Pigeon Post

  “Ages ago,” said Titty.

  What little wind there was had been blowing from the south. There was a sudden change. The smoke rolled towards them as if Kanchenjunga had puffed at it. A moment later it rolled back again and they saw that in a dozen places the flames beneath it had leapt nearer.

  “It’s coming this way,” said Roger.

  “Yes it is,” said Dorothea.

  “We’ve got to save the camp,” said Titty. “Once it gets to the trees nothing’ll stop it. Come on. Get the tents down.”

  There was another sudden hot breath from Kanchenjunga across the Topps, another loud crackling as the fire leapt forward over the dry bent, and some patches of bracken flared up into the smoke.

  The three of them rushed down the gully and back into the camp.

  “Roll up your sleeping-bag, Roger, and get your tent down. You, too, Dot. We’ll have to do everybody’s. And then we’ll have to get them down somehow. We’ll never be able to manage the handcart by ourselves. Oh dear, and there’s the pigeon’s cage … And Sappho.”

  “Let her fly,” said Roger. “She’ll be able to look after herself.”

  Titty checked herself.

  “Well done, Rogie. We’ll send her for help. An S.O.S. Oh, if only she was Homer or Sophocles … You can’t count on Sappho. But we’ll try. Anyway, she’ll be all right. She’ll get home some time or other. What are you doing, Dot?”

  Dorothea was pushing The Outlaw of the Broads into her knapsack.

  “I must save the Outlaw,” she said.

  “Let’s have a bit of paper,” said Titty, and Dorothea, without hesitating a moment, tore off half the title-page of her precious novel.

  “And here’s a pencil,” she said.

  Titty wrote three words only:-

  “FIRE HELP QUICK.”

  She tore off the strip of paper on which she had written them and rolled it into a thin slip. Roger, who was on very good terms with Sappho, caught her without difficulty. He croodled to her to keep her calm. Dorothea was telling her to fly straight. “Keep out of the smoke and you’ll be all right. And you’ll find Dick at Beckfoot. Only do fly straight, just this once.”

  Titty slipped the message under the rubber ring on Sappho’s left leg.

  “Shall I let her go?” said Roger.

  “Not in the trees,” said Titty.

  They hurried back to the edge of the Topps. A wave of smoke rolled towards them.

  “Now,” said Titty. “Quick!”

  Roger threw the pigeon into the air.

  “You simply mustn’t hang about,” said Titty. “Go home. Quick. Quick.”

  And Sappho rose high above the smoke, and was gone.

  “She may not get home till tomorrow,” said Dorothea. “You can’t count on Sappho.”

  “Come on and pack the tents,” said Titty, and then, running down the gully, she remembered something else. Below the Great Wall was the bramble thicket. And in the bramble thicket was the hedgehog. What about him? It was no good calling to the hedgepig to come out. And if the fire came leaping down from the Topps, the bramble thicket would roar up in flames and the hedgepig would be cooked in the middle of them.

  “Never mind the tents,” she said. “We’ve got to save the hedgepig.” This was dreadful. First one thing and then another. No settled plan. Nancy or John would have thought of everything at once and there would have been none of this dithering.

  “We’ve got fire-brooms,” suggested Roger.

  “If it gets to the edge of the Topps, we’re done,” said Titty.

  “It’s blowing the other way now,” said Dorothea, who had her knapsack on her back, empty except for the Outlaw.

  At that moment the wind veered again. A hot breath blew in their faces and the smoke rolled towards them. It was only for a moment, but as the smoke rolled back and lifted, they saw that the fire had taken hold of a new wide strip of withered bent and bracken.

  Titty looked about her. They were standing on the top of the long ridge of rock that made the Great Wall. There was very little grass there for the flames to catch, none at all, except in the cracks of the stone and in the gully that made a path down into the wood. Then, beyond the Great Wall, Nancy’s turf cutting had made another obstacle for the fire, in the wide strip of ground from which the grassy clods had been lifted and used for the damping of the charcoal fire. If only the wind did not help the flames to leap across it, or send flying sparks to light the brambles and grass below the rock. Yes, there was just a chance … if the wind did not change.

