The Clue of the Broken Blade Read online

  Joe said to Frank, “Did anything seem familiar about those four men?”

  Frank nodded. “Same sizes and shapes as our Bayport bank robbers. The thin man who drove the getaway car and the burly machine gunner could have been the pair who quizzed us in the restaurant in Somerville. The other machine gunner could have been the guy with the red, greasy hair. And the squat one looked like Signor Zonko!”

  Under further questioning Ziggy Felton denied knowing the identities of any of the East Coast mob. However, he admitted having heard via the underworld grapevine that gangleaders in Chicago and New Orleans had also been shaken down.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, the police, who had checked the warehouse, reported no one was there now. The theater building also was empty.

  Copeland had one of the squad cars at the scene take him and his driver back to headquarters. En route the Hardys and Chet were dropped off at their hotel.

  The following morning the three boys drove to Stockton in the rented Ford. The post office had no record of a Miguel Jimenez, but they were told by a clerk that mailman Herbert Shay would probably know him.

  On a map the clerk showed them Shay’s sixtyfive-mile route and pointed out a waterway. “In about an hour you should catch up with him around here,” he said. “There’s a marina where you can rent a boat.”

  The boys thanked him and a short time later were chugging along in a twelve-foot skiff at barely fifteen miles an hour.

  Frank sat in the stern, running the fifteen-horsepower engine, Joe sat in the bow, and Chet was amidship.

  “I’d prefer the Sleuth,” said Chet, referring to the Hardys’ fast, sleek motorboat.

  Joe nodded. “Especially since someone’s been following us ever since we left the marina,” he said apprehensively.

  The others glanced back at an eighteen-foot inboard boat about a quarter mile behind them. It was idling along at a speed no greater than theirs. Through the windshield they could see only one person, but they were too far away to make out his features.

  The boys’ skiff had chugged to about the center of the lakelike area, a good three hundred yards from shore, when the speedboat suddenly roared with power and came leaping after them.

  Traveling at about forty miles an hour it took their pursuer less than a minute to close the quarter-mile gap. It shot past on their left only twenty feet away, then swung across their bow so close it barely missed ramming them.

  The pilot was hunched low and had a peaked white yachting cap pulled down to hide his face. As he swung in front of them the yachting cap blew off, and they had a brief glimpse of red hair.

  A wave caused by the speeding boat hit them simultaneously from the left side and the front. Frank made a valiant attempt to head the bow into it, but the skiff handled too sluggishly. The boat rode up the wave sideways to its crest and overturned.

  The boys struggled to the surface a few yards apart just as the capsized boat sank from sight. They treaded water for a while until the waves subsided. The speedboat was rapidly disappearing in the distance.

  When it was out of sight, and the water had calmed, Chet sputtered, “Now what?”

  “We swim for shore,” Frank said. “But first let’s take some sightings so we can find this spot again.”

  Looking east toward a large island, he saw a flagpole before a row of small cottages. Glancing west, he noticed that the south edge of a boat dock on a smaller island exactly lined up with the flagpole. Then he looked north and south and fixed his position by means of trees on islands in both directions.

  “Okay,” he called. “Let’s head for that larger island.”

  Weighted down by clothing, it was a long swim. Finally they waded ashore and walked across the sandy beach.

  Suddenly Chet, who was in the lead, stopped dead in his tracks. Behind a sandy dune, stretched out on a blanket, were three girls in swimsuits. They looked up in surprise, and the brunette on the left said, “Look who’s here. Neptune and two of his mermen!”

  “Wow!” Chet said, a grin spreading over his face. “We sure came to the right place!”

  The plump blonde in the middle laughed. “I doubt it. This is a girls’ camp.” She added impishly, “Boys aren’t allowed.”

  “Sorry about that,” Joe said. “We’re shipwrecked.”

  The slender redhead on the right gave Chet a searching look through long lashes.

  “I’m Chet Neptune—I mean Morton,” Chet introduced himself. “These two mermen are Frank and Joe Hardy. We’re from Bayport back East.”

