Dorothy Dixon and the Mystery Plane

“Not a thing, thank you. Don’t bother to come down to the wharf with me. I’ve got several things I want to do aboard before I set out.”

“Just as you say. Good luck and a pleasant trip.” Yancy’s honest face wore a beaming grin as he doffed his tattered cap to Dorothy.

“Thank you again. Good night.”

Dorothy went outside and found that Yancy’s prediction of rain earlier in the evening had been justified.

“Lucky this is drizzle instead of fog,” she thought as she hurried down to the landing stage. “I’d be out of luck navigating blind on Great South Bay!”

She dove into the Mary Jane’s cabin and after lighting the old fashioned oil lamp in its swinging bracket, put on her slicker and sou’wester. Then she fished the chart of the bay out of the locker and spent the next quarter of an hour in an intensive study of local waters.

Having gained an intimate picture of this part of the bay, she plotted her course, and checked up on the blankets and food. That done, she blew out the lamp, picked up the anchor and left the cabin, closing the door behind her.

Outside in the drizzle, she deposited her burden in the bow, making the anchor rope fast to a ring bolt in the decking. Then she put a match to the side lights and coming aft, cast off from the staging. Next, she started the motor, a difficult undertaking. At the third or fourth heave of the heavy flywheel it got away with a series of barking coughs. She slid in behind the steering wheel and they headed out across the bay.

Night had fallen, but notwithstanding the light rain, visibility on the water was good. The tide, as Dorothy knew, was at the flood, so she cut straight across for the dull, intermittent glow of the Fire Island Light. The boat ran strongly and well and Dorothy gave the engine full gas. She knew from experience that one of its primitive type was not apt to suffer from being driven, but on the contrary was inclined to run more evenly.

It had been at least two years since she had sailed on Great South Bay, but she remembered it to be a big, shallow puddle, where in most places a person capsized might stand on bottom and right the boat.

“No danger of capsizing with the Mary Jane,” she reflected, “she’s built on the lines of a flounder – I’ll bet she’d float in a heavy dew!”

The two and a half feet of tide made it possible for her to hold a straight course and presently she could see the dim outline of sand dunes. The faint easterly draft of air brought the roar of the Atlantic swell as it boomed upon the beach outside. It was time to change her course.

A quarter turn of the wheel swung the Mary Jane to port and straightening out, she headed across the inlet. Five minutes later she had picked up the dunes on the farther side. With the dunes off her starboard quarter, Dorothy made the wheel fast with a bight of cord she had cut for the purpose, and going forward, extinguished her side lights.

Back at the wheel again, she steered just as close to the shore as safety permitted. For the next couple of miles she ran along the shallows.

“Thank goodness!” she muttered at last. Swinging the Mary Jane inshore, she cut her motor and headed into a small cove, to ground a moment later on a pebbly beach.

Springing ashore, Dorothy dragged the anchor up the beach and buried it at its full length of rope in the sand. Then with a sigh of satisfaction, she straightened her back and took a survey of her surroundings.

The little beach ran up to a cup-shaped hollow, encompassed by high sand dunes. She had noticed the inlet on the large-scale chart, and chose it because she figured that it lay about a mile on the near side of the cottage she sought. And since she had decided to use the motor boat instead of the plane because she wanted to cover her approach, this spot seemed made to order for her purpose.

Her eyes scanned the skyline, and for a moment her heart almost stopped. Surely she had seen the head of a man move in that clump of long, coarse grasses at the top of the incline! Standing perfectly still, although her body tingled with excitement, she continued to stare at the suspicious clump.

Then with characteristic decision, she drew a revolver from her pocket and raced up the side of the dune. But although she exerted herself to the utmost, her progress was much too slow. Her feet sank deep in the shifting sand until she was literally wading, clawing with her free hand for holds on the waving sandgrass.

Panting and floundering, she pulled herself to the top, only to find no one there. Nor so far as she could see was there any living thing in sight. The deep boom of the surf was louder here, and peering through the rain, she made out the long stretch of beach pounded by combers, not more than a couple of hundred yards away. Some distance to the right, facing the ocean twinkled the lights of a row of summer cottages. To her left nothing could be seen but tier after tier of grass-topped dunes, a narrow barrier of sand between Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, bleak and desolate, extending farther than the eye could reach.

Despite this evidence to the contrary, Dorothy still retained the impression that she was not alone. She had an uneasy conviction that she was being watched. She shivered.

“My nerves must be going fuzzy,” she thought disgustedly. “I can’t risk using a flash, and if there were any tracks this stiff breeze from the sea would have filled them in while I was climbing up here. Well, get going, Dorothy, my girl – this place is giving you the creeps – good and plenty.”

The Colt was slipped back into her slicker, and she trudged through the loose sand to the black stretch of ocean beach. Here, walking was better, and turning her back on the lighted cottages, she set out along the hard shingle by the surf.

Several times during that walk, Dorothy stopped short and scanned the long line of dunes above her. Try as she might, it seemed impossible to rid herself of the idea that someone was following. When she judged the remaining distance to the cottage to be about a quarter of a mile, she left the beach and continued her way over the dunes.

Although Dorothy had no tangible fact to connect the Mystery Plane with her holdup in New Canaan and Terry’s disappearance, she approached the lonely cottage with the stealth of a red Indian. And even if this night reconnoiter should prove only that the bearded aviator had a sweetie living on the shore of Great South Bay, or that he was making daily trips to visit friends, she had no intention of being caught snooping. No matter what she should learn of the cottage’s inmates, if anything, she proposed to return with the Mary Jane to Yancy’s wharf and spend the rest of the night aboard. She had no desire to tramp about Babylon after midnight, looking for a hotel that would take her in.

