Black Cat Weekly #8

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2Trouble Off Haddock

STEVE stared at the girl on the float as if some weird fish with a couple of tails had suddenly landed beside him. This was not the kind of Miss Cobb he had been expecting to meet. Somewhere along the line, the Purchases had got it into their heads that Linda Cobb was near his brother Tom’s age, and Tom was through college, married, and in the Navy. Steve tried hastily to figure out where they had gone wrong. On his flying visits to the Point, Dr. Cobb had never had occasion to talk much about his own affairs. All he had said was that he was a widower and that his daughter would be coming along with him to keep house and do some painting. It was that housekeeping business that had thrown them off, Steve realized. He started pulling himself together. Even waterlogged, Linda Cobb was easy to take, but by now she probably thought he had been born with his eyes out on stilts like a lobster.

Linda chuckled at his expression. “Don’t bother trying to explain,” she said. “It’s all Dad’s fault. Your mother told me he pulled me out of his hat without any vital statistics. He’s always doing it. Last summer our landlord had a playpen for me!”

Steve grinned and gave her a hand up. At least, she had a sense of humor. But with Waity on their minds, they had no time for casual conversation, and they stood, watching anxiously as Dr. Cobb continued artificial respiration. Captain Pel, though, looked up long enough to be encouraging.

“He’s coming around,” he said comfortably. “Stirred some a minute ago. You two go get dry. And step on it, will you, Steve? You’ll have to drive over to the Neck for Dr. Littlefield. We’d better play safe.”

He turned his attention back to Waity, and Steve dashed off with a muttered apology to Linda for his desertion. Throwing on dry clothes didn’t take long. Linda was just disappearing through the Cobbs’ front door when he slid under the wheel of the car and headed off the Point. But it was nearly six-thirty before he located a supperless Dr. Littlefield out on a call, and piloted the Ford home again, the doctor in his own car close behind him.

“Waity was on the landing float when I left,” Steve said as they climbed out in front of the house. “Maybe we’d better go down there.”

But his mother, on the lookout at the door, beckoned to them. “This way, Doctor,” she called. “Waity’s rolled up in blankets on the living-room couch. He seems pretty comfortable. And, Steve, Dad says you’d better get those crates on the float under shelter for the night. The wind’s shifting.”

She followed the doctor into the house, and Steve went reluctantly back to the landing. At the moment, he would have been willing to call it a day without hauling a batch of heavy crates up a gangplank and along a wharf to a fishhouse. The job was finished eventually, however, and he whistled his way to the house once more, his mind fixed on his belated supper until he spotted the doctor’s car still parked where they had left it. Then he took the porch steps two at a time and bolted through the hall into the living room. There was always the chance that Waity had been injured more seriously than anyone supposed.

But Waity was obviously doing fine in spite of the huge goose egg on the back of his head and the quantity of salt water that had been rolled out of him. Propped against the pillows of the couch, he was busy with a bowl of hot soup while the rest of them ate supper at a table pulled over in front of the fire. Steve tackled his own chowder, smiling with relief.

“Whew,” he said. “For a minute there, I thought Dr. Littlefield had turned up a couple of broken ribs and a punctured lung.”

The doctor laughed. “You can stop worrying, son. The patient’ll live. Just concentrate on this supper while it’s hot.”

Actually, his only real concern was over the foot that Waity had caught in the piling. It was too swollen and discolored for the doctor to be sure no bones were broken, and he insisted Waity stay off it until he could drive him to Brunswick next morning for an X ray.

“You can cart him home and get him into his own bed,” he told the Purchases as he got ready to leave after supper. “I’ll send Abby Beamish along to take care of him.” Then he smiled broadly at Waity’s outraged growl. “Oh, all right, have Steve if you’d rather. Only keep off that foot, Wait Webber, or I refuse to be responsible.”

Smothering a laugh, Steve strolled off to collect his pajamas and toothbrush. Offhand, he couldn’t think of any occasion when Abby Beamish and Wait Webber had seen eye to eye. Besides, the idea of a woman bustling around his house would raise Waity’s blood pressure to an all-time high. As Harpswell’s most determined bachelor, he lived alone and liked it. Steve, with an increased respect for the medical profession, helped his father carry him out to the car. Between satisfaction at escaping Abby and the sedatives administered for the pain in his ankle, Wait was obeying orders with abnormal meekness.

Steve took a quick look as they passed his grandfather’s old house, but there were no Cobbs in sight. He had been at the landing moving crates when they stopped to inquire for Waity, and he had yet to see Linda without her hair plastered to her head and water dripping off her nose. But from where he sat, Linda Cobb was not hard on the eyes, wet or dry, and since she had turned out to be seventeen, the summer could have been rough if she had shown up looking like a sculpin.

The weather next morning was not calculated to lure anyone outside his own door, and there was still no sign of Linda when Steve tramped back to Juniper Point. It was already after ten o’clock. A southeaster in the night had stirred up a kettle of pea soup that made the foghorn on Halfway Rock Light wail like a banshee, and with visibility beyond ten feet absolutely nil, Dr. Littlefield had been understandably slow getting around to Ash Point to pick up his patient. Steve stopped at the house just long enough to leave his pajamas and to answer his mother’s questions. Then he strode on to Purchas Landing. He still had to finish the unloading job that the accident had interrupted.

