Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/125



HE next pressing business of Henry Harrington, taken up immediately after luncheon, was to pay his friend Adam John five thousand dollars for an island worth fifteen hundred. This was a pleasant task. All his life now, it seemed, was to be made up of pleasant tasks. A word from Quackenbaugh provided a motor launch and Henry was soon chugging eastward on the channel called South Inlet, but really the middle inlet, which was here a quarter of a mile in width.

Where this inlet entered Harper's Basin lay a flat island with a stand of rather poor timber upon it. This was Hurricane Island; less than two hundred yards separated it from the mainland on the south and it was less than six miles from North Street, so that within thirty minutes, say about two-twenty of the afternoon, Henry was stepping off upon a beach of wave-packed sand.

Another small motorboat was moored upon this beach, but it was old and temporarily disabled, with the engine opened up and parts of it scattered about in the bottom of the craft. Evidently, Adam John's trouble with his motor had overtaken him while fishing, for there was tackle lying about and a smell of smoking salmon in the air. Indeed smoke appeared drifting lazily from an almost flat roof barely visible one hundred yards away above the bushes. Adam John no doubt was there curing his fish.