Pigeon Post

  “Then why didn’t you come?”

  “We couldn’t,” said Titty. “But it was quite all right. And we went on and on and came out at Slater Bob’s quarry. It’s no good going in now, John …”

  But John, torch in hand, was following the string into the tunnel.

  “Do you mean you got right through to Slater Bob’s?” said Nancy. “Why, he told me this end was all timbered and rotten and not safe. We’ll go through now. We’ll go through right away. We’ve got a grand lot of gold dust. It’ll save a whole day. The sooner we get him to make the ingot the better. Look here. I’ll race back to the gulch for the dust. And we’ll want the lantern, too …”

  “But we can’t,” said Titty. “Slater Bob’s not on our side any more. He’s in with Squashy Hat … He’s been seeing him again and again … He admitted it, didn’t he, Dot? It isn’t safe to tell him anything. I was in a stew all the time for fear he would ask us about the gold …”

  Nancy, who had been on the point of galloping off, stopped short.

  “You didn’t tell him?” she said.

  “Not a word,” said Titty. “But he told us Squashy knew everything about mining, and you could see by the way he said it whose side he was on.

  “Well, that busts everything,” said Nancy. “No wonder Squashy’s been spying on us and creeping nearer and nearer. And think of telling him when he’d promised he wouldn’t. You simply can’t trust natives when they get together.”

  “What are we to do?” said Dorothea.

  “Can’t we make an ingot ourselves?” said Nancy.

  She looked at Dick.

  Just then John came back out of the tunnel. He had a cut end of string in his hand and was coiling it up. He unfastened the other end of the string from the clump of heather. His face had gone quite white, and he looked queerly at Titty and Roger.

  “Come on,” Peggy was saying. “Let’s all go into the tunnel, anyway.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” said John. “Not now …”

  Nancy glanced at John. What was the matter with him?

  “Get Susan away,” whispered John, for Nancy alone. “Don’t let her go in …”

  Just for one moment Nancy hesitated. Then her clear voice rang out again.

  “No good going through to the enemy,” she said. “Waste of time. No good talking to Slater Bob if he and Squashy are allies against us. Look here, Professor, how do they get an ingot out of the raw stuff? … Come on, Susan …”

  John and Nancy were already moving away from the rocks where the tunnel came out of the hill. The others moved with them. Only Peggy hung back for a moment, wanting to explore the end of the tunnel, but got such a look from Nancy that, though she did not know the reason, she gave it up and hurried after them.

  “Roger, what are you doing?” said Susan suddenly.

  “Tightening my belt,” said Roger. “We’ve had nothing to eat since breakfast.”

  “Nobody’s had any, thanks to you people,” said John.

  “It’s all spoilt and gone cold and greasy by now,” said Susan.

  “I bet it’s jolly good,” said Roger.

  “Let’s go and eat it, anyhow,” said John.

  They hurried across the Topps, talking less of the passage through the mountain than of the treachery of Slater Bob in making friends with the enemy in spite of all his promises.

  “Susan,” said Titty suddenly, as they came near the Great Wall, “has the pigeon gone? You haven’t told Mrs Blackett about any one being lost? …”

  “We were just going to,” said Susan.

  “How awful,” said Titty.

  “We ought to send him off at once,” said Nancy.

  And before they settled down to eat the dinner that Susan had cooked for them so long ago, Sophocles was flying on his way.

  No one could have guessed from the message he carried how very different a message might have been sent a little earlier.

  “We must tell mother not to let out to anybody we’ve found gold,” said Nancy. “She might easily meet Slater Bob.”

