CHAPTER XX
PATSY WATCHES THREE SHADOWS
Once again Tom McCarthy and Rosa climbed to the upper sky where thestars seemed to reach down for them and the air was bitter cold.
“Now,” Tom muttered hoarsely, as he shut off the motor and they startedon a spiral glide, “listen!”
“Listening,” came in a hoarse whisper.
At first no sound reached their listening ears. Then they caught a low,indistinct roar, like the approach of an on-rushing storm.
“A terrible storm coming.” Rosa seemed a little frightened.
“That’s no storm,” Tom’s voice was husky. “It’s the roar of lots ofplanes.”
“Lots of planes,” Rosa repeated. “They come from an airplane carrier.They will fly to Portland, Boston, perhaps New York!”
“Who knows?” Tom’s eyes were on his instruments. They were stillspiraling rapidly.
“Darn!” he murmured, scowling fiercely. Where was the sea? To strike ithead-on meant death. At night sky and sea look alike. And yet he wantedto listen to get the direction of that on-rushing squadron. At thatmoment he saw himself at the controls with Rosa manning the machinegun, surrounded by ghost-like enemy fighters shooting by them in thenight. It was a fantastic, but not impossible, scene.
Suddenly a single flash of light appeared beneath them. One instant itwas there, the next it was gone.
“Rosa! Quick! The spotlight!” He pulled the plane up so short thatblood rushed to Rosa’s head and it was with the greatest difficultythat she set the light playing on the water.
One frightened look down and she gasped. They were all but upon thewater and going like the wind.
One more short pull and their ship leveled off. It was then that theirspot of light, gliding swiftly across the water, revealed a secret.Their light crossed a long, low craft with a tower at its center.
“Sub,” Tom shouted. But already it was too late to drop a bomb. Theywere over it and gone.
Instantly he began to climb. Not very high this time, perhaps tenthousand feet, then again silence.
The roar of distant motors was louder now, but even louder and closerat hand sounded a single motor.
“That’s the enemy plane,” Tom muttered. After listening with all hissenses, he changed the direction of his plane and they went shootingaway at full speed. Tom was flying by sense of direction alone, adangerous business in the night.
Ten long minutes he stuck to his course, then, after climbing oncemore, he shut off the motor and began to glide.
“Huh!” he grunted. “We had that plane’s course to a ‘T’, but they’refast. They’ve gone straight out to sea.”
“Then we can’t catch up with them?” Rosa asked.
“Never!”
“They go back to Europe?”
“That’s impossible. Plane’s too small to carry enough gas.”
“Then the ocean will get them.”
“No chance,” Tom grumbled. “They’ll keep a secret meeting with thatsub!”
Realizing that his supply of gas would not carry him much further andallow them to fly back, Tom put his motor in motion and veryreluctantly turned back.
At that moment, hidden by the night and the shadow of a great rock,Patsy and her grandfather sat huddled in the cold at the foot of BaldHead, listening and straining their eyes for some sight or sound fromthe sea.
“That was Tom McCarthy in the seaplane,” the grandfather whispered.
“Yes, and that other plane, that was an enemy plane,” said Patsy. “Ihope the good Gremlins will pack its wings with ice until it falls intothe sea!”
“But for us,” said the grandfather, “the sub is more important!”
“Yes, they might land,” the child answered and crowded close.
“Let them come,” came in a low, even tone. “We’ll take care of that.”He patted the tommy-gun on his knee. “We—”
“Sh—” Patsy placed a finger on his lips. Her young ears were sharperthan his. Had she caught the low murmur of voices? She could not bequite sure.
“People talking,” she whispered, after a moment of intent listening.
Another moment of breathless silence and then: “Sounds like watersplashing.”
“Paddles.” The old man gripped his gun tight.
Old for her years, Patsy knew this meant a boat of one sort or another.Without saying a word, she glided down the slope of Bald Head until herface was a scant two yards from the water that gently lapped the shore.Then, dropping flat on her stomach, she looked straight out across thedark surface of the sea. If a boat was out there it would show againstthe dull gray of the night sky.
A full five minutes passed without a sound. Then she whispered back:
“Not a boat, but three men sitting on the sea.”
“A rubber boat!” Without a sound the grandfather slid down the dock toher side. Then, bidding her lie quite still, he put his gun across herslender body. She did not flinch.
He could see the men. There were three or four of them. They cameslowly shoreward, pausing now and then to rest.
