“Well, you see everyone about this old dry dock is so terribly mysterious. I’ve just had an awful fright.”
“Tell me about it.” Mark Pence smiled as he spoke.
Seating herself upon the flukes of an up-ended anchor she did tell him; told him not alone of her experience that night, but of the one of that other night in the Spanish Mission.
“Do you know,” he said soberly when she had finished, “there are a lot of mysterious things happening about this dock. I don’t think it will last much longer, though. Things are sort of coming to a head. Know what those two policemen were here for?”
Lucile shook her head.
“Made a call on the Chinks, down there in the old scow. Came to look for something. But they didn’t find it. Heard them say as much when they came out. They were mighty excited about something, though. Bet they thought it was mighty strange that there was a stairway in that old scow twenty feet deep.”
“Are—are you sure about that stairway?”
The boy’s reply was confident:
“Sure’s I am that I’m standing here.”
Lucile protested: