Pigeon Post

  Nancy, under cover of the tussock, raised herself inch by inch to look out.

  “We can’t let him come up here,” she said.

  “We can’t stop him,” said John.

  “Of course we can,” said Nancy. “If he’s looking for our gold he won’t want us to see him find it. He won’t want us to see even where he’s looking. He won’t go anywhere where he sees us, at least, he won’t if he’s after the gold. If he isn’t, it doesn’t matter either way. We’ve got to be all over the place. We’ll soon see if he’s prospecting or not.”

  “He’s opening his map,” said Susan, who alone had never stirred. “He’s sitting down.”

  “Back to us,” said Nancy. “What luck. Clear off, everybody. We mustn’t all be in a bunch. Go on. Get as far as you can towards him without being seen. Spread out and be doing something. Do anything. Look for white heather. There isn’t any, but it doesn’t matter. Look for birds …”

  “Or lizards,” said Dick.

  “Why not caterpillars?” said Roger.

  “Caterpillars’ll do very well,” said Nancy. “There are those big velvety ones in the heather.”

  “What shall I do?” asked Dorothea.

  “You and Titty can go for a walk,” said Nancy. “But walk the right way and be well away from the rest of us before you start.”

  “You mustn’t let him think we’re doing it on purpose,” said Susan. “He may not be a rival at all. And if he talks to you, Roger, you’re to remember that these are the holidays and he isn’t a schoolmaster …”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Roger.

  “Oh yes, you do,” said John. “No secret cheekiness. That’s what she means. And you jolly well know it.”

  “Everybody as polite as pie,” said Peggy.

  “No talking if you can help it,” said Susan.

  “Don’t waste time,” said Nancy. “I’m off. Get away as quick as you can … Spread right out … So that whichever way he goes there’ll be somebody …”

  “Come on, Dot,” said Titty.

  “What about our knapsacks?”

  “Mine’s got an orange in it for later on,” said Roger.

  “Better take them,” said Susan. “I’ll take the empty pigeon-basket.”

  John went one way, Nancy another, followed by Peggy. Susan, bending low, was creeping directly towards the ridge where Squashy Hat was sitting with his back to her, looking at his map. Nancy’s plans were all very well, but Squashy Hat was a stranger, and if there was any talking to be done, she would rather do it herself. Titty or Roger might go and say something to him that would be difficult to explain. Dick and Roger were running side by side towards a big patch of waist-deep heather, their eyes on the enemy, ready at any moment to stop and be looking for caterpillars if he showed a sign of turning round. Dorothea and Titty were alone.

  “If we creep along behind these rocks we’re all right,” said Dorothea. “And once we get into the bracken we can crawl along as far as we like.”

  They set off. John, Susan, Roger, and Dick had vanished altogether. Now and then they caught glimpses of the red woolly caps of Nancy and Peggy.

  “They always forget those caps,” said Titty. “Anybody can see them miles away.”

  But presently they were in tall bracken and could see nobody at all. They crawled, bending low, so that anybody looking at the bracken would have thought that a sheep was pushing its way through beneath the waving fronds.

  “Sure we’re going the right way?” said Dorothea.

  “Yes,” said Titty. “Look at Kanchenjunga. We can’t go wrong, or at least not very, if we keep him behind our right shoulders.”

  They could not move fast, and they were both very hot and out of breath when Titty stopped short in the bracken.

  “I’m going to stand up and have a look,” she said.

  “Shall I, too?” said Dorothea.

  “Half a second,” said Titty.

  Cautiously she lifted her head. They were on the top of a low bracken-covered ridge. A couple of hundred yards off she could see Squashy Hat.

  “Now’s your chance,” she whispered. “He’s looking the other way!”

  Squashy Hat, tall, thin, with stooping shoulders, was looking at his map again. He was standing up on a pile of rocks that rose out of the heather. From this small height he was looking across High Topps towards the place where the woods dropped down from it into the valley of the Amazon. Titty and Dorothea looked that way, too, wondering what had become of Dick, Roger, John, and Susan.

  Squashy Hat swung slowly round. They both dropped to their knees in the tall bracken.

  “I’m going to have another look,” said Titty, at last. “I simply must get up. There’s an old bracken stalk running into my knee … Hullo. He’s off. He’ll be running into one of them any minute.”

  Dorothea rose, too.

  Squashy Hat, the folded map in his hands, was walking, long-legged, through the heather.

  “Look, look. There’s Susan.”

  Somehow or other, out of nowhere in particular, Susan had appeared. She was standing in the heather, with her back to Squashy Hat, and nobody could have guessed for a moment that she knew that he was there.

  “He’s seen her.”

  “Guilty conscience,” said Titty. “I thought so. He is looking for the gold and doesn’t want us to know it.”

  Squashy Hat had stopped short, changed course, and was swerving away to the right. They could see that now and then he glanced at Susan, who, for her part, was sauntering as well as anybody can saunter in heather.

  “He’s going to get round beyond her,” said Dorothea.

  They watched for minutes that seemed hours.

  Suddenly Squashy Hat checked again.

  “He’s seen somebody else,” said Titty. “Good. Good. I was afraid nobody could have got there in time. But I can’t see who it is.”

  “On that rock,” said Dorothea. “Something moving.”

  Just for a moment, far away, they caught sight of John on a far-away clump of rocks, looking at the summit of Kanchenjunga through the telescope.

  Squashy Hat turned uncertainly and came wandering back. He left Susan well on his right, and then, as if by accident, changed course again to go up on High Topps between the sauntering Susan and the patch of deep bracken from which Titty and Dorothea were watching him.

  “Ought we to go that way to frighten him off?” asked Dorothea.

  “Perhaps we ought,” said Titty. “Or one of us. I’ll go. Somebody ought to be here in case he comes this way.”

  She hesitated a moment, and then was glad she had not started.

  Suddenly, in the heather right in the path that Squashy Hat was taking, they saw a small boy, and heard an eager yell.

  “Hi! Dick. I’ve got a beauty!” That was Roger shouting.

  “Is it a fox-moth larva?” came Dick’s answer. And they caught the sparkle of the sunshine on his spectacles.

  Squashy Hat changed his course again and came walking almost directly towards Titty and Dorothea. He took off his squashy hat and wiped his face with a handkerchief. Then he put his hat on again and came steadily on, along a well-trodden sheep track. He was fanning himself with his folded map, and looking very bothered.

  He was close to them when they heard him talking to himself. “Straordinary thing,” he was saying. “Never would have thought it … Whole place seething with children … Oh, I beg your pardon.” He had suddenly seen Dorothea and Titty pushing their way through the bracken only a yard or two away.

  He was off again, moving along the edge of the Topps not very far above the Dundale road from which he had come. Then he seemed to think better of it, and turned right once more, as if to strike up into the heart of the wilderness. But there, right in his path, suddenly appeared a girl with a red knitted cap, making a very good show of using her red cap as a butterfly net in an unsuccessful chase of a white butterfly. And far away beyond the entomologist they could see another red
cap. What Nancy was doing, they could not see. But she was there, for a few minutes later they saw Squashy Hat swerve off once more, and this time he seemed to have made up his mind that there were too many people about for whatever he had meant to do, for he held right on along the edge of the Topps, and did not bear north again until he was climbing the lower slopes of Grey Screes.

  One by one the prospectors came together once more.

  “Well done, everybody,” said Nancy. “And you saw the way he shied. Anybody could tell he was up to no good.”

  “What’s he doing now?” said Roger.

  Nobody could quite make out, even with the telescope. Squashy Hat seemed to be busy with something high on the side of Grey Screes about opposite the middle of the Topps. Through the telescope they could see that he was climbing among the rocks, but he seemed to spend a long time in one place, and once or twice people thought they had heard the faint click, click of a distant hammer.

  “Bet he’s just gone up there to be able to see where we’re prospecting,” said Nancy.

  “Well, there’s no need to show him,” said John.

  “He won’t stay up there for ever,” said Nancy.

  But Squashy Hat seemed to be in no hurry. The afternoon slipped away, while the prospectors lay in the heather and watched their rival. They looked at two more of the old workings, not in the least likely ones, because there was no heather anywhere near. They did quite a lot of stone-breaking, but found nothing that Dick thought was anything like the proper colour to be gold. But, with Squashy Hat up there on the hillside above them, they did no more of the regular combing of the wilderness.

