“Did you see our smoke?” asked Titty.
“Uncle Jim saw it last night when he went up to the fell for a smoke,” said Nancy. “Aunt Maria doesn’t like tobacco in the house.”
“We couldn’t get away until late this morning,” said Peggy. “And then we saw Swallow’s brown sail going into the cove soon after we had got past Rio Bay.”
“We waited a good long time,” said John, “and we thought it would be all right coming here because we could see if you went to the island.”
“We could have given you the slip and got there without your knowing,” said Nancy. “You never knew we were on the lake till we hailed when we were coming into the cove.”
“We were busy with the fire,” said Susan.
“But where’s your tent?” asked John. “We left your old place for it. We’ve got four tents this year, and one of the old ones for all the stores.”
“The new tents are beauties,” said Roger. “I’ve got one of my own.”
“Shiver my timbers,” said Captain Nancy, “don’t you understand? We put it in the message we left with the wood. We told you there was native trouble. We’re jolly lucky to be here at all. We’ve got to be back and into best frocks for supper. We can’t camp. What about the feathers, Able-seaman? How’s the parrot?”
“He’s not been moulting very well,” said Titty, “but I’ve got about eight really good ones. Polly’s looking after the island.”
“You don’t mean real native trouble?” said Susan.
“It’s as bad as it can possibly be,” said Nancy. “We’ve only got to make a plan and it’s scuppered at once. No camping. No gold-hunting. No piracy except just now and then between meals. And best frocks every evening and sometimes half the day. Native trouble? It simply couldn’t be worse.”
“Where’s Captain Flint?” asked Titty.
“He can’t come until to-morrow,” said Peggy.
“Didn’t we tell you he’s stuck too. He’s on duty to-day. That’s how we got away.”
“He’s going to tea at Holly Howe,” said Susan. “Mother told us last night.”
“We saw he wasn’t in the houseboat,” said Roger. “He’s covered up the cannon.”
“He isn’t allowed to live there,” said Peggy. “He has to sleep at home.”
“But aren’t you coming to Wild Cat Island?”
“Not until she goes.”
“Until who goes?”
“The great-aunt, of course,” said Captain Nancy. “And she only came the day before you did.”
“But you needn’t bring her,” said Titty.
“If we could maroon her we would,” said Nancy. “We’d tie her to the anchor and send her to the bottom in forty fathoms. We’d feed her to the sharks. We’d leave her on a rock to be eaten by land-crabs. We’d hang her in a tree for crows – or vultures. Vultures would be better. We’d … There’s nothing we wouldn’t do. Can you think of anything really good?”
“Nancy thinks of something new each night for us to dream about while we’re going to sleep. Last night it was land-crabs. The night before that it was white ants.”
“You know,” said Nancy, “eating her up, like the fox ate up the Spartan boy. It’s nothing to what she deserves. Why couldn’t she come in term-time, when it wouldn’t have mattered so much?”
“But it’ll be all right if you’re camping on the island with us,” said John.
“But we can’t come,” said Nancy.
“We’ve got to be on view,” said Peggy, “all the time.”
“Our aunts aren’t like that,” said Roger.
“Nor are most of ours,” said Nancy. “Some of ours aren’t native a bit. One of them might almost be a pirate. But the great-aunt’s altogether different. There’s no help for it. We’ve got to be mostly native till she goes. If she ever does. It isn’t as if it was only us. We’d bolt, but she’d have mother and Uncle Jim as hostages. They’re much more afraid of her than we are. You see, she brought them up.”
“Won’t you be able to come at all?” said Roger.
“We’ll always have to be back for some beastly meal,” said Nancy.
“The kettle’ll be boiling in a minute,” said Susan, reminded of the dinner she was getting ready. It was a dreadful thing that all their plans were going wrong. But dinner had to be eaten just the same. “Have you got mugs?” she called over her shoulder as she hurried back to the fire.
“Rather,” said Peggy. “And we’ve got rations in the boat. There’s a cake and mugs in the knapsack. That other thing’s a meat pie. It was meant for native dinner last night, but the great-aunt said it was too salt, so cook said this morning we’d better have it and if the great-aunt wanted to see it again she’d have to do without. So we swiped it. It isn’t a bit too salt really. We dipped our fingers in the juice and tried what it was like while we were sailing down.”
She climbed back into Amazon and passed out the knapsack and then came carefully ashore with the meat pie.
“Sorry we’ve got no grog,” said Nancy. “Cook’s had no time to make any, being so busy with the great-aunt.”
“We’ve got plenty of milk for tea,” said Susan.
The four Swallows and the two Amazons were soon sitting round Susan’s fire, drinking tea and disagreeing altogether with the great-aunt’s poor opinion of the meat pie. When the meat pie was done, John used the tin-opener in his new knife to open the pemmican tin. Then he used the knife itself to cut the pemmican into six bits. They did not last long. But there was bunloaf and marmalade for pudding and then cake, and after that apples and chocolate to fill up with.
“Let’s keep the chocolate for rations while we’re exploring,” said Titty. After all, even though everything might be going wrong with their plans, they had set out to-day to explore the stream that ran into the lake at Horseshoe Cove, and there was nothing to stop them from doing that.