  “Hi, there,” said the blond girl, whose name was Susie Wade. The redhead introduced herself as June Fall, and the brunette was Kay Dover.

  “You look pretty sad,” Kay decided, eying the boys’ dripping clothes. “Come on. The Murrays might help you out.”

  “Who are they?” Frank asked.

  “The camp owners.”

  The girls led the way to a large building surrounded by small cottages.

  “Look what we found,” June said to the tall, friendly woman inside.

  Mrs. Murray shook her head in mock horror. “You find boys everywhere!” she said with a chuckle. Then she produced three pairs of swim trunks for the visitors to wear while she dried their clothing. Mr. Murray loaned them a canoe, a coil of stout rope, and a pair of pliers.

  “This might help you get your boat ashore,” he said.

  Frank grinned. “Thanks. We sure appreciate it.”

  Frank sat in the stern of the canoe with one of the paddles, Joe scrambled amidship with the other, and Chet sat down in front. When they neared the point where the boat had sunk, Frank asked Joe to let him handle the canoe alone. He went back and forth, checking his landmarks, until all four lined up exactly.

  Shipping his paddle, he said, “Okay, this is it.”

  Chet rose to a crouch and dived over the bow. It was about half a minute before he came up again.

  “We’re right on top of it,” he sputtered. “Give me the pliers and the end of the rope.”

  Joe handed him both. Chet dived again. This time he was down for a full minute. A moment after he came up, the boat, minus its motor, rose to the surface upside down. Gasping for air, Chet dropped the pliers into the canoe and hung on to its side.

  Joe pulled on the rope from the other side and hauled the outboard motor up. They righted the boat and attached the motor and towed the disabled craft ashore.

  “Good work, Chet,” Frank praised.

  “Admit it, you’d be lost without me!” Chet began to sing. “Back to paradise...”

  “Listen, Don Juan, we’re here on a job,” Joe reminded him.

  “Who says you can’t combine work with pleasure?” Chet replied loftily.

  When they reached the beach, the boys received a very pleasurable surprise. The girls had prepared a delicious picnic lunch. There were plenty of sandwiches, and a good thing too, because Chet and the plump blonde ate four each. She kept urging more food on the husky boy, obviously having picked him as her particular companion.

  “They’re sure suited to each other,” Joe whispered to Frank. “I’d hate to pay the grocery bill, though!”

  Kay, overhearing the whispered remark, giggled.

  Frank asked June if the mailman had been there yet. She told him that he stopped at the camp on his return trip and would be along about two in the afternoon.

  The boys decided to wait for him there rather than trying to catch up with him on his route.

  After lunch they drained the mixture of gasoline, oil, and water from the outboard’s tank and cleaned the motor. Mr. Murray supplied them with fresh gas and oil.

  By then their clothing was dry. When the mailman arrived, they were ready to leave. Herbert Shay was a well-built, middle-aged man. His boat was a sixteen-footer with a powerful seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor and front-seat controls.

  He told the boys that old Miguel Jimenez’s houseboat was moored in a secluded lagoon off Hank’s Tract Lake, and described how to get th
ere. The lake, he explained, had once been the site of numerous farms and orchards. But in 1936 the levees surrounding the area broke, flooding the tract so badly that attempts to redrain it had to be abandoned.

  “The lake can get awfully rough,” he warned. “And if fog comes up, you can get lost without a compass. Do you have one?”

  When the boys confessed they did not, he suggested that if there was any sign of fog when they reached the lake, they should stay near the shore instead of crossing directly to the lagoon.

  Then the mailman moved on. The Bayporters thanked the girls and the Murrays for their hospitality and resumed their journey. They reached Hank’s Tract Lake without incident, and, since the sun was shining, headed directly across to the shallow lagoon.

  There was only one houseboat in sight, a rickety old contraption tied to a tree. They beached the motorboat and climbed out. A plank led from shore to the wobbly porch of the houseboat.

