“How did it happen?” asked Dick.
There was a laugh from the experienced seamen. “It was a crab. Catching one. You didn’t get hold of the water with your oar. We’ve all done it. Why, Roger . . .”
“I didn’t catch a single crab last year,” said Roger indignantly.
“You were catching them all the time the year you learnt. Everybody does. You needn’t mind.”
Dick struggled to his place again, and the rowing went on, after an unfortunate attempt to begin at once, before the others were ready.
“Try again,” said Peggy. “Now. Give way.”
With less hurry and greater care Dick and Dorothea pulled on up the lake, while Roger and Titty, sitting behind them, watched their moving backs and rowed with even greater care, to prevent accidents of another kind.
“That’s enough for now,” said Peggy at last. “We’d better have John and Susan at the oars for getting into the river.”
Again there was changing of places, and Dick and Dorothea, very hot and oddly trembly at the knees, moved back to the stern, and sat beside the skipper. They looked at each other across her, smiled faintly, but said never a word.
Now that they were sitting still once more, and being rowed by other people, it seemed as if they were looking at a new lake. Close ahead of them was that promontory of rock and heather that Captain Nancy had pointed out to Dick. It looked now as if it were made of white sugar. There was the flagstaff sticking up out of the snow. Dick turned round to look back down the lake. They ought to be able to see the observatory from here. Somewhere up on that hill-side, beyond the islands.
“Trim the boat,” said the skipper sternly, but explained a moment later, “You see, if you don’t keep her balanced it’s beastly for the men at the oars.”
They rounded the Beckfoot promontory, that glittered in the sunshine. Beyond it two great banks of brown and withered reeds marked the entrance to the river.
“Here we are,” said Peggy to the visitors. “This is the Amazon River. Pull left. Pull left. Easy right. Pull left. Back water with your right. Pull left.” The boat swept round and headed in towards the reed beds. Suddenly the reeds opened, and they could see the clear way into the river and up towards a grey house that stood a little way back from the banks.
“This is where Nancy and I hid in Amazon the night the Swallows made a raid on our boathouse. We were in among those reeds.”
“And what happened?” said Roger gleefully from the bows.
“Somebody found an octopus,” said Peggy.
“And after that?” said Roger. “Who lost their ship?”
But Peggy took no notice of these jeers.
“Pull right,” she said. “Easy . . . Left a little.”
The boat was slipping up the river between the banks of reeds. There was a faint crackling as the wash from the boat stirred the reeds and broke the ice with which they were encrusted at the level of the water.
“That’s our boathouse.”
“What’s that crest?” said Dorothea. “What is it? There’s a skull and cross-bones.”
“Oh, that,” said Peggy. “All part of the same thing. It belongs to the Amazon Pirates. Summer, you know. Nothing to do with the Arctic . . . Hullo! Where’s Nancy? She promised she’d be down to help with the landing.”
The rowers stopped pulling.
“Aren’t you going to take her into the boathouse?” said John.
“Ice in there already,” said Peggy. “It’s out of the current, and not deep. I had a job to get her out this morning. We’ll push her nose into the bank by those reeds. She’ll be all right there for going back this afternoon. But where on earth is Nancy? Gently. Left. Left. Easy. Ship your oars. Ready, Roger? Roger always jumps out with the painter,” she explained to Dorothea. “He always does it in their own boat.”
Roger had shipped his oar and had the painter in his hand. The boat slid on through a yard or two of reeds. As it touched the bank Roger was ashore.
But of Captain Nancy there was nothing to be seen.
CHAPTER VIII
LOST LEADER
FROM the first moment of their landing, Dorothea knew that they were not wanted. Something had happened. The very house looked absent-minded, as if it were thinking of something else. This was not the sort of welcome they would have had if all had been as it was yesterday when Mrs Blackett had been so laughing and jolly, asking them to visit an Eskimo settlement on the other side of the fiord. And for Captain Nancy not to be at the boathouse to meet them . . . It was queer enough for her to have let Peggy make that Arctic voyage without her, but this was queerer still.
“Nancy’s probably lurking somewhere,” said John doubtfully.
“She’s probably still toasting her jaw,” said Peggy. “She said it was very stiff and beastly. Anyway, we’ll soon know.”
She took the painter from Roger and tied it to a post in the bank. There was deep snow everywhere and, with Peggy at the head of them, they followed a trail of footprints across the lawn towards the little door that opened into the garden on that side of the house.
But, before they had come anywhere near it, that door opened and Mrs Blackett came out on the step.
“Oh, Peggy,” she said, “I do wish you had waited a minute or two . . .”
Anybody could see that Mrs Blackett was bothered about something. She went on at once, “Now then, you others, you mustn’t think I’m not very glad to see you, but I’m not at all sure I ought to let you into the house . . .”
“But you asked them,” said Peggy.
“What is it poor Nancy calls you?” said Mrs Blackett. “Galoot, isn’t it? Of course I asked them. And I’m very glad to see them. But I want you now, all of you, to slip along the road to the bridge and catch the doctor. You’ll only just be in time. I telephoned just now, but they said he’d already gone this way, up the valley to Nook Farm, where somebody’s broken an ankle. You’ll catch him on his way back if you’re quick. I won’t let you into the house just now. Not that it makes much difference when you’ve been stewing with her in that igloo of yours all these days . . .”
