Rising as if to break the spell that had been cast upon her, Berley Todd went whirling through a wild dance. A weird place for a dance. Sea gulls, wakened by this sudden commotion, circled aloft screaming. The very waves appeared to lapse into silence, a silence that was to be broken at once by such a mad onrush as threatened to seize her and drag her away into waters as black as night.
“Come!” she cried. “We must go!”
Shoving their boat off the rocks, they paddled silently back to the island shore where, after concealing their boat, they made their way cautiously through the spruce trees to Ed’s cabin, and one more steaming bowl of Mulligan stew.
The day, however, was not over. Wild adventures awaited them in the night.
CHAPTER XXIII
A VISIT IN THE NIGHT
As Johnny Thompson returned to Drew Lane’s room in the early evening of that day, he found himself now in a mood of high exaltation and now in one of deep depression. He felt that he had, half by good fortune and half by earnest endeavor, come close to the solution of a crime that had filled the front pages of the nation’s press for days. At the same time he found the accusing hand of Fate pointing straight at a friend.
To Johnny friendship was a sacred thing. He worshiped often at the altar of friendship. To his friends he gave his utmost in loyalty and devotion. Never until now had he asked himself the question: “What am I to do if one of these friends proves unworthy of this loyalty and devotion?” There had been no need. But now—
“There’s the matter of the jimmy bar found in the speed boat,” he told himself gloomily. “There is the shoe that made the invisible footprint on the sheet. There is the wrist-watch band studded with green stones from Isle Royale. There is that place down by the river front from which I was ejected. Ejected!” He chuckled at this. They had put him out of the place, right enough. But he had done plenty to them after that, those two bouncers. “Yes,” he sighed, “it sure looks bad!”
He was relieved to find that both Drew and Tom were away. Letting himself in by a key Drew had given him, he dropped into a chair and for a full half hour sat there alone in the dark, thinking; and those were long, long thoughts.
“After all,” he sighed, as at last he sat up in his chair, “one’s first duty is to his nation and her laws, to the whole community and not to one individual who has gone wrong.”