CHAPTER IX

SOMEONE DROPS IN FROM NOWHERE

Pausing to listen whenever she gained the protecting shadow of an ice-pile, Lucile caught each time the pit-pat of footsteps. This so terrified her that she lost all knowledge of direction, her only thought to put a greater distance between herself and that haunting black shadow.

Suddenly she awoke to her old peril. The ice beneath her was heaving. Before her lay a dark patch of water. In her excitement she had been making her way toward open water. With a shudder she wheeled about, and forcing her mind to calmer counsel, chose a circling route which would eventually bring her to the shore.

Again she dodged from ice-pile to ice-pile, again paused to hear the wild beating of her own heart and the pit-pat of the shadow's footfalls.

But what was this? As she listened she seemed to catch the fall of two pairs of feet.

In desperation she shot forward a great distance without pausing. When at last she did pause it was with the utmost consternation that she realized that not one or two, but many pairs of feet were dropping pit-pat on the ice floor of the lake.

As she dodged out for another flight, she saw them--three of them--as they suddenly disappeared from sight. One to the right, one to the left, one behind her, they were closing in upon her.

There was still a space between the two to right and left. Through this she sprang, only to see a fourth directly before her. As she again dodged into a sheltering shadow she nerved herself for a scream. The girls were away, but someone, Mark Pence, the fishermen, old Timmie, might hear and come to her aid.

But what was this? She no longer caught the shuffle of moving feet. All was silent as the tomb.

For a moment she hovered there undecided. Then she caught the distant, even tramp-tramp of two pairs of heavy, marching feet. Glancing shoreward, she saw two burly policemen, their brass buttons gleaming in the moonlight, marching down the beach. It had been the presence of these officers which had held her pursuers to their shadowy hiding-places.

If she but screamed once these officers would come to her rescue! But she had, from early childhood, experienced a great fear of policemen. When she endeavored to scream, her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. And so there she stood, motionless, voiceless, until the officers had passed from her sight.

* * * * * * * *

While Lucile was experiencing the strange thrills of this terrible game out on the lake ice, Florence and Marian were witnessing mysterious actions of strange persons out on the lagoon.

In spite of the lateness of the hour, there were a number of persons skating on the north end of the lagoon, so the two girls experienced no fear as they went for a quarter-mile dash down the southern channel which lay between an island and the shore. At the south end of the lagoon the channel, which became very narrow, was spanned by a wooden bridge.

This bridge, even in the daytime, always gave Marian a shock of something very like fear, for it was here that a great tragedy ending in the death of a prominent society woman had occurred.

Now, as she found herself nearing it, preparing for a long skimming glide beneath it, she felt a chill shoot up her spine. Involuntarily she glanced up at the bridge railing. Then she gripped Florence's arm tightly.

"Who can that be on the bridge at this hour of the night?" she whispered.

"Probably someone who has climbed up there to take off his skates," said Florence with her characteristic coolness.

"But look! He's waving his arms. He's signaling. Do you suppose he means it for us?"

"No," said Florence. "He's looking north, toward the edge of the island. Come on; pay no attention to him. Under we go."

With a great, broad swinging stroke she fairly threw her lighter partner across the shadow that the bridge made and out into the moonlight on the other side.

Marian was breathing quite easily again. They had made half the length of the island on the return lap, when she again gripped Florence's arm.

"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 passing 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 passed 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 Chinks, 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 shivering all over, whether from a chill or from nervous excitement she could not tell.

The other girls came in a few moments later. For an hour they sat in a corner, drinking hot chocolate and telling of their night's adventures. Then they prepared themselves for the night's rest.

For a long time after the others had retired, Florence sat in a huge upholstered chair, lights out, staring into the dark. She was thinking over the experiences of the past few weeks, trying to put them together in a geometric whole, just as an artist arranges the parts of a stained glass window.

"There's Lucile's experience in the old Spanish Mission," she mused, "and my own in the museum. Then there's Mark Pence's visit to the old scow and the circular stairway. Then there's the blue candlestick. It's rare, mysterious and valuable. Why? The police are interested in it. Why? Then there's the police-sergeant's visit, and Lucile's experience on the ice, and the two policemen visiting the old scow, and there's that man on the bridge to-night, the two with the sled and the one sitting on the ice. It's all mysterious, so it ought all to fit together somehow."

For a long time she sat wrapped in deep thought. Then she started suddenly.

"Blue!" she whispered. "The face Lucile saw in the Mission was blue, illuminated and blue. In the story the old seaman told me the face of the god of the Negontisks was illuminated and blue. The candlestick I found was blue. What should be more natural than that a blue jade candlestick should be made in which to set a candle with which to illumine the blue god? Blue jade is valuable. A ring or stickpin set with a small piece of it is costly. That makes the candlestick both costly and valuable. All that," she sighed, "seems to hang together."

Again she sat for a time in deep thought.

"Only," she breathed at last, "who ever heard of a tribe of Negontisks in America, let alone here in Chicago? Try to imagine a hundred or more near-savages, with no money and no means of transportation but their native skin-boats, traveling eight thousand miles over land and sea and ending up in Chicago. It can't be imagined. It simply isn't done. So there goes my carefully arranged puzzle all to smash."

Throwing off her dressing-gown, she climbed into her berth, listening to the flag-rope lashing the mast for an instant, then fell fast asleep.