“Where are you going to explore?” asked Nancy.
“We’re going up the beck,” said Titty.
“You’ll only come to the road,” said Peggy.
It very soon became clear that there would be no exploring that day if it depended on Nancy and Peggy. What they wanted to do was to talk about the great-aunt and about schools and about all sorts of things that had been happening since Christmas. They were both tired of having only each other as listener. And you had only to look at John and Susan to see that they were quite content to sit by their fire in the cove and listen for just as long as Nancy and Peggy cared to talk.
The able-seaman and the boy listened for a long time and sometimes even asked questions. But at last Roger began trying to keep two little stones in the air at once, and one of his stones fell in his mug and might have broken it if there had not been a little tea left in the bottom. He had stopped listening. And the able-seaman, remembering all those blank spaces on the map got up and beckoned to him.
“Where are you going?” asked Susan.
“Exploring,” said Titty.
“Don’t go far from the stream,” said Susan, “and don’t be away too long. … What was that you were saying, Peggy?”
The able-seaman and the boy pushed their way into the bushes and disappeared behind a green curtain of leaves.
CHAPTER IV
THE ABLE-SEAMAN AND THE BOY EXPLORE
“By mutual confidence and mutual aid
Great deeds are done, and great discoveries made.”
POPE’S Homer
FOR some time, as the able-seaman and the boy pushed their way through the bushes and small trees by the side of the stream, they could hear the talking of the others, Nancy and Peggy very loud and clear, John and Susan not so loud. Then they could hear only the voices of Nancy and Peggy. Then Nancy’s voice alone was stronger than the rippling of the stream at the explorers’ feet. Then they heard even Nancy’s talk no more, though now and then, faint and far away as it was, there was no mistaking her cheerful laugh. After that, they could hear nothing but the noise of the wate
r toppling over six-inch waterfalls and down pebbly rapids. The stream was too wide to jump across, but there were places where it was possible to hop from stone to stone and to get across with dry feet if you were lucky. The trees grew close to the stream, and in some places the water had hollowed out a way for itself almost under their roots. There were little pools, foaming at the top where the stream ran in, and smooth and shallow and fast at the hang before it galloped away again down a tiny cataract.
“There’s a fish,” said Roger.
“Where?”
“There isn’t one now. But there was. Look! Look! There’s another!” But that fish too was gone before the able-seaman had seen just where the ship’s boy was pointing.
“They needn’t be frightened,” said the able-seaman. “It isn’t as if we were herons. Keep still when you see the next one. Don’t point at it.”
The boy hurried on with his eyes on the water close ahead of him. Suddenly he stopped dead, like a dog that smells partridges in a field of stubble. Titty crept up, stooping low, till she was close beside him.
“There,” said Roger. “By the stone with the moss on it. Look! He’s sticking his nose out.”
A widening ripple was washed away with the stream, but it had been enough to show Titty where to look. There, in the clear water, she could see a small speckled fish which stayed almost in one place as if it were hung in the stream. As she looked it suddenly slanted up and broke the water again.
“He isn’t a bit like the perch we caught in the lake,” said Roger.
“It’s probably a trout,” said Titty.
“I wish we had our fishing-rods,” said Roger. “We’d catch dozens and dozens and take them back to feed the camp.”
“We couldn’t fish in all these trees,” said Titty.
“Well, there are lots of fish,” said Roger.
“Anyway, we can’t fish now. We are explorers, sent out into the jungle by the rest of the expedition. We mustn’t think of anything else. At the very moment when we were looking at a fish there might be a yell …”
“A blood-curdling kind of yell?”
“Of course blood-curdling. Boomerangs and arrows might come whizzing through the air. And even if we weren’t killed at once the savages would tie us up and take us away, and then when the others came to look for us they would walk into the very same trap.”
“What’s that noise?” said the ship’s boy suddenly.
It was the noise of a motor horn. They both knew what it was, but it was far too good a noise to waste.
“The trumpets of the savages,” said Titty. “There’s probably a causeway through the forest. We must be near the edge of the jungle.”
Another horn sounded, on a different note, and they could hear the fierce throbbing roar of a motor bicycle.
“Trumpets and tom-toms,” said Titty. “The savages have their scouts on the road trumpeting to each other. We shan’t be able to go much farther. Peggy said we couldn’t.”
“Well, let’s go as far as we can,” said Roger.
This part of the wood was all smallish trees, growing thickly together. There were hazels, oaks, birches, and here and there an ash, and here and there a stout prickly bush of holly, or a lonely feathery pine waving high above the rest. There was honeysuckle, too, tangling bough with bough. It was as good a jungle as anyone could want. And through this jungle ran the little stream hurrying on its way to the lake.
The able-seaman and the boy pressed on. Suddenly they saw what looked like an opening in the trees away to the left. They crossed the stream and pushed through the bushes towards the opening, and found a cart-track, which led through the trees to a gap in the stone wall along the edge of the wood. Perhaps there had been a gate in the gap once upon a time, but there was no gate now, and the ends of the wall had fallen down. Beyond the wall lay the road, and on the other side of the road was another wall of loose stones covered with moss. Beyond that was another kind of wood, larches and pines and a few firs climbing steeply up into the sky.