  “We’ll want the fire-brooms,” said Titty. “But first we must wet all the grass along the top of the Wall …”

  “A chain of buckets going from hand to hand,” said Dorothea.

  “We’ve only got one bucket,” said Titty. “If they didn’t take it to the gulch. But there’s the kettle. If only we hadn’t used such a lot of water yesterday …”

  Roger was already in the camp and lugging a couple of the fire-brooms along the ground.

  “There’s lots of water in the well,” Titty shouted. “Kettle, Dot!”

  “The kettle’s full,” called Dorothea. “Susan filled it.”

  “Oh good,” said Titty, looking quickly round the camp. “But they’ve taken the saucepan. And they’ve got the bucket, too …”

  “There’s a biscuit tin,” said Roger. “We can eat the biscuits or put them in our pockets.”

  “Come on, then. Damping first. Fire-brooms later.” She took the big sugar tin and emptied all the lump sugar out on the ground. Susan herself would not have tried to save it. If only they had thought of anything like this happening, they would never have taken the bucket. Titty filled the sugar tin and raced after Dorothea, who had run on with the kettle.

  “What am I to do with it?” said Dorothea.

  “Wet the grass at the top of the gully,” said Titty. “Wet all the grass along the top of the rock, on this side of Nancy’s digging. The fire’ll go out if it has nothing to burn but stone.”

  Titty slopped the water out of the sugar tin. Dorothea used the kettle as a watering can, pouring the water on the dry ground, that was so dry that the water did not sink into it but lay in sparkling drops. They raced down the gully to the well, and met Roger coming carefully up with a biscuit tin full to the brim.

  “What have you been doing?” said Titty.

  “I hadn’t got room in my pockets for all the biscuits,” said Roger. “So I piled the rest in the store tent.”

  “Buck up,” said Titty. “There ought to be fifty of us instead of three.”

  The fire was nearer each time they came back to the top of the rock. It checked for some minutes at one of the ridges of stone that pushed up out of the heather. They began almost to think it had been stopped, and then they saw little flames trickling over the ridge, following the moss and grass that had found foothold between the rocks. It flared up again on the near side of the ridge as the flames caught a wide patch of bracken.

  Backwards and forwards they ran, with kettle, biscuit tin, sugar tin, pudding bowl and even washing-up basin, Titty and Dorothea managing two things at once. But after the first few journeys, the level of the water in the well began to fall. Good little spring though it was, they were taking water out faster than it was coming in.

  “It wouldn’t be much good if there were fifty of us,” said Roger at last, out of breath with running to and fro. “The well’s empty. I’ve scooped the last mud with the lid of the tin. We’ve got to give it time to fill up again.”

  “It’ll be too late,” said Dorothea.

  “John and Susan and the Amazons’ll be here soon,” said Titty, looking desperately into the high wall of smoke that was rolling towards Ling Scar and now hid even the peak of Kanchenjunga. “They’ll be able to get round behind it …”

  And then once more, when it had almost seemed that the fire was sweeping past them, the wind wavered, a line of fire raced across the ground under the smoke, and the sea of bracken, in which s
o often scouts had lurked, flared up with a crackling roar as if someone were wasting thousands of fireworks by lighting them all at once.

  “It’s coming,” said Roger. “What ought we to do about the tents? …”

  “Oh PLEASE rain … PLEASE rain …” Dorothea did not know that she was saying the words aloud.

  “Beat it out,” cried Titty. “Beat it out … wherever it starts … Look out. There’s a bit burning behind you … On the rock.”

  The fire was licking along the edge of the Topps. If the wind were to swing round to the west and stay there, nothing could save them. Even as it was, smoke filled their eyes, and sparks fluttered in the air like burning moths. They hurried this way and that along the Great Wall, stumbling, half blind, flailing away with their fire-brooms at tufts of grass that caught fire, smouldered and flared at their very feet.