  So the message ran:-

  “KEEP OUR SECRET EVEN FROM VENERABLE SLATERS. THIS IS IMPORTANT. ALL WELL. NO TIME FOR MORE S.A.D.M.C.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  “WE’VE GOT TO DO IT ALL OURSELVES”

  IN the ordinary way nobody much likes steak-and-kidney pudding that has been boiled at one o’clock, emptied out of its tins at two, and eaten all cold and greasy at six. But today the starving prospectors’ only thought seemed to be that they could have done with a little more of it. People were seen to scrape up even the grease with bits of bread, to eat those bits of bread as if they enjoyed them, and to lick their fingers afterwards. The beans were rather sad and flabby, but Susan hotted up the potatoes again while the pudding was being eaten. They made a separate course, and it was found that ginger beer had a very good effect in clearing off the film of grease which had coated everybody’s tongue.

  They had eaten the potatoes and were well into the apple course (two Newtown pippins apiece) before they could forget their hunger and turn to serious talk.

  “Well,” said Nancy. “We’ve got to manage without getting any help from Slater Bob. Everybody agreed?”

  Dick was wiping his spectacles. At the time, when he had heard the way Slater Bob spoke of Squashy Hat, he had agreed with Titty. But now he was not so sure. There was so much he wanted to ask.

  “Couldn’t we go and see him without telling him everything?” he said.

  “But we don’t want to,” said Nancy. “Not with him and Squashy being blood brothers and all that.”

  “But perhaps they aren’t,” said Dick.

  “Of course they are,” said Titty. “You heard what Slater Bob said.”

  “Couldn’t we manage to show our stuff to Slater Bob without telling him just where we found it?”

  “But why?”

  “Just to make sure,” said Dick.

  “Oh look here,” said Nancy. “Squashy knows exactly where we’ve been, and if we go and show Bob what we’ve found, they’ll put their horrid heads together and they’ll both know what we’ve found and where we’ve found it, and our claim’ll be jumped before Uncle Jim knows we’ve staked it.”

  “It isn’t as if we really knew,” said Dick. “And with Slater Bob knowing all about it … He’d tell us just what to do.”

  “Isn’t it all in the book?” said Nancy.

  Dick looked at the red book from which, indeed, he had hardly been parted since the expedition began. He had read the chapters on gold mining again and again, but a few words of advice from a real miner would be worth a lot of reading. There was all that stuff about assaying and chemical tests. There was a chapter on iron smelting that he thought might help, but there was nothing in the book about turning gold dust into ingots.

  John, for once, was more inclined to agree with Dick than with Nancy.

  “If they’re really working together,” he said, “why doesn’t Squashy come along to the gulch to see what we’re doing?”

  “He’s getting nearer every day,” said Nancy. “He’d have been in it, all right, if it wasn’t for us being always there.”

  Captain John jumped to his feet.

  “There’s been nobody on guard for ages!”

  “And we left the gold dust in the mine,” cried Nancy. “Galoots we are. Bobtailed galoots and gummocks. Come on. He may be there now.”

  Susan was just beginning to wipe the grease off the plates with handfuls of dry moss, dropping the moss into the fire, where the grease sizzled and spat.

  “No more meals tonight,” she said. “But there’ll be hot cocoa last thing. We’ve a lot of milk to spare with drinking grog instead of tea, and we’ve got that cocoa to use up. I emptied it into a paper bag to make room for the gold.”

  “Who’s coming?” said John.

  “We all are,” said Titty.

  “Peggy and I have got to wash up,” said Susan. “And Roger’s done enough for one day. No po
int in his making two journeys to the gulch. Unless he’ll do without his cocoa …”

  “Oh, I say,” said Roger.

  “Or sleep in his tent for a change …”

  “No, no,” said Roger.

  “Right,” said Susan. “Then you stay here now and help scrub Mrs Tyson’s saucepan.”

  “Whoever’s coming had better come,” said John. ‘There’s been no one on guard since we stopped work and started looking for the others.”

  “I saw him going home,” said Titty.

  “A hundred years ago,” said Nancy. “Come on, John.”

  And the two captains, followed by Titty, Dorothea and the much-worried geologist, hurried off to Golden Gulch.

  *

  “Gosh,” said John, as he stopped and crawled into the mine. “I went and left the lantern burning. If he’s been in here and spotted that, he’s discovered the whole thing.”

