The Best Wadsworth Camp Mysteries. Charles Wadsworth Camp
face at the command to anchor in Captain’s Inlet had not retreated. The fear, too, that had burned in his eyes then showed no abatement. It flashed over Miller that there was a resemblance—not physical, but all the more disturbing because it wasn’t—between the Anderson who had just come to him with his appeal and the Tony who recently had bent to his command and traversed the Snake. He found himself questioning if a mirror would not have shown an alteration in his own countenance. The thought troubled him. To drive it out he looked around—at the tapestry cushions, at the familiar ivory panelling, at the four French prints. He had lied to Tony. It was not the same. It did not look the same. It did not feel the same.
He reached up and opened the porthole to knock the ashes from his pipe. A vicious gust of wind tore the brass frame from his hand and entered the cabin. The lamp flickered. Beaching over to regain the frame, Miller’s eye caught Tony. He had dropped his work. He leaned heavily against the table, his mouth half open, his eyes fixed on the open port.
Quickly Miller realised that the silent native wanted to talk, wanted to tell him something, strained to go back, doubtless, to those unhealthy rumours whose beginnings he had blurted out at the entrance of the Snake.
Miller’s irritation flamed into anger. Decidedly, between Anderson and this superstitious fellow, his own poise would be threatened. Ridiculous! He could not be intimidated by the atmosphere of any place, however lonely, however tarnished by creeping lies. He slammed the frame shut and screwed it tight. He swung on Tony.
“What are you staring at now? Get hold of yourself. Make up your mind to one thing; you’ll see no ghosts on Captain’s Island while you’re with me. Hurry dinner.”
It was the first time he had used that tone with the man. He wondered at it, but Tony returned to the kitchen, shrugging his shoulders. Miller, however, noticed that a rule was broken. The kitchen door was left wide.
After dinner he went back to the book which he had thought fascinating last night. Now its cleverness had dwindled. It failed to hold him. Tony, whose invariable custom it had been to retire early to his bunk in the kitchen, sat wide-eyed in the doorway. Several times Miller was on the point of commanding him to close the door. In the end he thought better of it. These irritable impulses were foreign to’ his personality. They might be looked upon as a manifestation of the place against which he should guard. So when he went to bed, after keeping up his farce of reading for half an hour longer, he tried to throw himself into an attitude of amused comprehension.
“If it will make you feel any better, Tony, I’ll leave my door open a crack. Then you won’t have all the spooks to yourself.”
A sigh answered him. Tony’s light went out. The boat was in darkness.
Miller tried to sleep. But, in spite of the season and the closed portholes, a chill, damp air invaded his stateroom. The wind had increased to a gale. It beat furiously against the boat, which rocked in the uneven gusts. The distant pounding of the breakers brought a mournful undertone across the dunes. The stealthy passage of the tide suggested the flight of such creatures as Miller knew must live and torture in Tony’s superstitious imagination.
CHAPTER IV
THE “QUEER” GIRL
Convinced that he could not sleep, Miller lay brooding over Anderson’s story, sympathising under the stress of this night more and more with Anderson and Molly. Towards morning, however, he must have dropped off, for, when he opened his eyes, the low sun was shining through the port. The charnel house atmosphere had been dissipated. The Dart lay on an even keel. Tony was up. The welcome odour of coffee entered the stateroom.
Slipping on his bathrobe. Miller hurried to the deck, jumped overboard, and fought that racing tide until it was on the point of vanquishing him.
When he was dressed Tony brought him his coffee. He sat on deck sipping it, calmly appraising his surroundings, almost gleefully aware of the retreat of last night’s fancies.
He could see the fisherman’s boat now, anchored a third of a mile away, close to the shore of the island. It was, as Anderson had said, low, filthy, ancient; but its deck was empty, its owner nowhere to be seen.
Miller’s eyes followed the tangled shoreline in the hope of glimpsing the coquina house. But the thicket was unbroken as far as two gigantic mounds of white sand which stretched eastward from near the river end of the island and evidently separated the river and the inlet. From the tide Miller knew there must be an opening to the sea somewhere down there. Probably the inlet made a sweep to the east and ran out between the mounds and the dunes. The tradition that buccaneers had used the inlet was perfectly understandable to Miller. Screened from the marshes by the island and from the sea by the dunes, with a heavy fall of tide, it had been an ideal spot for the careening of pirate craft.
The sun was higher now in a clear sky behind the dunes. The white grains and the polished sea shells here and there glinted jewel-like in its rays. On the summits tufts of long, slender grass waved languidly in a light breeze. It was already warm.
Tony came in and took the cup and saucer. He was about to descend when he paused with a long intake of breath. That same pallor came into his face, that same fixed terror into his eyes as he stared across the dunes.
“What are you gaping at now?” Miller asked good-naturedly.
The lips opened. Tony whispered :
“Look! In—in white!”
During that outburst of yesterday there had been, Miller recalled, something about a woman in white, presumably the shade of the Algerian. He smiled.
“Come, Tony! Not by broad daylight. You only make yourself ridiculous.”
“Look!” Tony repeated. He pointed.
Miller gazed across the dunes, shading his eyes. There was something there, close to the sea; something white; something that moved—a woman or a girl.
He sprang up. Laughing, he jumped to the lower deck and drew in the dingy.
“There’s one ghost I’ll lay for you, Tony.”
“Don’t go,” the native begged.
Miller stepped into the boat, pushed off, and with a few strong strokes reached the dunes. He was curious. He reacted to an exciting impulse. Who was this early morning adventurer in white who moved across an empty shore! It might be the girl of whom Anderson had spoken—that ” queer” girl about whom he had maintained so puzzling a reserve.
He hurried among the dunes, no longer able to see the figure in white. But he remembered where it had stood, not more than a quarter of a mile away. He crossed rapidly in that direction, pausing only when the advisability of caution impressed him. It would riot do to assume the usual at Captain’s Island. It was far from ordinary that the girl should be there at all, clothed in this fashion. He was by no means sure that he would offer her a welcome encounter. She might try to elude him. Yet he had made a boast of the affair to Tony. He wanted to convince Tony and himself that the normal was not altogether foreign to the place. He planned, therefore, to step from the dunes to the beach almost at her elbow, but at the last dune he paused too long, fascinated by what he saw thus at close range.
She was a young girl, not more than twenty, he thought, although at first he couldn’t see her face. She was not tall, and she was very slender. As she stood, clothed in a long, clinging robe of soft, white stuff, bending forward to the breeze, gazing across the waves, she might have been a figure, animated and released from a Grecian marble. Her hair, unloosed, was yellow and reached below her waist. The breeze lifted vagrant strands which the sun caught and turned to gold. And when she turned, as though his presence had been communicated to her in some exceptional manner, he saw that she was beautiful with an elfin face.
So they stared at each other for a moment across the sand. His eyes wavered. With a strong effort he forced them back to hers. He was