“Is it Nancy?” asked Peggy.
“Yes, of course it is,” said Mrs Blackett. “Now then, if you want to help, you’ll hurry along to the bridge and hold up the doctor, and ask him to come and have a look at her.”
She gave them a cheerful, kindly smile, but they knew that it was only the front of a smile, because, behind it, she was thinking of something else.
“I wonder if Nancy’s really ill,” said Susan, as they came out of the Beckfoot gates into the road.
“She never is,” said Peggy. “And anyhow, she must have been awfully quick about it. It was only a jaw-ache when I set out to fetch you.”
“Mrs Blackett thinks she is,” said Dorothea.
“Oh, that’s just mother,” said Peggy. “Well, anyway, we’ll give a bit of a shock to the doctor.”
“He’s probably accustomed to illness,” said Dorothea.
“Holding him up, I mean,” said Peggy.
They hurried along the road at a good pace. The others were telling Dick and Dorothea about the Kanchenjunga expedition, and the trouble over the Great-aunt that had happened in the summer. “We camped out all night half-way up the mountain,” Titty said. “And saw wild goats,” added Roger, “and then I slept in a charcoal-burner’s hut.” These children, thought Dorothea, certainly did seem to have all the luck in the way of adventures. Why did things like that never happen to her or to Dick, but only in the books that she was always planning to write?
“You mean it really did happen?” she asked.
“Honest Pirate,” said Peggy, forgetting that at the moment they were Arctic explorers. “That’s the wood where John came and made the owl noise.”
“You can just see the lagoon if you climb up on that gate,” said Roger.
John had said nothing for some time. He was looking more and more serious. Something was on his mind. “I say,” he said at last,
“it’ll be pretty rotten if Nancy isn’t all right for going to the Pole.”
A sudden gloom fell over everybody, though Peggy did say, “Of course she’ll be all right. She planned the whole thing, and she isn’t going to miss it now.”
They came to the place where the road forked. To the right, it turned sharp over a bridge, crossing the river, on its way to the head of the lake and round to the little town that the Swallows and Amazons never called by any other name than that of Rio. To the left it turned up the valley between the fells. Nook Farm was up that road, and the doctor would have to cross the bridge on his way home.
“Perhaps he’s gone already,” said Titty.
“He hasn’t,” said Dick.
“How do you know?” said Dorothea, not that she did not believe him, but because she knew he must have some very good reason to be so very sure.
“There’s a motor car gone up this road with chains on its wheels, and it’s never come back,” said Dick.
John, Susan, Peggy, Titty, and Roger examined the tracks with great care.
“Not half bad,” said John at last. Dick blushed, and Dorothea felt a pleasant glow of pride. You never knew with Dick. Sometimes he would be thinking about nothing but geology or stars, and then, when nobody was expecting it, he would come out with something that even people like John and Nancy could not help admiring.
“About the holding up,” said Peggy. “If Nancy were doing it, she’d hide in those trees at the other side of the bridge, with all of us, of course, and then we’d leap out with a terrific war whoop just as he came along.”
But here, Susan put her foot down.
“All right in a wide road,” she said, “and if it’s just one or two. But he isn’t expecting us, and he won’t be able to pull up. Anyhow, Titty and Roger can’t do it.”
“And he’ll be going too fast,” said John. “He’ll be past us before he knows what’s happened. He’ll drive right on and never know he was really wanted.”
Peggy gave way at once.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll stop him gradually. We’ll spread ourselves out all along the road, and by the time he’s passed seven of us, all signalling to him and yelling like fury, he’ll know something’s up.”
“Listen,” said Dick.
They were standing on the bridge, and the noise of the little river, pouring over the stones higher upstream before settling down to glide quietly between its snow-covered banks, made it difficult to hear much else. But Dick had been carefully trying to make himself deaf to all noises except the one for which he was listening.
“He’s coming,” said Titty.
“Spread out. Spread out!” cried Peggy. “That way. Hare along as far as you can.”
“Don’t stand in the middle of the road, you two,” Dorothea heard the careful Susan say to Titty and Roger. She said the same herself to Dick.
In a few moments the whole seven of them were scattered at intervals along the road that led up the valley. The road was narrow and winding, and Dorothea, near the bridge, could see only Titty, standing in the nearest bend. She could hear a distant car. It stopped. Perhaps the doctor was talking to someone at the roadside. It came on again, a low hum with the rattle of snow-chains swinging against mudguards. Suddenly, far away up the road, she heard a most blood-curdling yell. Who would ever think that Peggy could made such a noise? Then another, a loud, urgent shout. John’s probably. Then a shout from Dick. Then Roger’s shrill, ear-piercing screech. Then a loud “Hallo,” like someone trying to make themselves heard through a telephone in the middle of a thunderstorm. Susan, no doubt. Then she saw Titty waving frantically. She heard her screaming, “Stop! Stop!” and just then, already slowing up, the motor car came round the corner. It stopped. She could see Titty climbing on the running-board, and talking to the driver. The others came running up. Dorothea ran to meet them, wondering what would happen next. How would the doctor take this method of letting him know that somebody wanted to see him?
