Coot Club
“Stick at it,” said Starboard as they rowed away.
An hour later, the Titmouse was cruising along by the reed-beds in the far corner of the Broad, when a yell from Ranworth Staithe made Tom and his pupils turn round.
“Coots ahoy!”
A small boy with a bicycle was standing at the edge of the staithe and waving … the skipper of the Death and Glory back from Acle. Tom swung the Titmouse round, and they raced back towards him.
“Been down to Acle,” said Joe, when they came to the staithe. “Robin think he see Margoletta go through for Yarmouth last night, but he ain’t sure. He say he’ll watch the bridge for us, and I tell him I’ll punch his head if he don’t, and I leave him fourpence to telephone up to my dad’s as soon’s he see her coming up again.”
“Tell Starboard to open the treasury and hand out that fourpence,” said Tom.
“No hurry,” said Joe. “Well, I’m off now. Got to see them others, case she go Ludham way or Potter Heigham.” He jumped on his bicycle and rode off the staithe to disappear behind the trees by the Maltster’s Arms.
In the afternoon they saw Port and Starboard again. The Flash had rounded a mark too close and touched it and so was out of her race, and Mr. Farland sailed her into Ranworth to see his daughter’s new friends, and to tell Tom that if by any chance the Hullabaloos did get hold of him and talked of the law or anything like that, Tom was at once to refer them to him. “Nothing like letting the other side know that two can play at law as well as one.… But you’re in the wrong, so you’d much better not let them catch you at all.… By the way,” he said to Mrs. Barrable, “you mustn’t let my girls be a nuisance to you.”
“They’ve been a great help so far,” said the Admiral. “I’m left without captain or crew with my brother going off, and Dick and Dorothea are hardly to be counted sailors yet.”
“They soon will be with Tom to teach them,” said Mr. Farland. “And Nell and Bess know one end of a boat from the other. Anybody like to come for a spin in Flash?”
In a minute Tom, Dick and Dorothea had tied up the Titmouse and were crowded into the little racing sloop. Dorothea found it hard to believe that only three days before she had been seeing Flash for the first time and looking so enviously at those two sailor girls.
The Flash had hardly put her passengers aboard the Titmouse and sailed out of sight into the wooded Straits before the outlaw and his friends were hailed again. This time it was Doctor Dudgeon, who had escaped from his patients for an hour or two. He had put some cushions in the stern of his old fishing boat to make it comfortable for Mrs. Dudgeon and “our baby” and had rowed them down to Ranworth to call on Mrs. Barrable. “I was so sorry I was out taking people’s temperatures when you came yesterday,” he said. “Your brother is the most interesting patient I ever had. My patients mostly are as dull as suet puddings.… It’s safe to say so, for you won’t tell them.… But your brother is something different altogether, and I’m proud to have plastered his scalp. But what I came to say is how grateful I am to you for aiding and abetting a lawless young ruffian, as I hear you did the other night.”
“Horrible people those were,” said Mrs. Barrable.
“I must say I should not at all like to have a row with them,” said the doctor, “but if Tom’s going sailing with you he ought to be safe enough. They’ve only seen him in that old punt.”
Late that night, when sailing was over for the day and the awnings had been rigged, and supper had been eaten in the Teasel, and Tom was just setting off to the Titmouse, taking Dick with him to bring the Teasel’s dinghy back, Mrs. Barrable asked him a question. “Well,” she said, “and do you think Dick and Dorothea will make a crew?”
“They’re doing jolly well,” said Tom.
Second Day
Dick wrote in his note-book, “Found two coots’ nests in a reed-bed close to Ranworth Staithe. Watched crested grebes fishing. What I thought was a fog-horn last night and the night before was a bittern. There was no fog, and Tom heard it, too, and told me.”
Port and Starboard came in their rowing boat to spend the whole day. Dick and Dorothea were taken out by turns first in Titmouse and then in the rowing boat, and made to sail and row by themselves, with the elder Coots as mere passengers to tell them what they did wrong. William went hunting, ashore. Mrs. Barrable painted another picture. Port and Starboard and Dorothea did the day’s cooking.