  “I do wish they’d be quick,” said Titty to herself. “Stick to it, Rogie! Well done, Dot!” and then, to herself again, “We’ll never do it alone …”

  CHAPTER XXXII

  IN THE GULCH

  IN the gulch, once Dick had hurried away with his pinch of dust in his handkerchief, nothing seemed worth doing any more. While he was there, with his talk of aqua regia and tests to prove that gold was gold, everybody had felt that there was still hope. Now that he was gone, it was as if he had taken the hope with him. They could think only of the broken crucible and the worthless ashes among the ruins of the blast furnace. “Triumph in sight” had been the last message sent to Beckfoot. Today they were to have carried home the ingot. And there was no ingot. All their work had gone for nothing. Even Nancy felt it was hardly worth while going on with the quarrying and crushing until the professor came back.

  They had taken some splendid lumps of quartz seamed all over with glinting yellow out into the sunshine. It looked good enough, but was it?

  “I wonder if it is or it isn’t?” said John, turning over the best bits.

  And Nancy did not feel like shivering timbers. She said, flatly, “I don’t know.” A moment later she added, “It’s our fault, really, not Dick’s. We ought to have sweated up the chemistry ourselves.”

  “Dick nearly always is right,” said Peggy. “About things like that.”

  “Not this time,” said Susan.

  “Even if he is,” said John, “we’re not going to have time to make an ingot …”

  “We can’t go on staying if Mrs Tyson wants us to go,” said Susan.

  They went dismally back into the mine.

  In there, in the comfortable darkness, that was broken only by the dim light of the hurricane lantern hanging from the iron peg, all four miners felt more and more sleepy. After all, it was two days since anybody had had a proper night’s rest. No one was in a hurry to get back to work. They did not feel even like talking. When somebody said something it just dropped dead like a stone.

  “Dick can’t be back till pretty late,” said Susan. The others heard her, but that was all.

  “How long does it take to come from South America?” said John.

  “Not long in a fast ship,” said Nancy dully. “But ages in a tramp.” And John was too tired to ask her what was the use of an answer like that.

  “Peggy, you’re falling asleep,” said Nancy, a few minutes later.

  “Well, why not?” Peggy yawned, leaning back against the wall. Nancy said nothing. She found her own eyes closing.

  It was a long time before anybody spoke again.

  *

  Peggy opened her eyes and blinked hard. Who was asleep? Not she. And then she smiled at seeing that Nancy’s eyes were shut. John’s head had fallen forward, and Susan’s was all on one side. The lantern burned dimly on the wall of rock. What time of day was it? Perhaps no need to wake them yet. Peggy stood up and went on tiptoe, to the mouth of the cave … What on earth was happening? What were those crackling noises? And the sky was full of smoke. For one moment she could not believe it. Then she knew. It had happened, the thing people had been dreading all the summer. This was the end of everything.

  She darted back into the mine and pulled Nancy by the arm, and John.

  “Wake up,” she cried. “Nancy! John! Susan! Quick! Wake up! The fell’s on fire.”

  “What’s the matter?” said Nancy, more than half asleep.

  “Fire,” shouted Peggy. “FIRE!”

  “Don’t be a galoot,” yawned Nancy.

  “It’s not time to get up yet,” said John, stretching an arm.

  “FIRE,” yelled Peggy. “It’s a big one. Oh, Susan! Do wake up!”

  Nancy staggered to her feet and went sleepily out of the mine, steadying herself with her hands against the rocky walls. The others, rubbing their eyes and yawning, were close behind her. They were not out of the tunnel before they heard that queer running crackle of fire in short grass and smelt the smoke in the air.

  “Giminy,” said Nancy. “She’s right. Some wretched idiot’s set the fell on fire … I say, and all the fire-brooms are in the camp …”

  “What about Titty and Roger?” cried Susan.

  “And Dorothea,” said John.

  They came out into the gulch. Thick clouds of smoke were rolling high overhead. The sun showed through them like a red-hot penny, disappearing as the smoke thickened and showing again as it thinned.

  They were just bolting across the gulch when they saw that they were not alone.

