
Chapter I. THE COONSKIN CAP GHOST
THE cream-colored yacht was anchored fully a mile from the nearest shore habitation. That in itself was
vaguely suspicious.
It was night and a moon hung high, spilling a silver flood of brilliant light. By that luminance, a close watcher
might have perceived two men on the yacht deck, crouched in the shadow of an upper deck awning. Both
held rifles, and their attitude was one of a strained waiting and watching.
Other and better coves were to be found nearer Bar Harbor, the Maine summer rendezvous of yachtsmen, but
these held anchored pleasure craft of varying size. The inlet where the cream yacht lay was otherwise
untenanted. It was as if those aboard wanted solitude.
The watching men maintained silence, keeping their eyes on the shore and occasionally cupping their hands
behind ears. One used binoculars.
"See it, Tige?" asked a man with a rifle.
"Ain’t sartin," said the one with the binoculars. "Calculate I’ll know in a minute."
Tige continued to peer through his glasses at the shore, often lowering them as if he distrusted their prisms,
and using his naked blue eyes that were like the snouts of two rifles seen from directly in front.
He was a lean, brindled man with something of the hawk in his face. His slab of a jaw moved regularly and
the tobacco it masticated occasionally made a squishing sound.
Sumptuous, luxurious, flamboyant and befitting a king, were descriptives applying to the yacht. The craft
hardly exceeded a hundred feet in length, yet she had obviously cost as much as a less pretentious vessel
three or four times as long. The woodwork was of mahogany; upholstery was genuine and rich, and there was
a profusion of built-in trinkets—bars, indirect lights, radio speakers and the like.
Rugged, rocky, misshapen, a place where anything might happen, described the cove. It was a harsh crack
where the stony shore had been gouged by nature, and there were no trees and little vegetation to garnish the
place. Boulders were present in profusion, ranging upward to the proportions of a railroad locomotive.
The silver light sprayed by the moon made black, awesome, shapeless shadows behind the boulders,
shadows that somehow were like monsters asleep.
"That be it!" Tige breathed abruptly, "I be plumb sartin!"
"Better give the signal, huh?" asked the other man.
Tige hesitated, seemed to consider while his teeth mashed at the tobacco quid; then he shrugged.
"Yeah," he muttered. "But lemme do it."
A moment later, Tige walked out on a wing of the bridge and lighted a cigarette, letting the match flame up
like a torch in his fingers for a moment before he twirled it over the rail. The gesture was casual, a natural
one—but the match flame could have been seen from shore.
Tige strode back out of sight, dropped the cigarette on the deck and extinguished its tip with a lance of
tobacco juice sent expertly through the darkness.
Perspiration droplets, not unlike spattered grease, had come out and covered Tige’s forehead while he stood
in plain view on the bridge. He scraped some of the sweat off with a forefinger, eyed the moist and slightly
glistening digit and shuddered violently.
"Suppose they saw the signal?" asked the other.
"Damn well better have seen it, or reckon as how they’ll get fired," Tige growled.