Pigeon Post

  “What do you mean?” said Captain Flint.

  “We had everything ready for him,” said Dick. “We began as soon as your telegram came saying he was to be put in this room.”

  Captain Flint’s eyes, following Dick’s, came to rest on the tropical grove, and the packing-case sleeping-hutch, with its “Welcome Home” and its floral decorations. He looked closer and burst into a roar of laughter.

  “Well, it’s no good saying I wrote to explain … I found the letter unposted in my pocket aboard ship. Poor old Timothy!” He slapped his knee and laughed again.

  “Did you give him to a steward to look after?”

  “But what did you think he was?”

  “Armadillo,” said Dick, and gave his reasons.

  “Skin not thick enough,” laughed Captain Flint. “Well, we won’t disturb the sleeping arrangements you’ve made for him. Hay?… Sawdust?… He ought to be very comfortable indeed … Eh! Bless my soul! What’s that?…”

  Even Dick was startled by the suddenness of the noise.

  “Br!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!!!!…”

  There could be no possible doubt that the pigeons’ bell was in splendid working order.

  Captain Flint, old traveller as he was, admitted afterwards that he had jumped half out of his skin.

  “Br!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!!!!! …”

  Bell and tea-tray, with the kitchen passage as a sounding box, made a noise almost deafening, urgent, threatening, like an alarm clock close to a sleeper’s head.

  “What on earth’s that?”

  “Br!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!!! …”

  “It’s one of the pigeons,” said Dick. “Funny their sending one today with me here …”

  “Br!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!r!!!!! …”

  “Can’t we stop it?” said Captain Flint, with his hands to his ears.

  Dick had already heard Mrs Blackett running downstairs. He was out in the hall in a moment.

  “I’ll stop it,” he said. “It’ll only be a message for me, something Nancy thought of after I’d started.” Mrs Blackett went upstairs again to get his room ready for Captain Flint.

  Dick ran out of the back door, across the yard and up the steps to the pigeon-loft. Out there in the yard the noise of the bell was not so bad. In the pigeon-loft, Sappho could have had no idea of the dreadful din she had started in the house. She was talking quietly to Homer and Sophocles, and sipping a little water. Dick flicked back the contact wire. The ringing came to an end.

  He had already seen the tiny roll of paper fastened by the rubber band to Sappho’s leg. He had never had to take a message before. Always Peggy or Titty or Roger or Nancy had been there to handle the pigeon. His job had been with the wires and batteries and electric bells. But there was the message and he had to get it. He cooed and croodled to the pigeon as he had heard the others, and Sappho, after a little hesitation, let herself be caught. What could the message be? Something about the gold. What would they say when he brought the melancholy news that it was not gold at all? He pulled out the paper and unrolled it. Only three words. The first time he read it he hardly realised what it meant. He read it again.

  “FIRE HELP QUICK.”

  Joke? It couldn’t be a joke. He was out of the pigeon-loft in a moment, slammed the outer door on the startled pigeons, leapt the last eight steps, all but fell, picked himself up and dashed into the house.

  “I’d like to see that bell contrivance of yours,” Captain Flint was saying as they met in the passage.

  Dick held out the scrap of paper with Titty’s desperate message.

  “We’ve been afraid of it all the time,” he said.

  “Where are they?” said Captain Flint shortly.

  “At the corner of High Topps, above Mrs Tyson’s farm. At least that’s where the camp is …”

  Captain Flint ran out into the garden and looked up the valley towards Kanchenjunga and that long spur of Ling Scar that held High Topps on its further side.

  Yes. The skyline up there was dim and blurred. Smoke was drifting over the top of the ridge.

  Captain Flint was back in the house before Dick had had time to join him in the garden.

  “Molly,” he called, in a voice that brought Mrs Blackett at once to the top of the stairs.

  “What is it, Jim?”

  “What’s old Jolys’ number? …”

  “Seven something … You’ll see his fire card on the telephone. What do you want him for?”

  “Fire on High Topps. You be getting the car out while I telephone.”

  Captain Flint ran to the telephone. There, pinned to the wall, was a card neatly typewritten by Col. Jolys himself.