In the afternoon the Death and Glory came rowing through the Straits with the news that the Margoletta had been seen going through Yarmouth to the south the day before. That made everybody feel a good deal more comfortable. All six Coots came to tea in the Teasel. Joe brought his white rat, and Dorothea made herself stroke it. They had tea in the Teasel, William and the white rat as far from each other as possible, William at the forward end of the cabin and the white rat with Joe at the after end of the well. The Death and Glory hoisted her patched and ragged old sail, and Dick and Dorothea went sailing in her, while the Admiral and the three elder Coots held a conference. It was decided that next day, while the twins could be there to help, they should set sail on the Teasel and try her on the Broad before venturing out into the river.
Third Day
This plan came to nothing, because in the morning they woke to the steady drumming of rain-drops on stretched canvas. It was no day for a trial trip. Neither Tom nor the Admiral wanted to get sails wet at the very start. Awnings were left up all day. Dick and Dorothea wore their oilskins and sea-boots and got some rowing practice in the rain. Dorothea planned a story, “The Outlaw of the Broads.” Dick helped Tom in the Titmouse, and between them they finished up the locker-doors. William, for fear of chills, was given a spoonful of cod-liver oil.
In the afternoon, when the rain was at its worst, Port and Starboard, in oilskins and sou’westers, came rowing into the Broad, bringing letters from the post office at Horning. Dick and Dorothea had a letter apiece that had been written up on the Roman wall and had a Carlisle postmark. Mrs. Barrable had a letter from her brother in London, horrified scraps of which she read aloud.
“Perfectly ridiculous.… You can’t do it.… Taking a boat as big as the Teasel down through Yarmouth with nobody to help but a brace of brats who have never been in a boat before.… What are you going to do about bridges? … What do you know about tides? Tides are no child’s play down at Yarmouth.… Jolly good chap that doctor, but he ought to put his foot down and tell you to stay where you are.…”
Dick and Dorothea listened and said nothing.
“People will jump to conclusions,” said Mrs. Barrable. “And I told him Tom was coming too.”
“He’s quite right, really,” said Tom.
“What do you think?” asked Mrs. Barrable of the twins.
“Yarmouth is an awful place,” said Starboard. “And the crew ought to have had some practice going through bridges.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?” said Mrs. Barrable.
“We’ve got to hang about at home tomorrow. The A.P.’s got people coming to tea, and we have to be there to pour out.”
“Next day, then?” said Mrs. Barrable. “What about coming with us for a day or so just to help Tom to put us all in the way of handling the Teasel?”
“We’ll have to be back the night before the first of the championship races,” said Starboard.
“We could do a tremendous lot in three days,” said Tom.
“Potter Heigham, I thought,” said the Admiral.
“Bridge to go through. Two bridges. Just what’s wanted,” said Tom.
“And then through Kendal Dyke and up to Horsey. It used to be a wonderful place for birds.”
“It still is,” said Tom.
“Good,” said Dick.
“We’ll have to ask the A.P.,” said Port.
“He won’t mind so long as we’re back in time,” said Starboard. “Anyway, if we can’t come we’ll get a message to you tomorrow. We’ve got to get back now.”
And then, with the rain pouring
off their sou’westers, the twins settled to their oars again and disappeared into the Straits.
*
That night, in the cabin of the Teasel, the Admiral, Tom, Dick, and Dorothea pored over the map together. The Admiral, with the wrong end of a paint brush, was tracing the curling blue line that marked the River Bure past the mouth of the Ant and on to the place where it was joined by the Thurne, and the blue line thickened and curled away down the map towards Acle and Yarmouth. Tom’s eye followed it down there, thinking of tides and the other dangers of Yarmouth and Breydon which make a cruise on the rivers of the south as exciting an adventure for the children of Horning or Wroxham as a cruise on the rivers of the north is for the children who live down at Oulton or Beccles.
