The Arizona Callahan
By H. Bedford-Jones
The same distinguished writer who gave you such thrilling stories of far places as “The Brazen Peacock” and “Lou-Lou” knows the odd corners of his own country too—as witness this exciting story of adventure among the untamed Beaver Islanders.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1924 issue of Blue Book Magazine.]
CHAPTER I
Nelly Callahan was the only one to see just what happened. Everyone else in camp had gone down the island that day to get a count of the half-wild cattle among the blueberry swamps.
The wild drive of rain and low clouds to the westward hid Garden Island from sight and lowered all the horizon, until Lake Michigan seemed a small place. Beaver Island was clear vanished, and so was High Island with its colony of Israelites. Nothing was to be seen from this north end of Hog Island except the foaming shallows and the deeper water beyond, and the huge rollers bursting in from the Wisconsin shore—with two other things. One, as the keen blue eyes of the watching girl could make out, was or had been a boat; the other was a man.
She had heard shots, faint reports cracking down the wind, drawing her to the point of land to see what was happening out there toward Garden Island. For a long while there was nothing to see, until the boat came into sight. It was only a blotch, rising and then gone again, gradually sinking from sight altogether. Few would have seen it. Nelly Callahan, however, was an island girl, and her eye was instantly caught by anything outside the settled scheme of things. So she knew it for a boat, and after a time knew that it had gone down entirely.
Presently she made out the man. To her intense astonishment he was sitting in the stern of a canoe, and paddling. Canoes are rare things in the Beaver Islands these days; here in the center of Lake Michigan, with the nearest land little more than a mirage above the horizon, there are other and safer playthings, and life is too bitter hard to be lightly held.