  Captain Flint took off the receiver and violently joggled the bracket. Mrs Blackett, her face white, was gone. There was no time for Dick to make up his mind what he ought to do. The telephone had answered. Captain Flint was talking.

  “Fellside, seven five … No … Not nine … FIVE … F for fool. I for idiot … Yes … SEVEN FIVE … Hullo … Hullo … That Jolys … Jim Turner speaking … Oh yes. Back today … Listen! Fire on High Topps … What? … Yes … Got a good hold by the look of it … Blowing from Dundale … Southerly … Right …”

  There was a sudden roar in the yard, Mrs Blackett racing Rattletrap’s engine.

  “Come on, Dick. Hop in.”

  “What about the dromed … bicycle?” said Dick.

  Captain Flint lifted it up and put it into the back of the car, its handlebars and front wheel sticking up above the back seat. The front wheel was still spinning. Dick scrambled in after it. Mrs Blackett slipped out of the driver’s seat to make room for Captain Flint. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she was saying, “I ought never to have let them camp up there in this drought.”

  “It’s all right, Molly,” said Captain Flint. “Don’t you worry.” He clicked the gears in. Rattletrap, knowing her old master, started off as if she meant it. They swung through the gate and sharp right into the road. The gears changed, second … third … “Hold tight, Dick,” said Captain Flint. “She won’t do forty except downhill, but she’s a bit of a broncho round corners …”

  The narrow road was all corners. Dick and the dromedary were sometimes sharing a seat on one side of the car and sometimes on the other. He held on as tightly as he could. Rattletrap had never moved so fast. Even in the front seats Mrs Blackett and Captain Flint were being tossed about as the old car bounced across pot-holes and over loose stones. They were not talking. Once Dick heard Captain Flint say, “Go it, old girl,” but he was speaking to Rattletrap, not to his sister. As they roared and rattled and clattered up the valley road they could see dull, grey smoke drifting along above the woods. What had happened up there? Where had the fire started? Was the camp burnt? And Dick remembered how he had tiptoed across it, leaving Dot and Titty and Roger sleeping in their tents … And the gold wasn’t gold. Every single thing had gone wrong. And now this, worst of all … What if they were too late?

  And then, on two wheels, the car shot round, over the narrow bridge, scraping one mudguard, and into the Tysons’ farmyard. It was deserted. Mrs Blackett jumped out of the car as it stopped, and ran across the yard to the path up into the wood.

  “All up at the fire,” said Captain Flint. “Hullo. Good. You’d better take one, too.”

  The neat stack of fire-brooms was gone. But three or four of the fire-brooms were lying on the ground where the stack had been. Captain Flint took one and raced up the wood after his sister. Dick took another. He ran after Captain Flint, up and up the winding path. It had been bad enough riding down it on a dromedary. But now, with the fire-broom … His heart thumped. His breath caught the back of his throat. On. On. His legs ached above the knees. He slipped and hurt his ankle, but in his hurry hardly felt the pain. There was Mrs Blackett … He caught her up … He passed her … He caught just a glimpse of her face as he passed, climbing, climbing … And now he could hear crackling. The acrid smell of burnt bracken fill
ed his nose and throat at every gasping breath. He shifted the fire-broom to his shoulder. He let it drag behind him on the ground. He lifted it again. Nearly at the top. Gold dissolves in aqua regia. What a donkey he had been. Was Dot all right? Smoke drifted thickly through the trees. Somebody was shouting …

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  THE NATIVES

  “WE’LL never do it alone,” said Titty to herself. Here and there little snakes of fire ran along the cracks in the rock. As fast as one was trampled and beaten out, another showed itself. Dorothea, with the Outlaw safe in the knapsack on her back, was doing her best with one of the fire-brooms. Roger was doing his best with another. But again and again all three of them had to turn away from the blinding smoke, and Titty knew that the struggle could not last much longer. A shift of wind, even for a moment, and smoke and fire would come rolling down the gully, the dry leaves of the wood would catch, and, hedgehog or no hedgehog, she and Roger and Dorothea would have to run for their lives.

  And at that moment help came from all sides.

  A tall long-legged man in grey flannels came leaping through the smoke. He had lost his hat, but Titty knew who he was, and could never have believed she would have been so pleased to see him.