  Only a few yards from the secret entry to their mine a man was lying full length on the ground, pillowed on a clump of heather. His feet were what they noticed first, large feet in heavily nailed climbing-boots. His face was hidden. He had been using a map, and had spread it over his face like a tent to keep off the sun. He was lying on his back, and his left hand rested on the pile of good lumps of quartz that John had brought out from the mine that morning. The sight of that hand, half-closed over the quartz, turned it to gold again, at least for Nancy.

  “It’s Squashy Hat,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And he’s got his paw on our gold …”

  “Gosh!” said Peggy.

  “Come on,” said John. “We’ve got to get across …”

  Susan was already climbing the other side of the gulch. The fell was on fire, and for gold and Squashy Hat she had not a thought to spare … Roger and Titty, left alone …

  “He’s asleep,” said Peggy.

  “Serve him right if we let him roast,” said Nancy, but she could hardly do that. Instead she poked him with a foot.

  “Wake up,” she said. “FIRE! Come on Peggy!” and leaving Squashy Hat to do what he thought best, she and Peggy raced after the others.

  Bracken flared in their faces and a cloud of thick smoke rolled down to meet them over the edge of the gulch. They dropped back choking.

  “It’s between us and the camp,” shouted John. “We’ll have to get round.”

  “It’ll be in the gulch in another minute,” said Nancy.

  “Prairie fire,” said a quiet voice below them. “No time to be lost. We’ve got to run for it. All right if we get away up on the Screes.”

  They looked down. Squashy Hat, whose guilty conscience had always made him bolt at the sight of them, had a voice that was somehow steadying.

  “We can’t,” said Nancy.

  “We’ve got to get back to the camp,” said Susan, desperately looking this way and that at the smoke that seemed to be coming from all sides at once.

  Squashy Hat ran up the steep slope, and stood there in the smoke.

  “You’re right,” he said, “we can’t get to the Screes. But we’ve a chance yet,” he went on, in that same steadying voice. “There’s a bit of a gap to the norrard.”

  They raced together, the four prospectors and the rival they had caught with a clutching hand actually resting on their gold. They raced along the bottom of the gulch. They came up out of the gulch at its northern end just in time to see the flames meet again beyond them. The gulch was an island in the middle of the fire.

  The island was grow
ing quickly smaller as the fire came licking through the stones from grass patch to grass patch, blazing noisily through heather and bracken.

  Squashy Hat looked anxiously round. They could see he was wondering what best to do. He spoke again, rather gravely. “The whole place’ll be ablaze in another two minutes,” he said. “Our best chance will be among those stones …”

  “But Titty and Roger …” Susan stared hopelessly into the smoke.

  “We must get back,” shouted Nancy. “Come on, you!”

  They ran back. Squashy Hat stopped on a bit of stony ground where there was not much grass to feed the fire.

  “What are you waiting for?” shouted Nancy. He might be a rival, a robber and jumper of claims, but she could not leave him to burn.

  Squashy Hat was taking off his coat. “You’d better get your heads under this,” he was saying. “But I’m afraid we’re fairly trapped.”

  “Come on,” said Nancy. “Get back into the mine …”

  “What mine?” said Squashy Hat.

  “Ours,” said Nancy. And even in that dreadful moment a note of triumph came into her voice. He had not found it. “Our mine,” she said again. “We’ll let you in, but no jumping!”

  “What do you mean?” said Squashy Hat.

  There was a sudden wide leaping flame and a roar as the fire caught the dry grass at the southern end of the gulch. There were sparks flying red in the smoke above their heads. On the further side of the gulch a patch of bracken blazed up like a bundle of fireworks.

  “Look here,” said John. “I’ve got to get across to the camp.”

  “You can’t,” said Nancy. “Get into the mine. It’s the only hope. Your getting burnt won’t help anybody. Come on. Get in, Peggy. Quick.”

  Peggy was waiting by the mouth of the old working. She stooped and was gone.

  “Well, I never saw that,” said Squashy Hat.

  “Hurry up, Susan!”

  “Go in yourself!” said John.

  “Of all the turnipheads!” said Nancy, and bolted in after Susan.

  The heather flared close above them.