The able-seaman saw the road first. She dropped flat at once on the ground by the side of the cart-track. The boy waited for half a second and then dropped beside her.
“We don’t know whether they’re friendlies or not,” said the able-seaman.
“The only people we know on this side of the lake are the Amazons,” said the boy.
“Well, we know where they are, so anyone on the road must be someone else.”
A motor car flashed across the gap in the wall. For a moment they caught through the trees the glint of sunlight on something bright; then they saw it in the gap; then it was gone. Then three natives on bicycles passed the gap, going the other way. Then came a noise which promised something better. It was the noise of horses’ hoofs clumping on the hard road.
THE EXPLORERS
“Trotting or walking?” said Roger.
“Probably walking,” said Titty. “It usually is when it sounds like the other. A lot of them, anyhow.”
The horses were a long time coming into sight, but when they came they were worth waiting for. Through the gap in the wall the able-seaman and the boy saw them pass by, three huge ruddy-brown horses, harnessed one before the other, and after them the thing that they were pulling, the trunk of a great tree chained down to two pairs of big red wooden wheels, a tree four or five times as big as the tall lighthouse tree on Wild Cat Island. One man was leading the first of the horses, and another man was resting, smoking a pipe, sitting high in air on the thin end of the great tree which stuck out over the road behind the second pair of wheels. He had his back towards the explorers, or he might easily have seen them from so high above the wall.
“Where is it going?” said Roger.
“Probably to be made into boats,” said Titty.
The larch wood at the farther side of the road looked easier going than the tangled jungle through which they had come.
“Can’t we wriggle a bit nearer to the road,” said Roger, “and then rush across when none of the natives are looking?”
“It’s no good,” said Titty. “There’s someone passing every other minute.”
As she spoke another motor car went trumpeting by.
“I say,” said Roger a minute or two later. “The natives couldn’t see us if we went under their road instead of across it.”
“Of course they couldn’t,” said Titty.
“There must be a bridge,” said Roger, “where the stream comes through.”
“That’s a jolly good idea.”
“I thought perhaps it would be.”
“We’ll get back to the beck at once,” said Titty. They could hear it, not very far away, when they listened for it, and indeed they had left it only when they had been tempted by seeing the clearing where the cart-track ran through the wood. They jumped up and plunged back into the bushes, found the stream and hurried along its banks. Not more than fifty yards from the place where they had lain watching the road through the gap in the old wall, they came to the bridge, a low, wide, ivy-covered arch. The road ran over it, but the ivy was so thick and the trees below the bridge grew so close to it that the explorers found that they could follow the stream right into the arch without being seen by anybody, unless some native happened to be looking down from the bridge at that moment. Looking through under the archway they could see the bright greens and browns of the larch wood and the glitter of sunlight on the water at the other side.
The able-seaman sat down. “Take off your shoes, Boy,” she said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the boy.
“Tie the laces together so that you can hang them round your neck.” Her own shoes were off as she spoke. It was easier to untie them when there were no feet in them to put them into awkward positions. She untied them and took the end of a lace from each and tied the two ends in a bow. “You needn’t tie yours so tight,” she said, looking to see what the boy was doing. “You’ll want them when we get through. Now, then. Put your feet exactly where I put mine.” br />
She stepped into the water. It rose to her ankles at the first step she took, and nearly to her knees at the second, but after that it got no deeper, and at one side, under the bridge, it was quite shallow.
“Slip in here,” said the able-seaman. “I wish your legs were a bit longer. Don’t let your knickers get wet. Roll them up as high as you can. Keep to this side.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“And whatever you do, don’t tumble down.”
Steadying themselves with their hands against the low arch of the bridge that curved over their heads, and paddling in shallow clear water over stones slippery with moss, they crept carefully through under the bridge.
A big motor lorry passed overhead, making the old bridge shiver. The boy looked with scared eyes at the able-seaman. But this was one of those dangers that was gone before you had really had time to know it was there, and the able-seaman was already feeling for steadier stones in the pool above the bridge to find the best way to the bank.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Keep close along the wall. Don’t step on the big stone. It waggles, but there’s a good one here.”
There were no accidents. Both the explorers climbed safely out on the bank. Sitting so close under the wall that nobody could have seen them from the road, they dried their feet on their handkerchiefs, put their shoes on again, waited for a moment when nothing seemed to be passing, and darted forward in among the larch trees.
They climbed now, up through the steep larch wood, where the beck came noisily leaping down stone stairs to meet them. Up they climbed, keeping close to the stream until the larches ended and they were once more among hazels and oaks like those in the wood they had left on the other side of the road. And then, suddenly there were no more trees, and the able-seaman and the boy stood under the open sky at the edge of the forest, looking out over mile upon mile of green and purple moorland, green with waving bracken, purple with knee-deep heather. And beyond the moorland, the sunshine searching their gullies and crags, rose the blue hills that from up here looked bigger, far, than they had seemed when looked at from Wild Cat Island or from Holly Howe.