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

  “Give me yours,” said Squashy Hat, and set to work like a whirlwind.

  And there were John, Nancy, Peggy and Susan.

  “Are you all right?” panted Susan.

  “I’ve burnt one hand a bit,” said Roger.

  “You must butter it,” said Susan.

  ABLE-SEAMEN FIGHTING THE FIRE

  “They’re all right, John,” said Nancy. “Come on for the other brooms.” They dashed down into the camp and were back again in a moment.

  Three men from Atkinson’s farm came running along the edge of the wood, each with a fire-broom of his own.

  Squashy Hat looked round and saw them. Whatever might be said against him, he seemed to know what to do with a fire. The men from Atkinson’s knew him, and in a few moments farmers and prospectors alike were working like a trained team.

  “Don’t let it get a hold this side of the rock,” shouted Squashy Hat, and the men shouted back, “Aye, that’s the way … Keep him yonder!”

  Then came Robin Tyson and the farmhand from Tyson’s with their brooms, and they, too, joined the line of the defenders, beating down every flame that showed itself in the dry grass that clung along the cracks in the rock.

  And then came Mrs Tyson.

  “You’ve done it this time, Miss Nancy. And nowt to stop it. I should have sent you packing yesterday.” And before Nancy could say a word in answer, she was gone to use her fire-broom by the side of Robin Tyson.

  Roger, his scorched hand duly buttered, his face red with heat and indignation, came up to Titty. Mrs Tyson had passed through the camp.

  “She thinks we started it,” he said.

  “But we didn’t,” said Titty. “You told her …”

  And then she saw Susan. A moment before, Susan’s face had been all thankfulness that nobody was burnt. But now she too had heard what Mrs Tyson had said. Titty felt tears starting in her own eyes. Nothing ought ever to happen to make Susan look like that.

  The smoke had cleared a little from before them.

  Squashy Hat was giving orders.

  “You children stay here and don’t let it get going again. Come on, men. Along the edge of the wood … Will there be anybody fighting it from the other side?”

  “There’s Low Farm at Watersmeet,” said one of the men from Atkinson’s. “But they’ve nobbut the old man and a li’l lad.”

  “We’ll keep it out of the wood if the wind doesn’t shift,” shouted Squashy. “But along there where the rock ends it’d take a hundred men to stop it … Hullo, we must down that one.” And he raced off along the edge of the rock to meet a rolling mass of dark brown smoke.

  Titty was startled by a sudden yell from Nancy.

  “Uncle Jim!”

  She turned round. There he was, with a fire-broom in his hands, hurriedly counting the prospectors.

  “Nancy … Peggy … Titty … Susan … Dorothea … John … Roger … That’s all right.”

  “Look here,” said Nancy. “We didn’t start it. They think we did.”

  “All right,” said Captain Flint. “I don’t suppose …”

  He broke off suddenly.

  “What!” he cried. “Hullo! Who’s that? Well, I’m absolutely jiggered.”

  “He’s a jumper,” said Dorothea.

  “He’s after our gold,” said Titty.

  “He’s been spying on us, and plotting with Slater Bob … We’ve been fending him off for all we were worth …”

  But Captain Flint was not listening. He put his hand like a trumpet to his mouth and bellowed one word, one single word …

  “TIMOTHY!”

  And Squashy Hat turned round, waved a hand and went on beating in the smoke.

  Captain Flint was gone to join him.

  The weary, grimed prospectors stared open-mouthed at each other. Not one of them had said a word when Dick, dripping with sweat, came stumbling up the gully …

  “Is Dot all right?” he gasped.

  He dropped his fire-broom, and frantically tore off his spectacles. He had got very hot indeed running up the wood, and could see nothing at all for the drops of sweat that had fallen on his glasses.

  “Dick, Dick,” asked Dorothea urgently. “Is it gold?”

  In the excitement of the fire-fighting, and the dreadful discovery that Timothy, whom they had meant to welcome, and Squashy Hat, whom they had treated as an enemy, were one and the same, the others had forgotten everything else. Not Dorothea. How could she forget, when the success or failure of the whole expedition depended on Dick alone? Was it gold, or was it not?

