The Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE INTERRUPTED MESSAGE
The next morning Legs awoke early and, after inspecting his watch, was about to settle himself for another hour's snooze when he detected a sputtering sound and instantly recognized it as the wireless in action. Footfalls on the flat roof of the kitchen ell confirmed him in the opinion that Turner was taking or sending a message. Straightway, the youngster was seized by an itching desire to witness the apparatus in operation, and all thought of further sleep vanished.
Very softly he arose, slipped on his clothes, and was hurrying on his way to seek the outer stairway leading to the roof of the annex when he stopped short and drew back on discovering, out on the porch, Hardy and Turner (the latter evidently just arrived) deeply absorbed in conversation.
"That's what it said," Turner was announcing, "that's every last word I could get. 'Lighthouse keeper at Kitty Hawk ill. Bring Smith from Knott's Island this morning without delay. You can make it if you hurry. There's a terrible—', and that's all I could pick up, though I listened till my ears ached."
Hardy paced up and down a few moments. "Terrible what, do you suppose? Battle, murder, or sudden death?"
"You can search me. All you know is that you've got to beat it and beat it good and quick. Beckon they had too much gumption to ask you to bump a hurricane."
"Confound it!" grumbled Hardy. "When I took this job, I didn't count on carrying lighthouse keepers around over all creation. Say, run up there, will you, and try your wire again while I get some stuff together. If I've got to go, I've got to—there are no two ways about it."
As the birdman rushed through the door, he nearly unset Legs in his haste.
"Hello! Down already?" he rattled, and then, as if seized by a sudden inspiration, "Look here, old fellow, how would you like to go with me in the plane as far as Knott's Island, about twenty miles from here? I'll leave you there with a friend of mine and pick you up on my way home this afternoon. Got to carry a lighthouse doctor from here to Kitty Hawk about forty miles further. How about it? Quick, right off the bat!"
The suddenness of the invitation staggered Legs and almost floored him.
"Want me to go?" Then after a second's hesitation. "Sure I'll go. You bet I'd like to go," said the lad, too flattered by the honor to feel much nervousness over the adventure.
"That's what I call a man! Now, come on, help me to throw some plunder into a bag."
"How 'bout calling the other fellows?" suggested the boy, on the track of the scurrying birdman.
"Hang the other fellows! We haven't got time to fool with them. Chase yourself."
In high feather, yet quivering from excitement, Legs kept at Hardy's heels as the man grabbed a small satchel from a shelf, rushed to the pantry and shoveled into the receptacle, without a word of explanation to the petrified Luke, some remains of the last evening's feast, then dashed upstairs for an aviator's coat for himself and one for Legs; thrust into his belt the pistol which he had official license to carry; bounded from the house, and called up to Turner to know if he could squeeze anything more out of the wireless.
"Not a buzz," cried the man aloft. "Not a sizzle."
"Then come on down and help us with the plane."
As the three were jog-trotting along towards the hangar, the Tarheel prudently raised some sharp objections to Hardy's plan for the boy, but, with the assurance that the passenger was to be dropped at Knott's Island, he subsided.
Fifteen minutes later, the bird had started on its journey.
"Gee! they'll be sore," thought the rising Legs with great elation, as he waved down upon his belated companions, who came running across the sand. "This is where I score." And, snuggling in his coat, began to goggle the surrounding sky and the sea beneath with more self-possession and courage than he had on his initiation.
Over the lighthouse rose Windjammer and, at a suitable elevation, was soon speeding above a sandy strip separating what appeared to be a vast inland lake on the one hand and the ocean on the other. To the lad's eyes, a singular change had taken place in the water, due to the curling whitecaps. The sky also had changed its aspect of the day before. The sun shone red and sinister through a weird mist, and from the rim of the southern horizon great clouds were surging.
Beyond the region of the landlocked waters, great stretches of woodland and the farms of the trucking land miles inland from the sand and marsh area came in view. Soon the state boundary was crossed, and immediately beneath the flyer gleamed another sand ridge, the beginning of that barrier extending, with breaks here and there, almost the whole length of the Carolina coast. For a space of ten or fifteen miles the ocean stretched boundlessly on the left, and on the right spread the upper waters of Currituck Sound. Then there came into view a sparsely wooded sandy island with groups of tiny houses at wide intervals. Now Hardy, steering to the right, crossed a narrow inlet, hovered over a village and planed down to a grassy spot not more than a stones throw from the marshy shoreline.
