The G-man's son at Porpoise Island

IF EVER two boys undertook a desperate errand the sandy-haired G-man’s son and his pal had bitten off a big chunk to chew when Stan proposed that they take Gagnon to Main Haven and turn him over to John. What John might do, Stan did not know but he realized that G-men are extremely resourceful and he had no doubt that the grocer of Main Haven would find a way to take care of Gagnon till this case was over. The most important immediate act was to get Gagnon out of that little room, and to the sloop.

“You mean you’re going to turn me over to the feds?” demanded the mobster.

“Why not?”

“They’ll kill me!”

“Battling flea-hounds!” roared John, interrupting, “which do you want: to be murdered by your dear old pals or to end up in a nice warm jail, alive and with something to eat for the next dozen years or more?”

The man swallowed hard.

“I’ll come with you, boys, only don’t point that arrow at my face all the time!” he said.

“You’ve got sense!” responded Stan, quietly. “Get a move on, and no funny business!”

And as the man started off up the corridor, his hands bound behind his back, he admitted that he had a flashlight in his pocket. John dug it out and they hurried for the entrance. But on the way they encountered the sounds of footsteps and the voices of intruders and they retired up a side aisle.

Dago’s exclamation of alarm was caused by Gagnon’s stumbling effort to move further from the main aisle as he recognized the swarthy fellow’s growling voice. Had Dago elected to investigate that noise he would have received an arrow for his pains—lucky Dago!

The party went on to the room and, the moment they had gone there, the boys rushed Gagnon for the entrance! It was now or never. The outcry of voices in the room back there drowned out the hurrying footsteps of the lads and their prisoner. Gagnon was no trouble. He was as anxious to get away now as were the boys to have him and he voluntarily took them away from the entrance and on the trail towards the cove where the boat was moored as he had been told they would go over the hilltop trail to the western end of the island. They doused the flashlight, of course, and apprehensively followed the hurrying prisoner through the black fog. It was an eerie journey and towards the end Stan took the lead as he knew just where the boat was. The trail seemed somewhat unfamiliar as he neared the end but he laid that feeling to the darkness and hurried on.

They came out upon the beach and he went to the right, leading Gagnon by the arm so that he would not lose contact with him.

“Don’t worry, boy,” said Gagnon; “I ain’t gonna skip. I’d rather live in a fed jail than get burnt with slugs!”

An astonished outcry from Stan was the first warning that all was not well.

“The sloop—gone!” cried Stan.

John groaned.

“By all the bluefish ankles in this—where?” John begged.

The sloop was gone and that was that!

They had to put the flashlight on and then Stan gave a hopeful exclamation.

“Say, this isn’t the rock where the Staghound was moored! Maybe——”

“Maybe this isn’t the right cove!” cried John.

Investigation by the light of the flashlight and lots of walking along the fog-bound shore gave forth the astonishing fact that it was not the cove where the sloop had lain!

“There were several coves around here, John,” admitted Stan, “but how we got off the main trail, I don’t know.”

“Sweet potatoes!” moaned John. “We get us a prisoner, and then lose our ship! A fine pair of dicks we are! Are we south or north of our cove?”

“North, no doubt. We’ll go along shore.”

“Hurry!” begged Gagnon.

John was heard to chuckle aloud.

“Hurry!” he echoed. “Great spirits of bulrushes—how you going to hurry through this fog?”

But they did hurry as best they could and after almost a half hour of scrambling along the beach half in the water and half out, daring not to use the light more than necessary, and falling over rocks, they all three fell sprawling over something taut! It was the spare line which Stan had rigged from the bitt of the sloop over the rock to another pointed boulder.

Gratefully, tingling with joy, the boys shoved Gagnon aboard and went below to light their lights. The cabin showed no signs of having been entered and they were glad of that. In the light of the cabin they made Gagnon lie on a bunk while they got their brains working.

“We’ve got to get out of this cove right off, John!” Stan explained. “No time to lose and—”

“—The tide, Stan!”

“The tide is o.k., dropping towards low, but still high enough to float us out into the cove where we can lower our centerboard! Main thing is—where’s the cove entrance?”

“Here’s your chart!” said John, putting it on the table and handing the skipper a pencil. “I’ll get the sails up and ready and the lines aboard.”

“O.k.,” said Stan, even as he started studying the chart and laying a compass course that would clear the rocks at the cove’s entrance. “Let her drift away from the rock so we can get the centerboard down to stop sideways.”

The tall youth was on deck by now and raising the sails. He was grateful for the Marconi rig now, for the mainsail was up by pulling one line instead of the two required for the old rig. There was one jib to raise instead of two. The sails were up in a minute or two and he was ashore releasing the lines holding her to the big rock. Luckily the cove had been very quiet and the single old tire used as a buffer between the Staghound and the rock had kept the sloop from damage by chafing.

The boat drifted away from the rock with the tide and a vagrant puff or two of wind, while John slacked the sheets so that the sails were not curved yet to the breeze. He lit the little electric light in the binnacle and studied the compass as it swung slowly while the boat drifted.

“Steer W.S.W. a bit to the south, John,” came Stan’s voice.

“Hey, you kids!” came a raucous and cursing voice out of the dark. “Stop, do you hear, or we’ll slug you plenty!”

In the cabin of the Staghound a trembling gangster opened his mouth in terror. Stan knew that Gagnon was about to scream for help on the theory that, when captured, his friends would think he’d been carried away forcibly! But the skipper of the Staghound gagged the prisoner instantly with a length of towel!

“Can’t hear you!” yelled John, and he trimmed the sheets of the sloop!

