Part 71

she sang happily, studying her gestures with care and cheerfully flopping her tail.

She had a very lovely voice which had been expensively cultivated. One or two small birds listened attentively for a while, then started in to help her out.

On the veranda of his bungalow, not very far from Northport, stood a young man of pleasing aspect, knickerbockers, and unusually symmetrical legs. His hands reposed in his pockets, his eyes behind their eyeglasses were fixed dreamily upon the skies. Somebody over beyond that screen of woods was singing very beautifully, and he liked it--at first.

However, when the unseen singer had been singing the Lorelei for an hour, steadily, without intermission, an expression of surprise gradually developed into uneasy astonishment upon his clean-cut and unusually attractive features.

"That girl, whoever she is, can sing, all right," he reflected, "but why on earth does she dope out the same old thing?"

He looked at the strip of woods, but could see nothing of the singer. He listened; she continued to sing the Lorelei.

"It can't be a phonograph," he reasoned. "No sane person could endure an hour of that fool song. No sane person would sing it for an hour, either."

Disturbed, he picked up the marine glasses, slung them over his shoulder, walked up on the hill back of the bungalow, selected a promising tree, and climbed it.

Astride a lofty limb the lord of Northport gazed earnestly across the fringe of woods. Something sparkled out there, something moved, glittering on a half-submerged rock. He adjusted the marine glasses and squinted through them.

"Great James!" he faltered, dropping them; and almost followed the glasses to destruction on the ground below.

How he managed to get safely to earth he never knew. "Either I'm crazy," he shouted aloud, "or there's a--a mermaid out there, and I'm going to find out before they chase me to the funny house!"

There was a fat tub of a boat at his landing; he reached the shore in a series of long, distracted leaps, sprang aboard, cast off, thrust both oars deep into the water, and fairly hurled the boat forward, so that it alternately skipped, wallowed, scuttered, and scrambled, like a hen overboard.

"This is terrible," he groaned. "If I didn't see what I think I saw, I'll eat my hat; if I did see what I'm sure I saw, I'm madder than the hatter who made it!"

Nearer and nearer, heard by him distinctly above the frantic splashing of his oars, her Lorelei song sounded perilously sweet and clear.

"Oh, bunch!" he moaned; "it's horribly like the real thing; and here I come headlong, as they do in the story books----"

He caught a crab that landed him in a graceful parabola in the bow, where he lay biting at the air to recover his breath. Then his boat's nose plowed into the sandy neck of land; he clambered to his feet, jumped out, and ran headlong into the belt of trees which screened the singer. Speed and gait recalled the effortless grace of the kangaroo; when he encountered logs and gullies he rose grandly, sailing into space, landing with a series of soft bounces, which presently brought him to the other side of the woods.

And there, what he beheld, what he heard, almost paralyzed him. Weak- kneed, he passed a trembling hand over his incredulous eyes; with the courage of despair, he feebly pinched himself. Then for sixty sickening seconds he closed his eyes and pressed both hands over his ears. But when he took his hands away and opened his terrified eyes, the exquisitely seductive melody, wind blown from the water, thrilled him in every fiber; his wild gaze fell upon a distant, glittering shape--white-armed, golden- haired, fish-tailed, slender body glittering with silvery scales.

The low rippling wash of the tide across the pebbly shore was in his ears; the salt wind was in his throat. He saw the sun flash on golden comb and mirror, as her snowy fingers caressed the splendid masses of her hair; her song stole sweetly seaward as the wind veered.

A terrible calm descended upon him.

"This is interesting," he said aloud.

A sickening wave of terror swept him, but he straightened up, squaring his shoulders.

"I may as well face the fact," he said, "that I, Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point, Northport, L.I., and recently in my right mind, am now, this very moment, looking at a--a mermaid in Long Island Sound!"

He shuddered; but he was sheer pluck all through. Teeth might chatter, knees smite together, marrow turn cold; nothing on earth or Long Island could entirely stampede Henry Kingsbury, of Pebble Point.

His clutch on his self-control in any real crisis never slipped; his mental steering-gear never gave way. Again his pallid lips moved in speech:

"The--thing--to--do," he said very slowly and deliberately, "is to swim out and--and touch it. If it dissolves into nothing I'll probably feel better----"

He began to remove coat, collar, and shoes, forcing himself to talk calmly all the while.

"The thing to do," he went on dully, "is to swim over there and get a look at it. Of course, it isn't really there. As for drowning--it really doesn't matter.... In the midst of life we are in Long Island.... And, if it is there--I c-c-can c-capture it for the B-B-Bronx----"

Reason tottered; it revived, however, as he plunged into the s. w. of Oyster Bay and struck out, silent as a sea otter for the shimmering shape on the ruddy rocks.