"All out for Knott's Island," sang out the pilot as he alighted under the staring eyes of a group of fishermen. "Boy, you're a seasoned birdman," he added patting the exultant lad on the shoulder. "You're wearing your wings; you're getting the bird look in your eyes. But, see here, keep off the swell-head and, while I chase off for Smith, keep a close watch on this plane and don't let any of those oyster rubes get their whiskers tangled in my propeller. I'll bring Nash back with me and turn you over to him to keep till I get back. Hell stuff you with prunes and persimmons. He has a grocery store yonder."
Hardy strode off to the shop, a few rods up the shore.
"Well, I'll be switched! Hello, sky pilot," hailed the grocer, bluff and hearty, red-headed and red-cheeked, in shirt sleeves and corduroy breeches spotted with marks of flour and other reminders of his trade. "Saw you coming with a tail to your kite. Looks more like chine than good red herring." He shot out a stubby finger in the direction of Legs.
"Just a kid I brought along for company," explained Hardy. "But look here, have you heard—?"
"A kid!" interrupted Nash. "Now I know you're a fool. Thought you were dippy enough to be windjammering by yourself, let alone bringing ballast with you. Haven't you heard of that gale whipping up the coast at a hundred miles an hour."
"What! What's that?" exclaimed the startled pilot. "A gale! The deuce you say!"
"What are you givin' us? Haven't you got a wire at Cape Peril?"
In hurried words, Hardy told of the broken message.
"This fills the gap then," said Nash. "Telegram came this A. M. early! 'Put storm signals out along coast. West Indian gale sweepin' north. Central now off coast of Florida.' Take a look at that barometer, will you?"
The pilot glanced at the instrument attached to the door frame.
"Doesn't look good a bit. But I reckon I can make Kitty Hawk. Now to get that fellow Smith in a jiffy."
"You can go over and see. He was hangin' around the store yestiddy, but seems like I heard somebody say he pulled out to Roanoke Island last night on a tugboat."
"Darn!" exploded Hardy, staring vacantly about him, and then turned to rush over to Smith's cottage several hundred yards away. Twelve minutes later he was back, looking his stormiest.
"Talk about wild-goose chases!" he fumed to Nash. "That chump Smith's wife says he's gone to Dareville on business, but I'll sure find him there. She bristled and looked sour about the Kitty Hawk proposition, but I'm going to get him there if I have to make a pancake landing to do it. This is the deuce!"
"Better lie low here, that's my advice," warned Nash.
Hardy shook his head impatiently.
"Orders are orders. I learned that in the army," declared the pilot firmly. "Now if you'll keep an eye on Hatton—"
"I'll keep two on him. Here comes your Sonny Longlegs now. Looks like he thought sompin' was after him."
He pointed to the lad sprinting toward them with such speed as he might have exhibited in front of a legion of tigers.
"Hardy! Hardy!" panted the boy as he bounded up. "Come quick! Come quick!"
There was a note of tragic insistence in his tone, but Hardy was not the sort of fellow to be stampeded.
"Great guns! What's up now?" he demanded. "What's got into you, boy?"
"One—one—one of father's lifeboats—with a hole in it—on the shore there."
He pointed tremblingly at a line of boats on the sloping bank not far from the airplane.
"Why, you're crazy. One of your father's lifeboats! He's in Mexico!"
"But I know it is! I know it is!" insisted the lad. "I found my initials I cut on it a long time ago. You don't think the yacht's gone down, do you?"
He was already dragging Hardy along, while the grocer, in dumb astonishment, toddled after on his fat, round legs.
"Keep your head, Hatton," commanded Hardy; "don't talk tommyrot. What in the name of herring could one of the yacht's boats be doing way up here?"
The boy slackened his pace a bit to rattle off his story. When Hardy had left for the store, he related, he kept an eye on the plane, but moved over closer to the beach. Among several boats lying there, one had instantly attracted his attention on account of its being a type quite different from those used by oystermen. Drawing nearer to inspect it better, he discovered that one side had been staved in as by the blows of an axe. The name on either side of the prow seemed to have been sandpapered out, but some fragments of letters still visible convinced him that the name had been The Jolly Ruffian. To confirm his suspicions, he found cut in the wood of the gunwale the letters W. M. M. H. This piece of mischief he had perpetrated five years before, and his misdeed had been deeply impressed upon him by a spanking.
Partly convinced by the story, Hardy reached the boat, inspected it carefully, and agreed with Nash that the evidence was overwhelming. The boat undoubtedly belonged to the Hatton yacht.
