CHAPTER XIV

THE DISAPPEARING PARCEL

In the meantime Florence and Jeanne were making the best of their opportunity to leave the "made land." They hoped to cross the bridge and reach the car line before the threatened storm broke. Petite Jeanne was terribly afraid of lightning. Every time it streaked across the sky she gripped her strong companion's arm and shuddered.

It was impossible to make rapid progress. From this point the beaten path disappeared. There were only scattered tracks where other pedestrians had picked their way through the litter of debris.

Here Florence caught her foot in a tangled mass of wire and all but fell to the ground; there Jeanne stepped into a deep hole; and here they found their way blocked by a heap of fragments from a broken sidewalk.

"Why did we come this way?" Petite Jeanne cried in consternation.

"The other was longer, more dangerous. Cheer up! We'll make it." Florence took her arm and together they felt their way forward through the darkness that grew deeper and blacker at every step.

Rolling up as they did at the back of a city's skyscrapers, the mounting clouds were terrible to see.

"The throng!" Petite Jeanne's heart fairly stopped beating. "What must a terrific thunderstorm mean to that teaming mass of humanity?"

Even at her own moment of distress, this unselfish child found time for a compassionate thought for those hundreds of thousands who still thronged the city streets.

As for the crowds, not one person of them all was conscious that a catastrophe impended. Walled in on every side by skyscrapers, no slightest glance to the least of those black clouds was granted them. Their ears filled by the honk of horns, the blare of bands and the shouts of thousands, they heard not one rumble of distant thunder. So they laughed and shouted, crowded into this corner and that, to come out shaken and frightened; but never did one of them say, "It will storm."

Yet out of this merry-mad throng two beings were silent. A boy of sixteen and a hunchback of uncertain age, hovering in a doorway, looked, marveled a little, and appeared to wait.

"When will it break up?" the boy asked out of the corner of his mouth.

"Early," was the reply. "There's too many of 'em. They can't have much fun. See! They're flooding the grandstands. The bands can't play. They'll be going soon. And then--" The hunchback gave vent to a low chuckle.

* * * * * * * *

After snatching a pair of boy's strap-overalls from the rocks the girl, who had emerged from the water beside the submerged net, with the dark package under her arm hurried away over a narrow path and lost herself at once in the tangled mass of willows and cottonwood.

She had not gone far before a light appeared at the end of that trail.

Seen from the blackness of night, the structure she approached took on a grotesque aspect. With two small round windows set well above the door, it seemed the face of some massive monster with a prodigious mouth and great gleaming eyes. The girl, it would seem, was not in the least frightened by the monster, for she walked right up to its mouth and, after wrapping her overalls about the black package which still dripped lake water, opened the door, which let out a flood of yellow light, and disappeared within.

Had Florence witnessed all this, her mystification regarding this child of the island might have increased fourfold.

As you already know, Florence was not there. She was still with Petite Jeanne on the strip of "made land" that skirted the shore. They were more than a mile from the island.

They had come at last to a strange place. Having completely lost their way in the darkness, they found themselves of a sudden facing a blank wall.

A strange wall it was, too. It could not be a house for, though made of wood, this wall was composed not of boards but of round posts set so close together that a hand might not be thrust between them.

"Wh--where are we?" Jeanne cried in despair.

"I don't know." Florence had fortified her mind against any emergency. "I do know this wall must have an end. We must find it."

She was right. The curious wall of newly hewn posts did have an end. They were not long in finding it. Coming to a corner they turned it and again followed on.

"This is some enclosure," Florence philosophized. "It may enclose some form of shelter. And, from the looks of the sky, shelter is what we will need very soon."

"Yes! Yes!" cried her companion, as a flare of lightning gave her an instant's view of their surroundings. "There is a building looming just over there. The strangest sort of building, but a shelter all the same."

Ten minutes of creeping along that wall in the dark, and they came to a massive gate. This, too, was built of logs.

"There's a chain," Florence breathed as she felt about. "It's fastened, but not locked. Shall we try to go in?"

"Yes! Yes! Let us go in!" A sharp flash of lightning had set the little French girl's nerves all a-quiver.

"Come on then." There was a suggestion of mystery in Florence's tone. "We will feel our way back to that place you saw."

The gate swung open a crack. They crept inside. The door swung to. The chain rattled. Then once more they moved forward in the dark.

After a time, by the aid of a vivid flash, they made out a tall, narrow structure just before them. A sudden dash, and they were inside.