As she slowly neared the cottage, taking particular pains now not to appear on the skyline, she wished that this adventure was well over. She still felt the effects of her adventure with the thunderhead. The tiny cabin of the motor boat seemed more and more inviting to the weary girl. Trudging through the rain over sand dunes was especially trying when one was walking away from bed rather than toward it.

Then she caught sight of the house roof over the top of the next dune and her flagging interest in her undertaking immediately revived.

Dorothy skirted the shoulder of the sandy hill, using the utmost precaution to make not the slightest sound. Then she squatted on her heels and held her breath. Directly ahead, not more than thirty or forty feet at most, gleamed the light from an open window, and from where she crouched, there was an unobstructed view of the room beyond.

There were three men sitting about an unpainted kitchen table which held three glasses and as many bottles. All were smoking, and deep in conversation. One man she knew immediately to be the bearded aviator with whom she had talked on the Beach Club shore. But although Dorothy strained her ears to the bursting point, the heavy pounding of the surf from the ocean side prevented her from catching more than a confused rumble of voices.

For a moment or two she waited and watched. The other two men wore golf clothes, were young, and though they were not particularly prepossessing in appearance, she decided that they were American business men on a holiday. They certainly did not look like foreigners.

Miss Dixon, crouching beside the sand dune, felt vaguely disappointed. She did not know exactly what she had expected to find in the cottage, but she had been counting on something rather more exciting than the tableau now framed in the open window. But since she had come this far, it would be senseless not to learn all that was possible. Taking care to keep beyond the path of the light, she crept forward on her hands and knees until she was below the window. Here it was impossible to see into the room, but the voices now came to her with startling distinctness.

“Why?” inquired a voice which Dorothy immediately recognized as belonging to the aviator, though oddly enough, it was now without accent. “You surely haven’t got cold feet, Donovan?”

“Cold feet nothing! The man don’t live that can give me chills below the knee,” that gentleman returned savagely. “But I won’t be made a goat of either, nor sit in a poker game with my eyes shut. Why should I? I’ve got as much to lose as you have.”

“Those are my sentiments exactly,” drawled a third voice, not unpleasantly. “Listen to that surf. There’s a rotten sea running out by the light. Raining too, and getting thicker out there by the minute. By three o’clock you’ll be able to cut the fog with a knife. What’s the sense in trying it – we’re sure to miss her, anyway.”

“Perhaps you chaps would prefer my job,” sneered the aviator. “You make me sick! But you’ll have to do what the old man expects of you, – so why argue?”

“How come the old man always picks days like this to run up his red flag?” Donovan was talking again. “There’s just as much chance of our picking up that stuff tonight as – as – ”

“As finding a golf ball on a Scotchman’s lawn,” the third man finished for him. “I know there’s no use grousing – but it’s a dirty deal – and well, we’ve got to talk about something in this God-forsaken dump!”

“I don’t blame you much,” the aviator admitted, “but look at the profits, man. Well, I must be shoving off, myself. We’ll have another bottle of beer apiece and – ”

But Dorothy did not hear the end of that sentence. Her vigil was suddenly and rudely interrupted. Someone behind her thrust a rough arm under her chin, jerking back her head and holding her in an unbreakable grip. The sickly-sweet odor of chloroform half suffocated her. For a moment more she struggled, then darkness closed in about her.

Chapter VII

SHANGHAIED

Dorothy came slowly back to consciousness. She was vaguely aware of the chug-chug of a small engine somewhere near by. Her head swam and there was a sickly sensation at the pit of her stomach.

She tried to move, and found it impossible. She heard the splash of waves but could see nothing except the boarded wall of her prison a foot or so away from her eyes.

After a while she became accustomed to the gloom and her sight was clearer. She decided that the rounded wall was the side of a boat. Turning her head slightly she saw that she lay on the flooring of an open motor sailor, beneath a thwart. It had stopped raining. Now the sound of the engine and the gurgle of water against the hull told her that the craft was moving.

She hadn’t the slightest idea where this cabinless craft was bound, or how she came to be aboard. Gradually there returned to her a confused memory of the cottage on the dunes, voices through the window. Someone’s arm about her neck, forcing her head back – she remembered, now, and groaned. Her body was one stiffness and ache.

Again she tried to heave herself into a sitting position, only to find that her ankles were bound with a turn or two of cord, and her wrists whipped together behind her back. She was trussed like a fowl, and by the feel of her bonds, the trusser was a seaman. She wriggled and writhed, consumed by rage at her own helplessness. The only result was to restore her circulation and clear her faculties, allowing her to realize just what had happened.

“Shanghied!” Dorothy muttered thickly. “Oh, if I’d only had a chance to let loose a little jiu jitsu on that beast who scragged me!”

Why had they brought her on board this boat and tied her hand and foot? Where was the motor sailor bound? What was going to happen to her next? Mr. Walters would probably get her letter during the afternoon. Yancy seemed a dependable sort of man. Without doubt a raid on the beach cottage would follow, but by that time the birds would have flown, and what good would the raid do her! Her thoughts ran on.

Those men in the cottage were not fools. Their conversation, as they sat around the table, had meant little to Dorothy, but she no longer doubted that the gang was interested in an undertaking that was illegal and fraught with considerable danger to themselves. Could it be bootlegging? Possibly. But Dorothy did not fancy that idea. The Mystery Plane, (she had got in the habit of calling it that now) hadn’t enough storage capacity to carry any great quantity of liquor. Where did that amphibian come into this complicated scheme?

This night’s work had turned out a failure so far as she was concerned: she should never have undertaken the job of ferreting out the truth alone.