“And the tales are spreading,” he told us. “Look here, you young cubs, it’s horribly disconcerting to have you of all people telling me a thing like this.”
Even now he could not believe us. But he sat staring at us, eyeglasses in hand, with his untouched drink before him.
“We’ll have to report it, of course. I’ve been all evening with the steamship officials. They’re having cancellations.” He smiled faintly at me. “We can’t get along without you Americans, Bob.”
I have not mentioned that I am an American. I was on vacation from my job as radio technician in New York. Don Livingston, who is English and three years my senior, was in a similar line of work—at this time he was technician in the small Bermuda broadcasting station located in the nearby town of St. Georges.
WE talked until nearly midnight. Then the telephone rang. It was the Police Chief in Hamilton. Ghosts had been seen in that vicinity this evening. There were a dozen complaints of ghostly marauders prowling around homes. This time from both white and colored families.
And there was one outstanding fact, frightening, indeed, though at first we could not believe that it meant very much, or that it had any connection with this weird affair. In the residential suburb of Paget, across the harbor from Hamilton, a young white girl, named Miss Arton, had vanished. Mr. Dorrance turned from the telephone after listening to the details and faced us with white face and trembling hands, his expression more perturbed and solemn than ever before.
“It means nothing, of course. It cannot mean anything.”
“What, father?” Jane demanded. “Something about Eunice?”
“Yes. You know her, Bob—you played tennis down there with her last week. Eunice Arton.”
I remembered her. A Bermuda girl; a beauty, second to none in the islands, save perhaps Jane herself. Jane and Don had known her for years.