept her progress. Here and there a dark head appeared for an instant, only immediately to disappear.

"Cowards!" she told herself. "All cowards. Afraid."

Now she was approaching the sandy beach. Unable longer to restrain her impulses, she broke into a wild run.

She arrived at the side of the O Moo entirely out of breath. Leaning against its side for a moment, she turned to look back. There was not a person in sight. The beach, the ice, the black lines of breakwaters seemed as silent and forsaken as the heart of a desert.

"And yet it is swarming with men," she breathed. "I wonder what they wanted?"

Suddenly she started. A figure had come into sight round the nearest prow. For an instant her hand gripped a round of the ladder, a preparatory move for upward flight. Then her hand relaxed.

"Oh!" she breathed, "It's you!"

"Yes, it is I, Mark Pence," said a friendly boyish voice.

"I--I suppose I should be afraid of you," said Lucile, "but I'm not."

"Why? Why should you?" he asked with a smile.

"Well, you see everyone about this old dry dock is so terribly mysterious. I've just had an awful fright."

"Tell me about it." Mark Pence smiled as he spoke.

Seating herself upon the flukes of an up-ended anchor she did tell him; told him not alone of her experience that night, but of the one of that other night in the Spanish Mission.

"Do you know," he said soberly when she had finished, "there _are_ a lot of mysterious things happening about this dock. I don't think it will last much longer, though. Things are sort of coming to a head. Know what those two policemen were here for?"

Lucile shook her head.

"Made a call on the c.h.i.n.ks, down there in the old scow. Came to look for something. But they didn't find it. Heard them say as much when they came out. They were mighty excited about something, though. Bet they thought it was mighty strange that there was a stairway in that old scow twenty feet deep."

"Are--are you sure about that stairway?"

The boy's reply was confident:

"Sure's I am that I'm standing here."

Lucile protested:

"But most folks don't use circling stairways much. They don't know--"

"I do though. I work in a library. There are scores of circling stairways among the stacks and I know just how high each one is."

"It _is_ queer about that stairway," Lucile breathed. "I must be going up. I'm getting chill sitting here."

"Well, good-bye." Mark Pence put out his hand and seized hers in a friendly grip. "Just remember I'm with you. If you ever need me, just whistle and I'll come running."

"Thanks--thanks--aw--awfully," said Lucile, a strange catch in her throat.

Her eyes followed him until the boat's prow had hidden him; then she hurried up the rope-ladder and into the cabin. She was s.h.i.+vering all over, whether from a chill or from nervous excitement she could not tell.