“Afraid?” the girl said.
“Yes, of a trap,” was the all but inaudible answer.
Grandfather was thinking slowly, carefully, weighing the wisdom oflaying a volley across the spot in the sea.
“They could be friends,” he whispered. “We’ll wait. Perhaps they willspeak. Then we’ll know.”
So they waited and while they waited the low roar of many planes beganbeating on their eardrums.
“Oh!” Patsy squirmed in fear. “If these are enemy planes from acarrier—”
“They’ll not bomb Black Knob,” was the cheering assurance. “They onlydrop bombs where there are many people.”
“Listen,” he ended. “See if you can get their direction.”
Once again, save for the occasional dip-dip of a paddle, silence hungover Black Knob.
Suddenly, after gripping the old man’s arm with intense eagerness, thegirl whispered:
“Grandfather! Those planes are coming from the south!”
“From Rocky Point airfield! They should have started sooner. Somethingmust have gone wrong. But now—”
“Now will there be a battle?” The child was trembling all over.
“I don’t know, child.”
“Shall you shoot out there?”
“We must wait and see,” was the calm reply, always in a slow whisper.“We cannot afford a horrible mistake.”
And so, with the roar beating ever louder in their ears, they laythere, not daring to move, the man and the child.
As for the shadowy figures “sitting on the water,” they too must haveheard, for there came no longer the dip-dip of their paddles.
Tom and Rosa, too, were being cheered by the ever increasing roar.
“We’ll leave that sub to them,” Tom said through the speaker. “We can’thave much more than enough gas to take us in.”
At last they circled low, dropped to the surface inside the breakwaterat Indian Point, then taxied in.
The instant the motor stopped and Tom had secured a tie line, he saidin a low tone:
“This is our secret, Rosa. To anyone else, you just didn’t go with me.”
“Okay,” was the frank agreement.
“Grab that skiff and row as fast as you can to the dock!”
“But you will come, too?” the girl demurred.
“Not yet!” He lifted her into the skiff. “Don’t you see, you littlegoose? If you come back for me, then it will all be quite regular. Youjust happened along and gave me a lift.”
“I see.” The girl rowed swiftly away.
When, a quarter of an hour later, Rosa, still fairly shaking with cold,but managing a casual stride for all that, walked into the big livingroom, Norma exclaimed, “Rosa! Where have you been? They have looked foryou everywhere!”
“I went out for a little fresh air, that’s all.”
Norma, studyin
g Rosa’s face, whispered: “Little Rosa has one moresecret.” And little Rosa had—just that!
Still the old man and the child lay in the darkness on the great rock,feeling the sound of motors growing louder, ever louder in their ears.Still the old man’s fingers trembled as they gripped the gun that mighthave spelled death to those shadowy forms on the black waters.
At last the girl whispered, “They’re paddling again! I can hear them,dip-dip-dip. Will they come ashore now? Will you shoot, Grandfather?”
“If they come ashore I will shoot.”
Still, quite breathless, the child lay quiet, tensing as she lost thesound of the paddles. The roar of motors drowned it out. As her eyessearched the waters, it seemed to her that the shadowy forms werefading.
Then she lost interest in the sea, for coming like the wind, wereairplanes, good American planes.
“They’re coming to drive the horrible sub and all the bad Gremlinsaway!” she whispered.
She wanted to leap to her feet and scream, “Hurrah! Hurrah for ourplanes!” but she dared not.
The planes were not looking for the sub. They had been sent out to findan enemy plane. As if by magic a gray mist came sweeping in from thesea.
“It’s the bad Gremlins.” She spoke aloud at last. “They have hiddenthose men!”
“The men on the sub have made a fog to hide them,” was thegrandfather’s reply. “Even the airplanes will not find the sub now.”
“Come,” he lifted her up, “we must go back to the cabin. You arefreezing. We will listen there. You may talk with your hands.”
“Grandfather,” she said, as she trotted beside him, “will the sub comeback?”
“Perhaps another day.”
“And then will you shoot at those shadows on the water?”
“Yes, if I know they are our enemies, I will!”
Little Patsy did not talk with her hands that night, for, afterdrinking a big cup of hot chocolate and being wrapped in two warmblankets, she curled up on the broad couch and fell fast asleep.
It was the grandfather who, with his hands, spelled out their story toBeth and Bess, the faithful watchers at the Granite Head spotter tower.And all the while the searching planes roared on in the night.
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