All was serene and dreamy about old Fort Skammel as the two, Ruth and her pilot, came ashore there. Dragon flies darted here and there. Spider webs drifted by.
“The calm of a Sabbath afternoon,” said the young pilot. “How good it is to be alive!”
“Life,” Ruth replied, blinking at the sun and struggling to reassemble her scattered thoughts, “could not be sweeter.”
An hour later, with the Secret Service man in the lead and an armed guard stationed along the corridors, the little company entered the room of many mysteries.
They were all there, Ruth, Pearl, Betty and even the little city girl who had come over in a row boat. And such a time as they had feasting their eyes on the softness and beauty of the silks laid out before them.
CHAPTER XXII
THE STORY TOLD
A few moments later the men from the revenue cutter were passing boxes and bales of silk up from the strangely snug underground room, and had begun carrying them down dim corridors to the ancient granite dock that had once served the fort.
“Ingenious chaps, those fellows were,” the little Secret Service man said, touching an electric heater. “Ingenious and resourceful. Heated the place with electricity.”
“But where did they get the current?” Ruth asked.
“There’s an electric power cable passing across the island. They wired this place, then waited for a time when the current was off to tap the line, I suppose.”