  “It’s all right,” said Nancy. “If anybody’d been in who didn’t know, they’d have gone ker-wallop over the crushing mill. I left it just inside the doorway and it’s still there.”

  “No blood on it?” said Titty.

  “Not a drop, and it’s just where I left it, anyway.”

  “Where’s the gold?” said Dorothea.

  “Here,” said Nancy. “He can’t have been here or he’d have swiped it. I had the whole lot in the frying-pan when Susan came stewing along to say you idiots had disappeared.”

  In the dim light of the lantern she was carefully raking the gold dust together and working it over the edge of the pan into the cocoa-tin.

  “I say,” said Titty, “you’ve done a jolly good lot.”

  “We’d have done a lot more if you people hadn’t got lost. The tin’s only a bit more than half full.”

  “How big ought an ingot to be?” asked Dorothea.

  “It can’t be too big,” said Titty. “How big an ingot do you think we’ll be able to make out of that?”

  Dick was looking doubtfully at the cocoa-tin and at the damp glittering dust that was still sticking to the bottom of the frying-pan.

  “It’s sure to get a good deal smaller when it’s all melted,” he said.

  “You’ll be able to do it all right, won’t you?” said Dorothea.

  “I wish you’d let me go and ask him about it first.”

  “Who? Squashy?” said Nancy.

  “Slater Bob,” said Dick. “If he hasn’t been here, perhaps they’re not in league after all.”

  Just for a moment even Nancy seemed a little doubtful. She was thinking, perhaps, if they could not find some way of asking Slater Bob about the making of ingots without giving away the secret that they had already found the gold out of which an ingot was to be made. After all, Slater Bob himself had told them where to look. Squashy Hat had been messing about on the hillside above them making his splashes of white paint all in a line, a sinister pointer, coming daily nearer and nearer to their mine. But, if Squashy Hat knew all that Slater Bob had told them, it was certainly funny that he had been content to spy from far away and had not taken his chance of coming down into the gulch when they had left it unguarded for so long.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Nancy.

  Nobody had ever heard her say anything like that before.

  John turned out the lantern, and they went out into the August evening, standing up in the gulch after stooping through the opening.

  And then suddenly, their doubts were settled for them.

  Dorothea trod on a matchbox.

  It crunched under her foot, and, as she stooped to pick it up, she saw that there was something very queer about it.

  Every day they had been most careful to leave nothing in the gulch that might betray the entry to the old working. The notice warning jumpers to beware had been planted in the middle of the little valley so that anybody might find it and read it and be warned off without discovering just where was the hidden vein of quartz and gold. Today, when Susan, full of native worry, had called them to look for the four who had vanished into the mountain, John and Nancy had not left the gulch before tidying everything away, stowing even the crushing mill out of sight inside the mine. For one moment she thought that, after all, they had overlooked one of the camp matchboxes. There were plenty of them. Even Roger had a matchbox for lighting the little lantern in his tent. And John or Nancy might have dropped a matchbox after lighting the lantern in the mine. But one glance at it, as it lay at her feet in the dusk, showed Dorothea that this was something else.

  She was startled into making a sort of sighing gulp.

  The others turned to look at her.

  “You haven’t gone and sprained your ankle?” said Titty, remembering Roger’s squeak when he had twisted his.

  “Look!” said Dorothea.

  “He’s been here,” cried Nancy, almost as if she was pleased.

  She picked up the matchbox and looked at it. The others crowded round. Anybody could see it was not one of their own. For one thing, it was a different shape, not so deep. For another, instead of the familiar picture of Noah’s Ark, there was a red triangle with an eye in the middle of it and red rays going in all directions.

  “I say,” said Nancy. “Giminy. It isn’t English at all. What’s this? ‘Phosphoros de Seguranca … Marca Registrada. Compannia Fiat Lux’…!”

  “It’s a bit like Latin,” said John.

  The matchbox was squashed flat. Nancy pinched it into shape again.

  “Well,” she said. “He hasn’t been in the mine but he’s been jolly near.”