  At last they saw him turn back. Instead of coming straight across the Topps, he came down by the way he had gone up, which showed clearly that he had had his eye on the eight who were watching him. He came down to the Dundale road and then strode steadily along it.

  “Going back to Atkinson’s,” said Nancy.

  “To have his tea,” said Roger, and Susan looked at her watch.

  “We’re going to be late,” she said.

  “Oh, look here,” said Nancy. “Now’s our chance. Let’s spread out again and search another strip. Don’t be a Great-Aunt.”

  “We’re late already,” said Susan.

  John agreed with Susan.

  “We’ve done him for today, anyhow,” said Titty.

  “But we’ve done hardly anything ourselves,” said Nancy. “And we never will get anything done while he’s at Atkinson’s, close to the Topps, and we’re right down in the bottom of the valley. If only the beck wasn’t dry and we could camp up here, we could be looking for gold before he gets up, and after he clears off to hog his ill-earned grub.”

  They went slowly back across the Topps to the Great Wall and Tyson’s wood. They went down the gully, past the bramble thicket, and not even Susan objected when, instead of going straight down the path, they turned through the bushes to have another melancholy look at the old pitstead of the charcoal-burners. Nobody could have dreamed of a finer place for their camp, with its clear patch of levelled ground where the charcoal-burners had had their fire, and the trees all round it to give shade, and the old ash that might have been specially planted to allow a sentinel to look out over the tops of the other trees and to see what the enemy might be doing at the farm on the further side of the Dundale Road.

  “If only there was a drop of water,” said Peggy.

  “But there isn’t,” said John, “and no hope of any.”

  “Oh well,” said Nancy at last. “Come on. Down to Tyson’s. Supper in the parlour. Bed in the dormitory. You can’t call that beastly orchard anything else.”

  Mrs Tyson was waiting for them when they came home.

  “This won’t do, Miss Nancy,” she said. “You’re more’n an hour late, and the chops I’d on for you’ll be pretty near cinders.”

  CHAPTER XII

  POT OF PAINT

  THEY were still at breakfast next day when a motor-car drew up in the farmyard with a squeak of brakes and the sudden scrape of locked wheels on the stones.

  “It’s mother!” cried Nancy, and jumped up. “I bet it means Timothy’s at the station.”

  They ran out into the yard. But Mrs Blackett had not come to announce the arrival of the armadillo.

  “Good morning,” she said. “No. Nothing’s come. But look here, Nancy, you’ve got to do something about your Post Office. Hours of delivery … most irregular … Not fair on the public to ring them up at dawn …”

  “Dawn?”

  “Five o’clock this morning. Dick’s horrible invention began to do its worst. We did our best to sleep through it, but couldn’t. In the end I had to get up and go down to the pigeon-loft. It’s very pleasant out of doors at that time of the morning, but I’d rather have had my sleep out all the same.”

  “But we sent the pigeon off quite early,” said Roger.

  “The bell began at five o’clock this morning.”

  “It was that wretched Sappho,” said Nancy.

  “Perhaps we’d given her too much to eat,” said Peggy.

  “I did give her some hemp,” said Titty.

  “Hemp!” said Nancy. “You must never give them hemp before a flight. But I expect she’d have dawdled, anyway.”

  “Oh, Sappho! Sappho!” said Titty, who was looking into the basket that Mrs Blackett had brought with her.

  “Sappho, indeed,” said Mrs Blackett. “Just idling about and then waking people up at five o’clock.”

  “Good,” said Roger. “You’ve brought her back. So we’ve three pigeons in hand.”

  “Two and a half,” said Mrs Blackett. “I don’t think Sappho ought to count.”

  “She always was undependable,” said Nancy.

  “Well, don’t use her if you don’t have to. The other two were always better, weren’t they? … Ah, how do you do, Mrs Tyson. I hope they’re not giving you too much trouble …”

  “So long as there’s no fires, I won’t complain. Fires is what I’m afraid of, with no water coming down the becks and all as dry as tinder. But if they could be more on time at night … With the farm to run and all, I can’t be waiting about keeping meals ready …” And with that, Mrs Tyson made room in the doorway for Mrs Blackett and they went into the farmhouse for a little private talk, leaving the indignant and bothered prospectors in the farmyard.

