Well, we scooted in the direction of the south shore, where it had been arranged that the leader was to wait for us with his collection of rowboats. On the way to the water I more than half expected to have the killer jump on us. But we saw nothing of him. Nor have we, for that matter, seen anything of him to this day. The Strickers tell the story that he came back to the cave, setting them free. Then he vanished. And it was well for him, I might add, that he did vanish. For the law was on the lookout for him the following day.
Scoop, in waiting for us off shore, had a string of four rowboats, the girl’s, which he and its owner were in, the Strickers’ two and the killer’s one, which we learned later was the lock tender’s. Anchoring the three towed boats a thousand feet [[224]]or so from the island, where they would be discovered in the daylight, we started for home.
Coming to the channel we heard, behind us, the echoing beat of a gasoline engine. A boat was coming down the canal from the direction of the lock where we had been held prisoners. At first we detected nothing distinctive in the engine’s sounds. But it wasn’t many seconds before our red-headed engineer tumbled to the truth of the matter.
“It’s the Sally Ann!” he yipped, crazy.
The Sally Ann! Peg and I and Scoop stared at one another in stupefaction. It couldn’t be our boat, we said.
But it was.
We waited, in trembling suspense, until the scow overtook us. At sight of the tillerman I gave a gasp. The white-haired thief! The man who had tried to murder his wealthy brother!
Was he the “friendly ghost”?
“Grandfather!” the girl cried, standing up in the rowboat and stretching out her hands to the aged man at the tiller. “Grandfather!” [[225]]