But Mrs. Barrable’s paint brush was moving up that other river, the Thurne … Potter Heigham … “such a pretty little place it used to be” … two bridges, road and railway … on and on and then sharp to the north-west through the narrow line that marked Kendal Dyke, and into a largish blue blot that meant the widening waters of Heigham Sound, and on again through a narrow wriggling line into another blue blot that was Horsey Mere. At one side of this blot was a short line marking a dyke, and at the end of it the sign for a windmill. “That’s where we’ll spend the night,” said the Admiral, “in the little cut close by that windmill.…”
The others leant over the cabin table. Closer and closer they put their heads to the paper. It was very hard to see, all of a sudden. Dimmer and dimmer.
“What’s happened to the light?” said the Admiral.
They looked up at the two little glass bulbs that usually lit the whole cabin. They dazzled no longer. A curly red wire was slowly fading in each bulb.
“The battery must be run down,” said Dick at once. He switched off one light, and, for a moment, got a rather brighter glow out of the other.
“Well,” said the Admiral, “we’ve been looking at the wrong end of the map. We can’t set out on a voyage with no light. Candles are all right in the well, but I don’t like them in the cabin. We’ll have to sail up to Wroxham to get the battery renewed.”
“It’s bad for it to be run down,” said Dick.
“Of course, it hasn’t been charged since we took the boat over. I forgot about it, with Brother Richard going away. Get out the candlestick for now. And the day after tomorrow, when the twins come, we’ll have to go to Wroxham instead of to Horsey.”
Dorothea felt a pang of disappointment as she went into the well for the candlestick. They had come from Wroxham that first day and so had seen that part of the river already. Sailing to Horsey would have been sailing into the unknown. Where was that candlestick? She found it and her fingers closed on the matchbox.
“Hurry up, Dot,” said the Admiral.
In the cabin the red glowing wires dimmed. “Better turn them out,” said Dick, and they sat in the dark, listening to Dorothea striking a damp match that would not light, listening also to the even grunting of the pug, who thought the dark was an improvement. Dick, too, was disappointed. He had been looking forward to Horsey, and to adding reed pheasants and bitterns to his list of birds seen. But, of course, batteries had to be charged.
Help came, unexpectedly, from Tom.
Dorothea lit her candle at last, and brought it into the cabin, setting it on the table where it threw its queer flickering light over the faces round the map. She saw at once that Tom had something to say.
“Wroxham’s a bad place for sailing. Specially now that the leaves are beginning to come. Get blanketed altogether in some reaches. It’s no good going up there for a trial trip. Much better get it done tomorrow. It’s safe enough with the Margoletta away through Yarmouth. I’ll take the battery up to Wroxham first thing in the morning. I’ll be back by tea-time.”
The Admiral looked at him in the candlelight, and laughed.
“Tired of lying low?” she asked.
“I’d like to give Titmouse a run,” said Tom. “And it’s perfectly safe now with somebody watching at Acle.”
“It certainly would be rather a waste of Port and Starboard not to have some real sailing while we’ve got them,” said the Admiral. “And there are no bridges on the way to Wroxham.”
“It’s stopped raining,” said Tom, putting his hand out through a port-hole to feel.
A few minutes later he was baling out the Teasel’s dinghy for the third time that day. Dick ferried him across to the Titmouse. Tom lit his lantern and looked about him. “Bone dry,” he said, “in spite of all that rain. That’s the first time the awning’s had a proper wetting.”
He watched Dick vanish into the darkness, listened for his safe arrival aboard the Teasel, and turned in for the night, feeling extraordinarily happy. Jolly good that the twins were coming in the Teasel, at least to Horsey and back. It was all very well, but he really did not much like the idea of handling a boat as big as the Teasel for the first time, with only Dick and Dorothea to help. And jolly good, too, to think that tomorrow, Hullabaloos or no Hullabaloos, the little Titmouse would herself be voyaging once more.
CHAPTER XI
TOM IN DANGER
IT was a fine clear morning with a north-westerly breeze. Tom was up early, and long before breakfast was ready in the Teasel he had come alongside. He and Dick made a double sling with the end of the Teasel’s mainsheet, and lowered the heavy battery carefully into the Titmouse.