"We--we're here," Florence panted, "but where are we?"

"Oo--o! How dark!" Petite Jeanne pressed close to her companion's side. "I am sure there are no windows."

"The windows are above," whispered Florence. A flash of lightning had revealed an opening far above her head.

At the same instant she stumbled against a hard object.

"It's a stairway," she announced after a brief inspection. "A curious sort of stairway, too. The steps are shaped like triangles."

"That means it is a spiral stairway."

"And each step is thick and rough as if it were hand-hewn with an axe. But who would hew planks by hand in this day of steam and great sawmills?"

"Let's go up. We may be able to see something from the windows."

Cautiously, on hands and knees, they made their way up the narrow stairway. The platform they reached and the window they looked through a moment later were quite as mysterious as the stairway. Everywhere was the mark of an axe. The window was narrow, a mere slit not over nine inches wide and quite devoid of glass.

Yet from this window they were to witness one of God's greatest wonders, a storm at night upon the water.

The dark clouds had swung northward. They were now above the surface of the lake. Blackness vied with blackness as clouds loomed above the water. Like a great electric needle sewing together two curtains of purple velvet for a giant's wardrobe, lightning darted from sky to sea and from sea to sky again.

"How--how marvelous! How terrible!" Petite Jeanne pressed her companion's arm hard.

"And what a place of mystery!" Florence answered back.

"But what place _is_ this?" Jeanne's voice was filled with awe. "And where are we?"

"This," Florence repeated, "is a place of mystery, and this is a night of adventure.

"Adventure and mystery," she thought to herself, even as she said the words. Once more she thought of the cameo.

"I promised to return it to-morrow. And now it seems I am moving farther and farther from it."

Had she but known it, the time was not far distant when, like two bits of flotsam on a broad sea, she and the lost cameo would be drifting closer and closer together. And, strange as it may seem, the owner of the cameo, that frail, little, old lady, was to play an important part in the lives of Petite Jeanne and Florence.

* * * * * * * *

In the meantime the two officers and the man of the evil eye were playing a bit of drama all their own on the sand-blown desert portion of the island.

"You'll have to come clean!" the senior officer was saying to the man whom he addressed as Al.

"All you got to do is search me. You'll find nothing on me, not even a rod." The man stood his ground.

"Fair enough." With a skill born of long practice, the veteran detective went through the man's clothes.

"You've cach├ęd it," he grumbled, as he stood back empty-handed.

"I'm not in on the know." The suspicion of a smile flitted across the dark one's face. "Whatever you're looking for, I never had it."

"No? We'll look about a bit, anyway."

The officers mounted the breakwater to go flashing electric lanterns into every cavity. As the boom of thunder grew louder they abandoned the search to go tramping back across the barren sand.

Left to himself, Al made a pretense of leaving the island, but in reality lost himself from sight on the very brush-grown trail the nymph of the lake had taken a short time before.

"Well, I'll be--!" he muttered, as he brought up squarely before the structure that seemed a monster's head, whose eyes by this time were quite sightless. The light had blinked off some moments before.

After walking around the place twice, he stood before the door and lifted a hand as if to knock. Appearing to think better of this, he sank down upon the narrow doorstep, allowed his head to fall forward, and appeared to sleep.

Not for long, however. Foxes do not sleep in the night. Having roused himself, he stole back over the trail, crept to the breakwater, lifted himself to a point of elevation, and surveyed the entire scene throughout three lightning flashes. Then, apparently satisfied, he made his way to the windlass he had left an hour or two before. He repeated the process of drowning the complaining voice of the windlass and then, turning the crank, rapidly lifted the dripping net from the bottom of the lake.

With fingers that trembled slightly, he drew a small flashlight from his pocket to cast its light across the surface of the net.

Muttering a curse beneath his breath, he flashed the light once again, and then stood there speechless.

What had happened? The meshes of that net were fine, so fine that a dozen minnows not more than two inches long struggled vainly at its center. Yet the package he had thrown in this net was gone.

"Gone!" he muttered. "It can't have floated. Heavy. Heavy as a stone. And I had my eyes on it, every minute; all but--but the time I went down that trail.

"They tricked me!" he growled. He was thinking now of the policemen. "But no! How could they? I saw them go, saw them on the bridge. Couldn't have come back. Not time enough."

At this he thrust both hands deep in his pockets and went stumping away.