Chapter XVIII: 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.