  As they approached, a tiger-colored cat emerged from a nearby clump of tules, padded up the plank, and stood before a hole in the screen door. The feline paid not the slightest attention to the boys, but peered intently into the interior of the houseboat. Then it crept through the ripped screen and disappeared inside, its tail swishing.

  “Probably the old man’s cat,” Chet mused. “I understand that all hermits have some kind of pet. They’d go nuts living absolutely alone. Take Robinson Crusoe for example. He—”

  “Sh, sh!” Frank commanded.

  “What’s up?” Chet whispered, stopped short in his philosophical observation.

  “I heard something.”

  “Like what?”

  The three stood still and listened. From inside came a loud noise. This was followed by a shrill high-pitched voice. “Go away! Go away!”

  The shriek sent shivers through the boys.

  CHAPTER VII

  Danger in the Delta

  “IF that’s old Jimenez, he sounds like a fiend,” Chet whispered.

  A cracked voice behind them said, “That’s not old Jimenez, young man. It’s Don Quixote.”

  The boys turned to face an elderly but straight-backed man with snow-white hair. His deep-set eyes burned at them.

  “You heard Don Quixote,” he said. “Get going!”

  “Are you Mr. Jimenez?” Frank asked.

  “What’s it to you, boy?”

  “I’m Frank Hardy. This is my brother Joe, and Chet Morton. We’re trying to get some information on Giovanni Russo, and his sword Adalante. We heard you know all about it.”

  The old man glared at him for a second before saying, “I have no information. Go away.”

  “Help! Help!” the shrill voice shrieked from inside.

  “Por dios!” Jimenez exclaimed. “Don Quixote!”

  He started up the plank, but moved so stiffly that it was obvious he would not arrive in time to save Don Quixote from whatever danger he was in. Frank leaped past him, jerked open the screen door, and rushed inside.

  A large black myna bird was perched on a bookcase, flapping his wings and screeching in terror. The tiger-colored cat crouched on a table, ready to spring.

  Frank’s outstretched arm blocked the cat’s leap. It dropped to the floor, hissing, then fled between the legs of Miguel Jimenez as the old man pulled open the door.

  “You saved Don Quixote,” he said gratefully. “Thank the young man, Don Quixote!”

  The bird ruffled his feathers and squawked, “Good-by and good riddance!” Then he cocked his head at Frank and said, “Welcome aboard, mate!”

  “Thanks, Don Quixote,” Frank replied with a grin.

  Jimenez glanced over his shoulder at Joe and Chet, who had paused in the doorway. “Come on in,” he invited them.

  The rescue of his bird completely changed the recluse’s attitude. When the Hardys offered to mend the hole in his screen door, he mellowed even more. He produced a piece of wire screening and they patched the hole. As they were working, he told them the true story of the so-called duel in which the sword Adalante had been broken and lost.

  “There never was a duel,” the old man began. “That’s a story told to conceal what really happened. Giovanni Russo was kidnapped by a bandit and was held for ransom in a secret place in his own vineyard.”

  He paused, then continued thoughtfully. “Fearing death, Giovanni wrote his will on his saber. Or so he later said, anyway. The blade was broken when he fought his way free. Then he swam from the island on which his vineyard was located to another island.”

  “Where was his property?” Frank asked.

  Jimenez explained that it was near a place called Paradise Point, and described how to get there.

  As he finished, the myna bird suddenly flapped his wings and shrieked toward a window, “Go away! Go away!”

  “Someone must be out there!” the old man declared. “Don Quixote never says that unless we have a visitor.”

  The boys rushed outside to investigate. But there was no sign of anyone around.

  When they returned to the houseboat, Joe asked, “How do you know all about the kidnapping, Mr. Jimenez?”

  In a sad voice the recluse replied, “To my shame the bandit who kidnapped Giovanni Russo was named Miguel Jimenez, too. He was my great-uncle.”

  “We heard there’s a book about Russo in the Stockton Public Library,” Chet put in. “Do you know about that, Mr. Jimenez?”

  The old man nodded. “It’s in the school library of the College of the Pacific in Stockton, not the public library. It has a description of the sword Adalante in it.”

