with his foot and deposited the snake inside.
Judy, however, still registered a marked lack of enthusiasm for the whole situation. A little whittled stick stuck through a hasp failed to impress her as an adequate way to secure a six-foot reptile mean enough to imitate a rattlesnake. But the ranger straightened up again, acting as if everything were now under control.
“Maybe I’d better introduce myself,” he said. “Assistant Ranger Timothy Wade, at your service. Do you want a key to a cabin or are you just looking for friends?”
“Neither,” Judy retored with dignity. “I’m Judith Carrington from the bookmobile.” Retrieving the book she had thrown at the snake, she added the two from the doorstep and handed them over in a neat stack. “These must be yours,” she said frostily. “But we don’t have the book on Brazilian antivenins yet. We had to order it.” Then turning on her heel, she was about to start for the station wagon when she thought of something else. “And if it comes, you can walk out to the bookmobile to get it. Hereafter, I only stop and honk.”
Get stuck on a date with that ranger and you’d need a mongoose, Judy thought crossly as she headed the bookmobile up Gallows Road. It was a miracle he didn’t hiss when he talked! Maybe she should have stayed where she belonged and worked in the New York Public Library again. But after all, she ought to be able to ignore one ranger; the rest of them were probably human. And she did not like humid heat. New York was perfect for college in the winter; it just was not her idea of a summer resort. That was why she had jumped at this job when the Personnel Bureau at Barnard had told her about it, she reminded herself—that and the fact that Sinnett Harbor made her family seem nearer. Even after all these years, her mother still had a Harbor accent. Her father must be right; a born State of Mainer was always a State of Mainer. He claimed you could scratch the surface of any of them, no matter how long they had been away, and come spang up against a Maine ledge every time.
Judy shelved the obnoxious ranger, and put her mind firmly back on the road. On her bookmobile route map, Sinnett Harbor looked like a big mitten dropped down on Pentecost Bay, and Gallows Road ran between the tall pines of the Park preserve and the salt water of the Bay’s inlet right along the edge of its gargantuan thumb. What kept surprising Judy about it was the lack of traffic. Somehow, with the entrance to the National Park at the end, she had expected campers to be hiking all over the scenery. Instead it ribboned emptily out ahead of her. She had not seen another car all afternoon. Except for its paving, Gallows Road must look exactly as it had in her mother’s childhood. For that matter, it probably had not even changed since the eighteenth century when the notorious pirate, Bold Dick, used to anchor his Sea Hawk impudently off Gibbet Ridge practically in the shadow of the town gallows!
Remembering Bold Dick set Judy’s thoughts wandering again. Ever since she had written that term paper in American lit., she had been wondering why Sandys Winter had waited till last year to write Rogue’s Hour. She would have thought Bold Dick was a natural for one of his first books. After all, not every novelist had a handy piratical ancestor who struck his Jolly Roger and came sailing home to haul his ship’s eighteen-pounders onto Gun Point in the nick of time to save his native town from the British. Mr. Winter even still lived in the same house Bold Dick had built after he rescued his lovely Tory, Charity Royalle, from the gallows to marry her. At least, though, when Mr. Winter did get around to writing Rogue’s Hour, it had won him the Pulitzer Prize for the second time, and the movie version had just captured Oscars for half its cast.
For a barefoot boy from a salt-water farm who had sailed on a fishing schooner to earn money to go to college, Sandys Winter had certainly acquired the Midas touch, Judy decided. Everything he wrote turned into a smash-hit movie. It was strange that he had never married. His pictures looked distinguished enough, definitely Park Avenue tailoring and Dunhill pipes. Maybe success had turned him into a stuffed shirt. Anyway, she was likely to find out soon. She had not been in the library an hour this morning before she discovered he was the member of the board of trustees who had given the new wing.
A pair of great blue herons flapped down in the marsh grass along the inlet and Judy promptly forgot everything else. She even stopped the station wagon a while to watch them, and when she got going again, she no longer had Gallows Road to herself. A Model A was chugging toward her from town, but it seemed to be pulling over to the shoulder. Maybe her herons had lighted farther on now. When she looked at the Ford the next time, however, the driver was bending over its hood.
Of all the deserted places to get stuck in, Judy thought sympathetically as she stopped alongside the white-haired man in hip boots and salt-stained dungarees who was struggling with a crank. “Couldn’t I give you a push, or a lift or something?” she asked.
“A push would do it,” the man said gratefully. “She seems set against being cranked.” He smiled at Judy, his deep-set eyes startlingly blue in his weathered face. “I stopped to plug a lobster claw and my starter went dead.”
Judy nodded cheerfully. “Okay, here we go,” she said, and maneuvered until she could drive in behind him.
“I don’t dare stop again, but I’m much obliged,” he called out his window as his car got going once more. “We’ll meet soon anyway.”
Listening to the familiar chug-chug, Judy chuckled to herself. She thought it highly probable. With an obstinate starter and an ornery crank, he was likely to be still stuck near a Park cabin on her Friday trip if he had to stop to deliver his lobsters. So far this had been quite a day!
The rest of it was peaceful enough, however, and she spent the evening placidly unpacking and writing a ten-page letter to her family. Consequently, it was irritating to have snakes on her mind again before she could even get down to breakfast the next morning. Her brand-new lipstick had turned up missing, and she knew she had had it in her pocket right up to the minute she encountered that rangers repulsive reptile. Judy was in no humor to be philosophical about it either, not with payday four days off. Screwing up the two lipsticks she had on her bureau, she eyed them both with a grimace of distaste. If she had to make out with those stubs until Friday afternoon, somebody was bound to think she was trying to land a clown’s job with Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey. Worst of all, “somebody” was likely to be her landlord and landlady, Captain and Mrs. Matthew Dunning—and Captain Matt was chairman of the library board.
As a matter of fact, however, the effect Judy achieved with one of those stubs was unlike any clown’s mouth on record, and Captain Matt’s shrewd blue eyes twinkled as he watched her swing up the harbor’s Foreside past his workshop after breakfast.
“Blonde and jet-propelled,” he remarked to his wife with interest, and Jen Dunning smiled at him.
“I shouldn’t wonder if the breeze around the library blew a mite brisker than it’s blown for quite a spell,” she agreed cheerfully.
But that Tuesday morning the breeze around the library was already brisk enough to suit Judy. She had her hands full with something called “Bold Dick Week.” Sinnett Harbor, she had learned, was about to celebrate the 175th anniversary of its famous escape from the British during the Revolution, and though it was possible someone in the town might not be on a committee, nothing happened to make Judy think it was probable. The library bulged all day with committee members hunting for weird information—like the ingredients of whipped silla-bub or the proper way to fasten a hangman’s noose.
About five-thirty, though, when she dashed out to the nearest drugstore to grab a sandwich and a cup of coffee for supper, Judy began to look confidently forward to an evening lull. With weather like this, nobody in his right mind was going to coop himself up if he could stay outside and watch a full moon rise over Pentecost Bay. But she had failed to reckon with Sinnett Harbor’s Yankee thoroughness. By six-thirty two committees had already put Miss Leonard, the