The Maquoit, tied up at the float the way Waity had left her, looked like a boat daubed on a backdrop that somebody had forgotten to fill in with scenery. As he climbed aboard to open up her hatch and clear her winch, Steve could hear his father’s power saw whining through planks in the boatshop at the head of the cove, but for all he could see, the shop might have been at the bottom of Casco Bay. It was certainly no day for pleasure cruising. He swung the winch arm monotonously back and forth, picking up crates and dumping them on the float until he had emptied the Maquoit’s hold and could begin to haul the stuff across the Point to Dr. Cobb’s office.

It was dull work, though, and he was glad to see the end of it when he manhandled his final load onto the wheel-barrow and stopped at the fishhouse to get a hammer and crowbar from the tool rack. At least, yanking the slats off the crates would keep him inside the lab wing long enough to let the fog evaporate out of his ears. He picked up the wheelbarrow handles and shoved off again. After six round trips, he felt as if he could run the course with his eyes closed, so he butted the office door open with his shoulder and backed in without bothering to look around. The possibility of traffic complications was the last thing worrying him until he pinned somebody against the wall. Then he turned in a hurry to find Linda laughing at him.

“I was going to honk,” she said, “but you didn’t give me time.”

Steve chuckled. “You can’t say the Purchases don’t make an effort,” he told her. “When we can’t drown our tenants the first day, we try to flatten ’em out the next.”

“You can have ’a’ for effort,” Linda retorted, “but you were licked before you started. The Cobbs bounce up like rubber.” She eyed the crate on the wheelbarrow interestedly. “Is that the weapon that clouted Waity yesterday?”

Steve nodded, “and if it had been handy, I’d probably have bounced it off his skull again this morning,” he admitted. “The easiest way to handle Wait Webber is to have him out flat counting stars. He roared around like a walrus cussing the weather from six o’clock on.”

“Then I hope he did some for me,” Linda said plaintively. “The first morning I’ve ever spent in Maine and what do I get? Visibility unlimited—clear to the end of my nose!”

She twisted around to study the wet white blanket outside the window, and Steve glanced appreciatively at her profile. He had seen plenty of worse views. In fact, this morning in charcoal dungarees and a red flannel shirty Linda Cobb was likely to improve any scenery he’d met. Parking lazily on the nearest crate, she watched him pry off slats until he happened to look up again and smile. Then she reached for the hammer.

“Oh, all right. You shame me into it. I’ll pull the nails out of these things while you pry off the rest. I suppose you want them stacked in that wood basket, too, while I’m at it!”

She buckled to work energetically, but now and then her eyes wandered to the window for another look at the weather.

“It’s positively spooky outside,” she exclaimed. “Why, anything could happen in weather like this. Look at that fog drift into queer shapes. I almost saw pirates landing gold a minute ago, or maybe they were smugglers loaded down with jade!”

Steve grinned at her. “Keep right on seeing things,” he said. “That’s all the excitement you’re likely to get around here. If you wanted Indians and buccaneers, you should have dropped in a couple of hundred years ago. Kidd cruised in the Bay, and a lot of others buried gold on the Islands. My grandfather ued to tell us about a Bailey Island man who dug up twelve thousand dollars’ worth of Spanish doubloons.”

“When do we dig?” Linda demanded, and Steve laughed.

“We’re a hundred years too late for that, too. Everybody else beat us to it. Of course, Dad says things got pretty lively again in rumrunning days, but Harpswell’s turned respectably dull. My brother Bob’s an ensign on one of the two coast guard cutters that get assigned to the Bay in case of trouble, and we haven’t even seen the Yakatak’s stern since he’s been aboard.”

Linda wagged her head sadly. “Another one of those realists,” she said. “They’re always taking the fun out of life. Go ahead and play it your own way. I’ll keep my weather eye out for sinister ships and suspicious characters. When I’m sniffing on the trail of the treasure, you’ll eat your words.”

“I won’t have time then,” Steve said promptly. “I’ll be too busy streaking past you with my shovel!”

Still laughing, Linda was tossing her armful of slats into the wood basket when voices outside shouted for Steve, and Captain Pel and Dr. Cobb hurried into the room.

“I need you, Steve,” his father explained. “Some radio ‘ham’ picked up an SOS from a cruiser off Haddock Rock. Ed Randall just phoned in from the store. Let’s get going. Ed’s notifying the Coast Guard we’ll take over with the Abenaki.”

Steve was already on his feet, grabbing his jacket, but he stared at his father in surprise. “The Abenaki? With Waity laid up? What’ll you do if I have to get aboard the cruiser?”

“Make out,” the captain told him. “Dr. Cobb’s volunteered to come along. We may be shorthanded on her, weather like this, but Ed says the cruiser’s a seventy-footer. The Maquoit couldn’t touch her with a sea on.”

He turned impatiently to the door, anxious to get started, but Linda ran after him.

“Would I just be in the way, Captain Pel?” she asked. “Because I’ll come if you think I’ll do.”

His hand on the knob, the captain regarded her quizzically. “Ever get seasick, young lady?” he demanded, and Linda shook her head.

“I don’t think so,” she told him. “At least, I never have when Dad’s taken me out on lab boats.”

“Then you’re signed on,” he said, and led the way rapidly down to the wharf.