  “What are we going to do about it?” said John.

  “Go and leave it at Atkinson’s,” said Nancy. “So that he’ll see we know what he’s been up to. That ought to warn him off.”

  They climbed the side of the gulch and looked out over the Topps. No one was in sight.

  “Come on,” said Nancy. “We’ve just time before dark. We’ll go and leave it in the porch at Atkinson’s, and then you can pick up Roger on the way back. They’ll be having that cocoa ready, too. Come on.”

  Tired though they were after that long day, Titty, Dick and Dorothea hurried after them as John and Nancy set off for the Dundale road. All the time they kept looking about them, but saw nothing moving.

  “He’ll be at home, I bet you anything,” said Nancy. “Well, who thinks now he isn’t after our gold? Bob must have told him everything.”

  Nobody wanted to wait as sentinel at the edge of the Topps. All five of them ran down the road, and, led by John and Nancy, snaked along through the trees beside the cart track going down to Atkinson’s.

  It was falling dusk and there was already a light in one of the downstairs windows of the farm, looking out into the little garden.

  “Sh,” said Nancy. “Wait …” She slipped off alone along under the garden wall. For a moment they saw her stooping in the porch. A minute later she was with them again.

  “Listen,” she whispered. “The Atkinsons are all at the other side of the house. That’s his window. Let’s just make sure he’s at home. Keep close to the wall. If we get across to that holly bush we’ll be able to see in.”

  The first bats were swinging overhead against a still pale sky as they crept round the garden and reached the holly bush.

  “He’s there,” said John.

  “What about that?” gasped Nancy. “Look at that table …”

  They could see through the window, open in the summer evening. Squashy Hat in his shirt sleeves was sitting in an armchair, with his feet, in bedroom slippers, cocked up on another. On the table were the remains of a supper, but it was not at this that they were looking. The white cloth covered only half the table. On the other half were some books, with a map thrown loosely on the top of them. And beside these books, gleaming in the light of an oil lamp, were half a dozen large bits of white quartz.

  SCOUTS AT DUSK

  “Let’s just charge,” said Titty.

  “Quiet,” said John. “Don’t go and tread on a twig. We know
now for certain. That’s enough. Let’s get out.”

  Not another word was said until they were back once more on the Dundale road.

  “Well,” said Nancy, “that means it isn’t safe to say a word to anybody. We’ve simply got to do the whole thing ourselves.”

  “Dick’ll manage, all right,” said Dorothea.

  “We’ll want a lot of charcoal,” said Dick.

  “We know how to make charcoal,” said Nancy. “We’ve watched the Billies often enough.”

  “And a proper blast furnace,” said Dick. “You can’t get a hot enough fire any other way.”

  “What’s it like?” said Nancy.

  “It needs a bellows,” said Dick.

  “Mother’s got a beauty,” said Nancy, “in the drawing-room. Come on and tell the others. Even Susan’ll see it’s serious now.”

  *

  They came back to the camp to find Susan stirring the cocoa rather grimly, and Roger, oddly silent, watching her. She had heard, at last, the whole dreadful story of how the tunnel had fallen in on the heels of the explorers. You would have thought that by this time it was too late for even a native to be much upset, seeing that everybody was alive and well, but Susan could not stop herself from thinking of what so easily might have been.

  They told her of the finding of the matchbox in the gulch and of how they had actually seen Squashy in his room at Atkinson’s with lumps of quartz on the table beside him.

  “So it’s all settled,” said Nancy. “We’ve got to manage without getting any help at all. Someone’s got to go to Beckfoot tomorrow to get hold of the drawing-room bellows. And Dick wants a crucible and a blowpipe.”

  “I don’t care what we do,” said Susan, “so long as there is no more going into tunnels.”

  “There won’t be,” said Nancy.

  John and Titty looked at each other, and looked away again. What would Susan be saying if she had actually seen what John had seen, the string going into the hill and ending under a huge fall of rock and rotten timbers?