Most of the neighboring fishermen had gathered about the plane, but one weatherbeaten old fellow sat mending a net by the waterside, stopping every now and then to cast uneasy glances at the trio pow-wowing over the lifeboat.
"Who's this smashed-in boat belong to?"
"My boat," shouted back the old man in a tone that implied, "And what business is it of yours?"
"Wouldn't mind coming over and telling us where you got it, would you?" urged Nash.
The fisherman arose and walked over deliberately.
"Go ahead and tell him, Mr. Hall," coaxed Nash when the man arrived. "He's all right."
"Buy it?" quizzed Hardy, in a hurry to be done with the business and off on his errand.
"No, I didn't," was the brusque reply. "It ain't yourn, is it? What you askin' fer?"
"To come right to the point, my friend, this boat here looks very much like one I've seen before, and I'd just like for curiosity to know how it came here."
"They're all right," encouraged Nash once more. "Tell 'em. You're a friend of mine, ain't you?"
"Well, if you're a friend of Tom Nash thar," he drawled, jerking his head towards the grocer, "I don't mind talkin', but I ain't much set on unloadin' my own business on strangers. And what's more, I say nobody ain't goin' to get their hands on this boat unless they can prove it b'longs to 'em. That's whar I stand. The way I come across it was this way. Less'n two weeks ago I was out dredgin' my oyster beds 'bout two shouts and a fling from hyuh and the tongs got hold o' sumpin' that felt powerful funny. Me and my son, we jerks and jerks, but couldn't move it a peg. Then I gets a boy to dive down and feel of it, and the boy, says he, 'It's a boat, a rowboat.' Then me and my son gets a big iron hook and a chain and hitches on to that boat in 'bout fifteen feet o' water and hauls it over to the shallow marsh and drags it asho' and with that thar hole stove in it. I asked everybody I seed, and nobody don't know nary a thing 'bout whar it come from. Then I says, it's mine till somebody can prove a claim to it, that's what I says."
"Then you have no suspicion as to who sunk it or where it came from? Nobody suspicious been seen around?" persisted Hardy.
"No, sir, not so far as I knows," declared the witness, and then, after a few moments' hesitation, he pointed to a lanky man in an oilskin coat in the group around the airplane. "I recollect Joe Turpin, that tallest man yonder, did say that he give some grub to a tramp one night 'bout the time I found the boat. He said he came from Roanoke Island and his name was Buffalo Dare or some such."
Unable to get any further information from Hall, Hardy directed the excited Hatton to stay where he was while he himself interviewed the man in oilskin. Joe Turpin answered the questions after some coaxing. The stranger, he asserted, was a short, stocky, smooth-faced man with a rattlesnake sort of eye, but he stood out of the light with a slouch hat pulled down over him face, and the witness wasn't sure he could recognize him if he saw him in the daylight.
"He wore sto' clothes," continued Turpin, "and didn't look like our folks. He paid for his food. Said he was an Indian traveling to Dare County and that his name was Buffalo Dare."
This source of evidence exhausted, Hardy found that the other men in the group had no knowledge whatever of the stranger, so he hurried back to the oysterman for a last word.
"I don't want no other folks' belongin's," insisted the old man, "but nobody ain't goin' to get that boat but the lawful owner, and then only when he forks out fifteen dollars fer haulin' it out of the oyster bed. It was wuth every cent of it, and it kilt some o' my young oysters, too."
"Now, Hatton," said the pilot, turning to the boy, who had followed every word of the oysterman with breathless interest. "You stay here with Nash and don't worry. You know your father's been heard from. I s'pose one of his boats got adrift when he laid over in the Sound, and that's all there is to it. I've wasted too much time already. Nash, take care of him till I get back."
Legs, however, was in no mood to be shaken off. As fast as the words could tumble out of his mouth, he argued he must get to Roanoke Island to find out something further; it would be impossible for him to stay in that lonesome spot, and so on. Hardy frowned, looked fierce, positively refused to let him go, melted a little, and then, after a short consultation with Nash about the prospects of the weather for the next hour, finally gave in.
"Anything to keep the peace; but if the wind gets stiffer I'm going to land and leave you even if it's in a wilderness twenty miles from civilization."
Up went the bird, amid the wondering longshoremen, the pilot steering from Currituck Sound to the mainland; he then left Currituck County behind, passed over Dare County, and, turning east across a narrow inlet, drove across Roanoke Island in a freshening breeze, hovered over a hamlet, glided down, and landed even keel in the outskirts of Dareville on the seaward side of the island.