“Do you really think it’s safe?” said Dorothea. “They may be just waiting to pounce.”
“Not they,” said Tom. “And we’d know if they were. Joe’s got a friend watching at Acle. And, anyway, I’ll be back in no time. No tacking. I’m going to row every yard I can’t either run or reach.”
“It’s a very long way,” said Dorothea.
“Are you quite sure you wouldn’t rather I sent it up from Horning or Ranworth and had it sent back?” said Mrs. Barrable. “It would never do for the skipper to get into trouble the very day before the Teasel really starts sailing.”
But Tom was sure that everything was all right. The coast was clear, there was a fine breeze and he was in a hurry to be off. Mrs. Barrable handed out a note to the Wroxham boat-letter from whom her brother had hired the Teasel. “That’s to tell them about the battery,” she said. “And then there are these things to buy.” She gave him a written list of things, the stock of which was running rather low. Tom took the list, put it in his pocket with the money to pay for the things, and then rowed quickly away between the trees, his sail all ready for hoisting in any reach where he found a fair wind.
*
It was a dullish morning without him. They washed up. They swabbed the decks. They took William with them as a passenger to Ranworth Staithe when they went to get some fresh water. On the way back they looked in on two coots’ nests, and met a pair of crested grebes out fishing, but, with William aboard, they found it harder to come near the grebes than when they were alone. William sat up on a thwart, put his paws on the gunwale and looked out as keenly as Dick, but he could not see a bird on the water without barking. They went back to the Teasel at last and found the Admiral busy preparing a canvas. Dick settled down in the cabin, making a fair copy of his roughly scribbled list of birds he had seen in Norfolk. Dorothea tried to write some of the new book that had seemed almost half done when she had put down a list of its chapter headings.… The Secret Broad, The Outlaw in the Reeds, The Black Coot’s Feather, The Bittern’s Warning, and so on. What a book it was to be, and yet, somehow, the first chapter had ended after a paragraph or two, and the second would not go beyond the first gorgeous sentence: “Parting the reeds with stealthy, silent hand, the outlaw peered into the gathering dusk. Away, across the dark water.…” Well, what was it that he saw? Dorothea found herself wondering instead what Tom was seeing on his voyage up to Wroxham to change the Teasel’s battery. Had he managed to see Port and Starboard on his way through Horning? The morning slipped away, and still the outlaw in the book was peering out of the reeds across the dark water.
Dorothea had to leave him there, for suddenly it was too late to do any more writing. The Admiral wanted to get dinner over, to have a long afternoon for painting. There was the lighting of the Primus, the choosing of a tin of steak-and-kidney pudding, the timing of its boiling by the ship’s chronometer, and then the eating of it, and of some stewed pears, several hunks of cake and some chocolate (“No need to save it now, with Tom bringing a fresh supply”). And all the time the sun was shifting the shadows, and Admiral Barrable hurried through the washing up because with every moment the light was getting better for the picture she had planned of the shadowy Straits, with a little boat coming out of them, its sail just catching the sunshine through the trees.
“There’s only one time to paint it,” she said, and Dorothea understood that with artists it is the same as with writers, and she hurried Dick into the dinghy to give the Admiral a fair chance, and asked if it would be all right if they rowed up to the main river.
“Don’t fall in,” said the Admiral. “Better leave William with me. Where did I put that turpentine?”
Rowing side by side, with an oar apiece, they paddled away from the Teasel. The Admiral absent-mindedly waved a paint brush at them. They waved back. The trees closed in on either side of them. They were in the Straits and the Teasel and the open Broad were hidden behind a curtain of young spring leaves. They paddled steadily on, out of the shelter of the trees into the long straight dyke leading to the river.
“There’s a sail!” said Dorothea, looking over her shoulder at a white triangle shining in the sunlight, moving along above a distant line of willow bushes.
“One, two,” said Dick. “One, two.… You must keep time. Look out! we’ll be into the reeds. Not so hard. One, two. One, two. That sail’s going down the river. They’ll have met Tom, I should think.”