“I thought that was how you folks figured; you didn’t act any too welcoming. But I’d be some sleuth if I went telling my business to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I have to count on a little unpopularity once in a while. Yes, we knew the boat as soon as we came here and looked her over. She was just the boat we expected she would be. A government cutter had been trying to pick her up before the blizzard came down.”
“Then she wasn’t a phantom ship at all,” Ann remarked. And her disappointment must have shown in her voice, because her father and Warren Bain seemed to think that was one of the funniest things they ever had heard. But was all that excitement and anxiety over nothing but an ordinary boat that had been wrecked in a perfectly natural way?
Bain went on with his story.
“She ran under the name of The Shadow although she carried no name, and her owner, Jim Rand, captained her. She carried a crew of five men besides himself and she ran a good trade, smuggling Italian silk and Indian spices into the North Atlantic harbors. She wasn’t hard to pick up because of that figurehead, but Rand wouldn’t give it up. It was his mascot and the crew believed that he talked things over with that wooden image. Rand was a clever one. This boat was stopped many a time, but when the men from the government cutter climbed aboard to examine her they never found anything. She seemed to be running empty. We never found a cargo and consequently we never could pin anything on Rand.”
“Well, you got it on him now,” Fred said heartily. “Which one o’ these is Rand?”
“Neither one,” and Warren sounded contemptuous. “Rand was a lawbreaker but he wasn’t like either of these two low-down thieves and murderers here. Rand is up in your burying ground. You put him there with the mate and two of the crew.”
“So, one o’ those was the captain, hey?” Fred rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well—I guess he’s glad to be resting in the ground.”
“He made the worst mistake of his life when he shipped these two,” went on Bain, “both of them with criminal records, although he didn’t know it. Of course he couldn’t expect to get too high-class sailors for his business, but those he’d had were harmless, at least. As near as I can make out from what Tom tells me, Rand had just sold a cargo of silk in Boston and for some reason or other refused to divide the cash the minute the crew wanted it. So they mutinied, on the advice of these two jail birds. The captain went overboard, but he accounted for three of the crew before he went. Tom and Charlie hid on the wreck until after you searched her”—he nodded to Fred—“and then they blew for shore to wait until the excitement cooled down and our hero Charlie was tucked into jail, somewhere upcountry, for taking a lady’s pocket-book while he was stealing her chickens.”
They all turned to look at Charlie, who acted very sheepish. Ann had a suspicion that his shame came from having been caught, rather than from the actual crime. So that was why his face had that queer pallor.
“They were hidin’ on the boat when we came on?” Mr. Bailey demanded incredulously. “We looked her over well; there weren’t a cubic inch in her that we didn’t see.”