  “I was all wrong,” said Dick, panting. “It’s not gold at all. It’s copper. Captain Flint showed me himself. It turned blue with ammonia …”

  One blow after another.

  And then came Mrs Blackett, who had not been able to keep up with Dick racing up the steep path through Tyson’s wood. She, too, called a hurried roll of the prospectors …

  “Nancy … Peggy … Titty … John … Susan … Where’s Dorothea? Oh there. And Roger? Not hurt? What have you done to your hand? … Oh, my dears, think what your parents would be saying to me if …”

  “We’re all right, mother … Everybody is,” said Peggy.

  “But Timothy’s been here all the time,” said Nancy. “He’s just along there with Uncle Jim … He jolly nearly got burnt, falling asleep in our gulch …”

  “Look out, Susan,” shouted John. “There’s a bit smouldering right at your feet.”

  “Help!” cried Dorothea, beating away frantically at the little flames that had been lurking in a tussock of dry bent and had suddenly flared up.

  “Pouf, what smoke!” coughed Mrs Blackett. “Haven’t you a fire-broom to spare?”

  “Have mine,” said Roger, who, with his buttered hand in a bandage, found he could not do much good with the new fire-broom he had brought from the camp.

  The main body of the fire was sweeping on along the rocky edge of the Topps. Captain Flint and Timothy and the farm men were moving with it, fighting hard to keep it from crossing the stony ground and getting down into the wood. Every now and then one or other of them showed in the drifting smoke, flailing away with a fire-broom, and then disappeared as the smoke rolled over him. The prospectors were hard at work beating out first one and then another spurt of fire along the edge of the ground already burnt, where red-hot sparks, creeping underfoot, were hard to see until unexpectedly they burst into flame. There was one dreadful moment when a little holly tree, on the low side of the rock and close to the wood and the bramble thicket, blazed up suddenly like a firework, with a loud crackling noise. But John and Nancy were there in time to trample out the grass around it.

  Mrs Tyson, in despair, came back out of t
he smoke.

  “There’s nowt’ll stop it,” she said. “Ye may fight it here along the rock, but when it comes to Greenbanks ye’ll not hold it. Eh, Mrs Blackett, I didn’t think it of them. I should have sent them packing yesterday. Never again. Never again …”

  “But Colonel Jolys …” began Mrs Blackett.

  “Colonel Jolys,” said Mrs Tyson bitterly. “What’s the good of Colonel Jolys? Who’s to tell him? By the time they see the smoke over yonder the woods’ll be ablaze, and the whole valley gone in ashes …”

  She stopped short and listened.

  “What’s that?” said Roger.

  The blast of a coach horn, the old blast on four notes that used to echo up and down these valleys thirty years ago, before the motors brought the coaches to an end, sounded not so very far away. It was answered by another, nearer.

  “Tatarara-ta-ta-ta … Tatarara-ta-ta-ta … Come to the cookhouse door, boys. Come to the cookhouse door.”

  Dozens of motor horns sounded in the distance.

  “It’s the fire-fighters,” cried Nancy. “It’s Colonel Jolys. But how on earth have they come so quick? …”

  “We telephoned as soon as we got your message.”

  “What message?”

  “We sent Sappho,” said Roger …

  “I wrote a letter,” said Titty, “but we never thought she’d fly straight …”

  Nancy jumped into the air with both feet.

  “Well done!” she shouted. “Well done the able-seamen! Good old Sappho! John! Susan! Peggy! Do you hear? They sent an S.O.S. by pigeon post. And Sappho flew straight for once.”

  “One o’ them pigeons …” said Mrs Tyson doubtingly.

  There was a roar of cheering somewhere away along the top of the wood, answered by another. The horns sounded again.

  “Nay, we’ve a chance yet,” cried Mrs Tyson, and was gone.

  It was evening before they knew that the fire was beaten and the valley saved. Colonel Jolys and his men had been in time to burn a wide strip of ground in the path of the fire, so that the fire, when it came there, died for lack of fuel. High Topps was a black sea with wave crests of white ash. To the north the smoke was clearing, and Ling Scar showed clear above it.