She came up in time to see a small, neat, pink-faced man, with a bowler hat and white chamois leather gloves, leaning over into the back of his car and opening both the side doors.
“What’s that?” he was saying. “Toothache? Nancy? Ruth? Oh, all right, Peggy, I know the young woman you mean. How many of you are there? So these are the Swallows? I’ve heard of them from your Uncle Jim. Four of them, and then . . . What? Dorothea and Dick? All right. Let them all come. The car’s meant to hold four, so there ought to be room for a mere eight. Last come first served. Dorothea, did they say your name was? Hop in here. No, I won’t have more than one in front. It’s none too easy driving, even with chains. Make sure that door’s shut.”
They were off.
“We’ll be having the lake frozen over if it goes on like this,” said the doctor over his shoulder.
“What’s the good?” said Peggy, from behind. “We’re all going back to school in three days’ time. Day after tomorrow’s our last day.”
“I’d forgotten that,” said the doctor. “Hullo. Steady then.” The car skidded a little in the snow as he turned a bend on a steep little dip in the road.
In a very few minutes the car was turning in at Beckfoot. The front door opened as it pulled up. Somebody must have been watching for it from a window. Again Dorothea had that queer, unpleasant feeling that somehow it would have been better if they had not been there.
“Will you come straight up, doctor?” said Mrs Blackett. “I’m so glad they were able to catch you. And you children can wait in the study a few minutes. No, Peggy, not in the dining-room. Nancy was in there a long time holding her head to the fire . . .”
Dorothea saw Susan and John look seriously at each other, but not even Peggy said anything. There was a general wiping of boots (Roger was caught and brought back for this purpose before he had taken much snow into the house). Then the seven went into a room in which a fire had only just been lighted. Dick at once noticed a microscope under a glass cover. Titty and Dorothea went straight to the bookshelves, but the books seemed to be mostly about geography, chemistry, mining and such things.
“Uncle Jim uses this room when he’s at home,” Peggy explained. “These are all the things he hasn’t got room for in the houseboat.”
“What houseboat?” asked Dick.
“On the lake,” said Peggy, “between Holly Howe and our island.”
Nobody sat down. They wandered about the room, looking at things, touching the queer paper weights on the desk, mostly lumps of dark stone with a glitter of metal in them, and staring up at a bundle of spears, a couple of spotted leopard-skin shields, and an assegai, a club with a large round knob at the end of it, and the jawbone of some big fish, dried and mounted on a wooden plaque. At any other time there would have been talk about these things, but just then even Dick was wondering what was happening upstairs, and whether Captain Nancy was going to be all right for the expedition to the Pole.
At last they heard a door open up on the landing, and the doctor’s voice, “You’ll just have to make the best of it, Nancy, and keep away from looking-glasses . . .” Then they heard him coming downstairs with Mrs Blackett . . . “Mumps, my dear madam, mumps. She’ll have a face like a pumpkin tomorrow. Of course . . . Yes, keep her in bed and keep her warm. The sooner the swelling comes up, the sooner it’ll be, down again . . . Three to four weeks. Oh, no. She’ll not be free from infection till at least a week after the swelling’s gone down.”
“And what about Peggy?”
“You’ll have to isolate her, of course. Not that it really matters . . . Some schools . . .”
The drawing-room door closed, and they heard no more.
“If it’s mumps,” said Susan, “she won’t be able to come to the North Pole.”
“Well, we can’t go then,” said John.
“We’ll have to put it off for another year,” said Peggy.
“We shan’t be here another year,” said Titty. “Not in winter.”
“What’s that
noise?” said Dick suddenly.
There was the slow creak of a door being stealthily opened upstairs, and then, very low, but still loud enough for everybody to hear it, a very bad imitation of an owl.
“Tu-whooooooo . . . Whooooooooo.”
“It’s Nancy,” whispered Peggy.
“They simply can’t do owls,” said Roger. “She ought to have done a duck.”
But nobody heard him. Peggy first, they had hurried out into the hall.
A queer figure was leaning over the banisters above them. In blue pyjamas, with a handkerchief round her face, and her red woolly outdoor cap pulled right down over the handkerchief, Nancy looked a good deal more piratical than usual.
She held one hand to her jaw, and spoke in a dreadful whisper:
“Mumps!”
“We know,” said Susan. “We’re most awfully sorry.”
“And the day after tomorrow’s the last day,” said Peggy.
“There’s no point in going to the Pole without you,” said John. “And it wouldn’t be fair, anyhow.”
Nancy began a laugh, but the expression of her face changed suddenly, and she put up the other hand, tenderly, as if she were going to put a broken jaw back into place.
“Galoots!” she whispered. “Galoots! Oh, donks, idiots, turnipheads! Don’t you see it’s the very best thing that could have happened? It just puts everything right. It’s saved the whole expedition. It means another whole month to the holidays. And the lake’ll be frozen all over long before the end of a month. The expedition will go to the Pole in the proper way, over the Arctic ice.”