Christmas Cove

It was night on Casco Bay off the coast of Maine. There was no moon. Stars were hidden by a fine haze. The distant harbor lights of Portland, eight of them, gleaming faintly in pairs like yellow cat's eyes, served only to intensify the blackness of the water and the night.

Ruth Bracket's arms moved backward and forward in rhythmic motion. She was rowing, yet no sound came from her oarlocks. Oars and oarlocks were padded. She liked it best that way. Why? Mystery-that magic word "mystery." How she loved it!

In the stern of the little punt sat slim, black-haired, dark-eyed Betty Bronson, a city girl from the heart of America who was enjoying her first summer on the coast of Maine.

Betty, too, loved mystery. And into her life and that of her stout seashore girl companion had come a little mystery that day. At this very moment, as Ruth rested on her muffled oar, there came creeping across the silent waters and through the black of night a second bit of mystery.

The first mystery had come to them on shore in the hold of a beached three-masted schooner.

Ruth knew the schooner well enough. She had been on board her a dozen times and thought she knew all about her-but she didn't.

The owner, a dark-skinned foreigner who had purchased the schooner six months before, used her for bringing wood to the islands. There is, so they say, an island in Casco Bay for every day in the year. Each island has its summer colony. These summer folks like an open fire to sit by at night and this requires wood. The schooner had been bringing it in from somewhere-from Canada some said. No one seemed to know for sure.

Being an old schooner the wood-carrying craft must be beached from time to time to have her seams calked. They beached her at high tide. Low tide found her stranded. The return of high tide carried her off again.

In this there is no mystery. The mystery began when Ruth and Betty, along with other girls and boys of the island, swarmed up a rope ladder to the tilted deck of the beached schooner.

Being of a bolder nature than the others, having always a consuming desire to see the hold of so ancient a ship, Ruth had led Betty into the very heart of the schooner and had opened a door to pursue her investigation further when a harsh voice called down to her:

"Here now. Come out'a da sheep!"

It was a foreign skipper.

Startled, the girls had quickly closed the door and bolted up the gangway. Not, however, until they had seen a surprising thing. They had seen three bolts of bright, red cloth in that cabin back of the hold. Were there others? They could not tell. The place had been quite dark.

"Looked like silk," Betty had said a few moments later as they walked down the beach.

"Can't tell," Ruth replied. "Probably only red calico, a present for the wood chopper's wife."

"Three bolts?"

"Three wood choppers' wives with seven children apiece," Ruth laughed.

She had found this hard to believe. There certainly was something strange about those bolts of cloth, and the foreign skipper's desire to get them away from the cabin.

And now, as they listened in the night on the bay with muffled oars at rest, they caught the creak of oarlocks. The schooner had got off the beach with the tide. She was anchored back in the bay. That the dory had come from her they did not doubt.

"Where are they going?" Betty asked in a faint whisper as the sound of rowing grew louder, then began to fade away in the distance.

"House Island, perhaps."

"There's nothing over there."

"Only an abandoned house and the old fort. No one living there. Strange, isn't it?"

"Really mysterious," Betty agreed.

"We'll row around the Black Gull, then we'll go home," said Ruth.

Visiting the Black Gull, an ancient six-master that had lain at anchor in the harbor months on end, was one of Ruth's chief delights.

Steam and gasoline, together with the high price of canvas, high wages and demand for speed, had brought this slow going craft to anchor for good.

So there she stood, black and brooding, her masts reaching like bare arms toward heaven, her keel moving with the tide yet ever chafing at the massive anchor chain that was never drawn.

Night was the time to visit her. Then, looming out of the dark, she seemed to speak of other days, of the glory of Maine's shipping, of fresh cut lumber, of fish and of the boundless sea.

It was then that Ruth could fancy herself standing upon the deck, with wind singing in the rigging and setting the sails snapping as they boomed away over a white-capped sea.

They had rowed to the dark bulk that they knew to be the Black Gull and had moved silently along the larboard side, about the stern and half way down the starboard side, when of a sudden a low exclamation escaped Ruth's lips. Something had brushed against her in the dark.

The next instant a gurgling cry came from the bow of the boat. This was followed by a splash.

"She-she's overboard!" thought Ruth, reversing her strokes and back paddling with all her might.

"Ruth!" came a call from the water. "I'm over here! Some-something pulled me in."