  “Did you hear that?” said Nancy. “And it isn’t as if we’d lit any. The mates haven’t even had a chance of boiling a kettle. And if only she’d let us do our own cooking, it wouldn’t matter to her how late we were.”

  “It’s jolly unfair,” said Roger.

  “Look here, mother,” said Nancy, when Mrs Blackett came out again, “couldn’t you persuade her to let us cook? It’s simply awful having to start home ages before we’re ready.”

  But Mrs Blackett would not even try. “It would be all very well,” she said, “if there was water anywhere else. But there isn’t, and Mrs Tyson might easily say she wouldn’t have you here at all. I wouldn’t blame her if she did. And as for starting home early, just think how much earlier you’d have to start if you had to come all the way home to Beckfoot. No. I’m afraid you’ll have to make the best of it. And do, please, try to be in time for meals.”

  “If it rains and the beck on the Topps fills up again, it’d be all right for us to camp up there.”

  “I suppose it would,” said Mrs Blackett. “But it doesn’t look much like rain. Well, good luck to you. I’m glad you saw nothing of your rival …”

  “But we did. Almost as soon as we’d sent off Sappho. He was charging about all over the place. But we fended him off …”

  “Oh, Nancy!” said her mother, and looked at Susan.

  “It was quite all right,” said Titty. “He went away of his own accord.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said Mrs Blackett. “But don’t go and get into trouble with strangers. Better keep out of his way.”

  Already she was sitting in the driving-se
at and racing the engine. “And now,” she said, “I must hurry back to my plasterers and painters. You needn’t send a pigeon today. But I’ll expect one tomorrow. Homer or Sophocles. Not Sappho, if you please.” Rattletrap leapt forward. Mrs Blackett waved a hand, clutched at the wheel with it, missed the gatepost by an inch, and was gone.

  “Homer and Sophocles ought to give Sappho a talking to,” said Dorothea.

  “They’ll have a chance today,” said Titty, as she opened the door of the basket and let Sappho join the other pigeons in the big cage.

  *

  It was perhaps two hours later, but to Roger, lying in the bracken at the roadside, just opposite the gate to Atkinson Ground, it seemed much more like four. The expedition had been split in half. “We can’t keep out of his way,” Nancy had said, “if we don’t know where he is.” When, after waiting a long time for their sandwiches and thermos flasks, they had at last climbed the wood and come out on the Topps above the Great Wall, they had seen no signs of their rival. John had pointed out that he might have gone off the other way, and it had been decided that Peggy must lead a scouting expedition, while John, Susan, Nancy, and Dick went on with the combing of the Topps. Everybody knew that Dick was too absent-minded for scouting, and, as a geologist, he was needed by the prospectors. Nancy would have liked to go scouting down to Atkinson’s herself, but Peggy was the only one of the more experienced scouts who had not been at Mrs Atkinson’s when the pioneers had first learnt that Squashy Hat was lodging there. It would never have done if Mrs Atkinson had recognised them and told Squashy Hat who they were. So Peggy had planted Dorothea with a whistle in a good place well above the Dundale road, Titty at the point where the road dived down below the wood, and Roger opposite Atkinson’s gate, while she herself had crept through the trees to the Atkinsons’ garden and seen Squashy Hat smoking an after-breakfast pipe. She had come back and signalled this news to Roger. He had signalled it to Titty. She had signalled it to Dorothea, and Dorothea, after whistling to attract their attention, had signalled on the single letter “Q” to let the prospectors know that they could work in peace for the enemy was safely in his earth. Then Peggy had once more gone down through the trees into the enemy’s country, and Roger, for a very long time indeed, had been lying on his stomach looking out across the road between the stalks of the bracken. Fern-like fronds of bracken shaded his head, but the sun scorched his back and two flies seemed to be taking turns in settling on his nose. They were small and black, but, he thought, very brainy for their size. Again and again he had waited with hand poised ready to bat them when they perched. Again and again he had been too late and batted his nose from which a fly had flown just as his hand came down. It was too hot, and batting his nose made him hotter. Besides, he ought to be keeping still, and he changed his plan and let the flies have things their own way and showed how an Indian would behave, stirring not at all, while a fly with cool, sticky, tiny feet, moved up his nose, down it, circled its tip, and walked slowly up one side of it. By squinting he could almost see it, not properly, but bigger than it really was, close under his eye.