  The recluse eyed the boys curiously. “Why are you so interested in all this?”

  Frank quickly told him the reason. Jimenez shook his head doubtfully and said, “I can’t imagine how you expect to find the saber. But good luck, anyway.”

  The boys thanked him for his information and left. When the skiff chugged out of the lagoon, Frank shifted the motor into neutral and glanced up at the sky. It had become quite overcast.

  “Looks as if a storm’s brewing,” he said.

  “The mailman only warned us against fog,” Chet remarked. “Rain shouldn’t stop us.”

  “I guess so,” Frank agreed and headed away from shore.

  As they neared the center of the lake, a speedboat emerged from a hidden cove near the mouth of the lagoon and arrowed straight for them.

  “That’s the one that swamped us before!” Chet exclaimed.

  “There’s another boat coming from the opposite direction!” Joe called.

  Frank and Chet turned to look. A sixteen-footer with a powerful outboard motor was also heading toward them.

  The speedboat reached them first. This time, even though he was crouched low, the boys could see the driver’s face because he was hatless. It was a coarse, brutal face surmounted by red hair!

  On the previous occasion Frank had not realized until too late that the man was deliberately trying to swamp them. But this time he was prepared. As the boat zoomed near, Frank cut sharply left to aim the bow at the point he judged the speedboat would swing in front of them.

  There was a near collision. The speedboat curved no more than a foot from the skiff’s bow. Then, as it swept past, the skiff nosed over the crest of the wave and plunged down its other side without capsizing.

  But just as the water began to calm, the speedboat roared toward them again! By now the other boat had reached the spot, too. The boys recognized mailman Herbert Shay. Realizing what was happening, he came to their rescue. He headed for the approaching craft at full throttle.

  Although smaller than the speedboat, Shay’s seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor made his boat just as fast. And the mailman showed reckless courage. He bore head-on at the larger craft, forcing the redhead to spin his wheel in panic to the right.

  Then Shay swung sharply left as the speedboat was turning. The two canted side by side, showing their bottoms to each other and almost touching before veering apart again.

  The larger boat nearly cap
sized before its pilot managed to get it back under control. Unable to stomach the dangerous game, he opened his engine wide and roared away.

  The mailman pulled alongside the Hardys. “Who was that idiot?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” Frank called out. “The same kook gave us some trouble on the way out to the Jimenez houseboat.”

  “It’s getting to be a wacky world,” Shay said, throttling down to keep his boat abreast of the boys’ skiff. “Some people take pleasure in hurting others for no good reason.”

  Joe said, “I think there’s a reason behind this.”

  “And we’ll find out what it is, too!” Chet said emphatically.

  “Take care,” Shay said. “By the way, what luck did you have with Jimenez?”

  “We saved his myna bird,” Frank said with a grin. “There seems to be a shortage of cat food around here.” He told what had happened.

  The mailman grinned. “Your good deed for the day!” Then he glanced up at the sky. “You’d better get across the lake fast. It’s going to storm any minute.”

  With a good-by wave, he sped off. Frank headed the skiff for the far end of the lake.

  A few seconds later there was a light patter of rain, accompanied by a distant rumbling sound. Then came a blinding flash of lightning and almost simultaneously an earsplitting crack of thunder!

  CHAPTER VIII

  A Library Clue

  THE lightning bolt hit so dose in front of them that they could smell the ozone. Frank instinctively steered around the spot.

  This was a lucky move. The lightning’s target had been a nearly submerged log, now split in two by the bolt. Both halves were large enough to drive a hole in the bottom of the skiff.

  The trio reached the marina without further incident, turned in their boat, and drove back to Stockton. They checked into a motel on the outskirts of town.

  Saturday morning, while breakfasting in the motel dining room, they discussed plans for the day. It was decided that Joe and Chet would check out the vineyard once owned by Giovanni Russo while Frank investigated the book old Miguel Jimenez had told them was in the library of the College of the Pacific. Joe and Chet dropped Frank off at the campus, then drove on to Paradise Point.