Then a voice which was none other than Mr. Sandborn’s bellowed, “You kids better come back here. You’ll get slugged if you don’t! We ain’t fooling!”

Did Mr. Sandborn mean for them to really surrender? Or was he bluffing to convince the other men. John knew no answer, and Stan, who came on deck just then, was hesitant.

A blast of tommy-gun fire, familiar thunder to the boys who had heard those guns used at Cedar Island in the Hogan case, reverberated among the hills! Water spattered about the sloop and slugs sang whining into the wake! Then the blast moved away to the left! It have been lucky shooting for the men could not have seen the sloop in the fog!

That decided the boys and with all sail crowded on, praying that the compass course was right, they headed on a course W.S.W. a little south! The wind had shifted to the east during the night and was almost dead aft, flowing over the hills of Porpoise Island, as they coursed with wings spread for the open sea!

“I told-a you they was-a at one of these coves!” yelled Dago back on the beach. “Gallagher, you gotta get those kids or we’ll all be in trouble!”

“Let’s get back and use the speedboats, men!” ordered Gallagher, rejoicing inwardly that his boy and the brave Tallman lad had escaped this present danger and taken Gagnon with them! He suspected they would head for Main Haven and he was proud of them for their grit and brains. Such conduct was worthy of G-men themselves!

The gangsters raced overland to the cabin and the boat-shed where, roundly cursed by a wild and purplish Nevada, the men put off in two gray speedboats on a weird chase! Mr. Sandborn longed for a chance to get at the wiring on those two boats and so stop the chase but realized it might look suspicious and end his activities. So he calmly took his seat with Butch and Dago in a boat and they hummed with bright lights for the entrance to Black Cove. They came out of that in the wet fog at forty miles an hour, thankful for sound knowledge of the lay-out of rocks and headlands.

One boat turned east, round the snout of Porpoise Island and down the north coast. The other flung itself into the rollers of the sea down the southern side. Both boats traveled at top speed but the fog ruined any chance of overtaking the fleet sloop which was somewhere out there, silently winging its way with a mobster prisoner! Naturally the boys were not showing any side-lights and thus, even without the fog, as Dago well knew from past experience, it would have been hard to locate and get them. Then, too, as Dago admitted privately to himself—the boys were pretty nifty with them arrow things!

They did have a chance, just one slim possibility of finding that sloop, but only the G-man saw it and he said nothing. For one instant, they were running by the close stern of a white sloop, for he saw both a faint shape of the sloop and the glitter of white water from her wake as she capped a big roller, but the light from the searchlight was being flung straight ahead and no one else knew that two boys had definitely escaped their pursuers!

About ten minutes later the light glittered softly through the fog upon a sail and, with a coarse exclamation of delight, Dago had Butch swing to the boat. The cursing, shouting speedboat’s crew slid alongside, and aboard, guns out and hands ready!

“What is this?” demanded a big sailor in blue at the wheel of the great forty-meter yacht. “What do you want?”

One look was sufficient to establish the fact that a mistake had been made! Mr. Sandborn wanted to laugh out loud, but couldn’t. He kept a firm mouth while a flustered Dago did some quick explaining to the bulging sailor at the wheel. From below came a stern-faced man in a robe. He had a shiny object in his right hand.

“What’s up?” demanded he, sharply.

“Looks like pirates, sir!” shot back the helmsman who had not been fooled by Dago’s stuttered apologies.

“Pirates?” demanded the owner. “Let me at them!”

At that moment, not a mile away in the wind-blown waters of the ocean, a Marconi-rigged sloop was racing through the fog on a compass course of S.E. at her best gait, taking the rollers in her stride, while her mast strained and her rigging hummed! The fog seemed clear as they neared Main Haven and soon they could make out the cottages along the shore, and then the town itself. It was starlit in that harbor as they drove in, lighting side-lights as they came.

“There’s an abandoned wharf on the shore over there,” Stan said, pointing to one side of the entrance. “We’ll tie up there and walk Gagnon round to the town. That way, we may keep our identity hid, John!”

“You’re right! Somebody’ll have to buy me more arrows when this case is over—if Gagnon tries any stunts!”

But Gagnon, who had heard that remark, did not mean to try any stunts now that his deliverance was near, and he meekly climbed ashore from the wharf and marched ahead of the boys towards town. They both had their bows along but, to a casual observer, they having untied his hands, Mr. Gagnon appeared like an older brother, hiking into town with his two kid-brothers after a bow-and-arrow hike.

Gagnon was as good as his word and they made town in good shape and walked right into John’s store! The grocer was just going to close up, for it was very late.

“Sorry, boys, too late for groceries,” grinned John.

“Too late for a prisoner, too?” demanded John Tallman.

Now the Federal agent, John, had never realized how really effective these two boys were before. He’d laid their supposed prowess to newspaper accounts and Mr. Sandborn’s praise to fatherly affection for Stan and friendly regard for the Tallman boy. But he had to think fast in the next ten minutes or the whole town would know something was wrong down at the grocery store!

He whisked Gagnon into the cellar, bound and gagged him and then went to the phone. He called a number and said, “Hello, Jim, old boy?”

“Why, hello, John!” came the rejoinder. “How’s the grocery business?”

“Pretty swell. How about coming down—over the week-end with your bags?”

A whistle of surprise came over the wire.

“Like that, eh? I’ll drop in, old boy!”

And that meant that Mr. Gagnon would shortly be in the hands of a squad of G-men and that that same squad would make a net about Porpoise Island, by land and sea, ready for the big showdown on Thursday next!

“I’m hungry, Stan,” confessed John, as they started back for the yacht. “What I mean is—I’m actually HUNGRY!”

Stan didn’t seem surprised.