The Best Wadsworth Camp Mysteries. Charles Wadsworth Camp

      CHAPTER I

       THE DANGEROUS HABITATION

       Table of Contents

      Captain’s Island is not far from civilisation as one measures space. Dealing with the less tangible medium of custom, it is—or was—practically beyond perception.

      James Miller didn’t know this. When he had thought at all of his friend Anderson’s new winter home he had pictured the familiar southern resort with hotels and cottages sheltering Hammonds peerage, and a seductive bathing beach to irritate the conservative.

      That background, indeed, was given detail by his own desires. For he had received Anderson’s letter concerning the new move while still in bed with a wearisome illness. Now, after two months’ convalescence in quiet waterways, he was ready to snare pleasure where it was most alluring before returning to the North and Wall Street. So he sent a telegram from Allairville, instructing Anderson to meet him in Martinsburg and conduct him to the revels of his tropical resort. As a matter of fact it was this wire, despatched with such smiling anticipation, that became the leash by which he was drawn into the erratic, tragic, and apparently unaccountable occurrences which at the time added immeasurably to the lonely island’s evil fame.

      Still it went, and Miller, ignorant of what he faced, went after it as quickly as he could, which was with the speed of a snail. It took his small cruising launch forty-eight hours, including a minimum of rest, to conquer the fifty miles between Allairville and Martinsburg. Because of this aversion of his boat to anything approximating haste he had caused the name Dart to be painted across the stern in arresting letters.

      As the droll craft loafed down into the busy roadsteads of the southern metropolis this warm May morning. Miller, in perfect consonance with its bland indifference, lay in a steamer chair on the upper deck. Clothed in white flannels and smoking a pipe, he surveyed with gentle calm a petulant, unreasonable world. He smiled pleasantly at enraged tug-boat and barge captains. Crawling through the railroad drawbridge, he waved a greeting free from malice at the keeper, who, arms akimbo, chin uptilted, bawled his expectations of a train by midnight and his reasonable ambition to clear the draw before that hour.

      Nor did the native, leaning against the wheel forward, respond even by a glance to these studied incivilities. His ears seemed to be occupied exclusively by the engine as capricious symptoms; his eyes, by his goal, at last within view; his hands, by the wheel as he coaxed the Dart to the urgencies of traffic.

      Miller eyed the fellow approvingly. By rare good luck he had hired him down the state when he had bought this boat as the first ingredient of the doctor’s prescription for a long rest in the South. At the start the man had proved his fitness by exposing an abnormal affection for diseased gasoline motors. Since then he had served Miller acceptably as captain, engineer, deck-hand, cook, and, in a sketchy sense, valet. Moreover he knew obscure, uncharted channels. He had a special intuition for the haunts of fish and game. In the villages where they paused for supplies he out-bargained the storekeepers almost without words. Miller appreciated that it was due only to his devotion and ingenuity that the Dart at present indifferently blocked traffic in the river before Martinsburg. With the inexcusable confidence most of us bring to the contemplation of the immediate future