“May Roger and I go and look for treasure after breakfast?” she said.
“The Amazons are coming today,” said John. “We’ve got to scrub decks first and put everything shipshape before they come. But afterwards, perhaps. Hullo,” he said. “Titty, skip down to my tent and get the telescope. That’s the third boat I’ve seen go into Houseboat Bay.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the able-seaman, and ran down to the camp. Here she was grabbed by the mate, who wanted someone to butter bread while she was looking after the perch.
“Captain wants the telescope,” said the able-seaman.
“Tell him breakfast’s practically ready,” said the mate. “The telescope’ll keep. Perch won’t. They ought to be eaten hot.”
Titty escaped with the telescope and gave her message.
“Coming in a minute,” shouted John. He held the telescope to his eye. “There’s something up in Houseboat Bay. There’s a motor launch going in now with a lot of people in it.”
The mate’s whistle shrilled from the camp.
“Coming, coming,” shouted the captain.
“If the natives are making an attack on Captain Flint,” said Titty, “I wish we were there too.”
The mate whistled again, and the captain and the able-seaman joined the others by the fire.
“Something’s happening in Houseboat Bay,” said John. “Boats going in one after another. I suppose he’s telling them all that we have been touching his beastly houseboat.”
“Don’t think about Captain Flint,” said Susan. “We can’t help it if he thinks we have been at his boat. Nothing will stop his thinking it. Remember what Mother said. We know we haven’t. Don’t worry about him. I’ve put the sugar in your tea, and here’s your perch. There’s another one after that, and then one more if the Amazons aren’t quick.”
When each of the Swallows had eaten two perch, so that four were left in the frying-pan, Susan sent the boy up the look-out to see if the Amazon was in sight. He was back in a moment.
“No sail in sight,” he said, “but there’s a big boat going out of Houseboat Bay.”
“They won’t be here till after breakfast,” said Susan. “That’s another perch all round.”
“I wonder what is happening,” said John.
“Don’t think about him,” said Susan.
“All right. I won’t,” said John.
As soon as breakfast was over and done with, everybody set to work to tidy up. “I’ll look after the camp,” said the mate, “if you want to clean up Swallow. Take the boy and the able-seaman, and set them scrubbing decks and polishing up the brass-work.”
“There isn’t much brass-work,” said Roger.
“There are the belaying-pins,” said Titty.
“Well, go and polish them up,” said the mate. “You can do a lot with sand and a damp rag. Here are two rags. Get along with you. Clear all the dirt out, and rub all over with a wet rag, and make her look like a new ship.”
“I’m going to bring the sail up to the camp,” said John. “It wants lacing again to the yard, and I can do the reef points best when the sail isn’t bent.”
“I don’t care so long as you don’t get in my way,” said Susan. “I’ve got the pots to clean.”
“We’ll take Swallow round to the harbour and moor her so that she’s all snug in her berth when the Amazons come,” said John.
He went down to the landing-place with the able-seaman. The boy had run on before and was already aboard. They pushed off and paddled her round to the harbour, where they had left the mast and sail when they went fishing before breakfast. John stepped the mast and hoisted Titty’s flag to the masthead. The boy and the able-seaman stayed aboard to do their polishing and cleaning. John moored Swallow with a warp over her stern and the painter from her bows, so that she floated at one side of the harbour, leaving room for the Amazon to come in.
“You can slack up the stern warps and haul on the painter when you want to come ashore,” he said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the able-seaman and the boy, already busy scrubbing the thwarts and cleaning all the dirt from the bottom boards.
The captain took the rolled-up sail with its boom and yard, balanced them over his shoulder and carried them back to the camp. There he dumped them on the ground. Susan had just finished her washing up.
“I’ll just go up to the look-out and see if those boats have gone,” he said.
Susan looked up.
“It’s no good thinking about him,” she said. “Just don’t think about him at all.”
“That’s all very well,” said John, “but I can’t help it.”
“Come on and help me to hang out the blankets,” said Susan.
“The Amazons may be in sight,” said John.
“Never mind if they are,” said Susan.
They took the blankets from the tents and hung them over the tent ropes that were stretched to the trees. Then they pummelled the haybags, which had got very lumpy. They shook them and pushed them and pulled them about until they were a little less like half-empty sacks of round Dutch cheeses and a little more like mattresses.
Then Susan started scraping the saucepan and the frying-pan and cleaning the black off them with fine sand. At least, it was not very fine sand, but it was the finest she could get.
“I’m going to leave the kettle just as black as it is,” she said. “It looks fine.”
John spread the sail flat out on the ground, undid the lacings and freed it from the yard and the boom. He settled down with some fine stuff, thin string, to finish of the ragged reef points with neat splices, cutting the frayed ends away with his knife.
This took a long time, and then he noticed that one of the seams in the sail was giving. An inch or two of stitching had come undone. John went into his tent and rummaged in his box.
“Lucky we brought a sailmaker’s needle,” he said as he came back.
“Luckier if you knew how to use it,” said the mate a moment or two later, when she looked up and saw the captain sucking his thumb.
“Well, it isn’t my fault,” said the captain. “Real sailmakers push the needle through with a lump of leather in the palm of their hand.”
“Let’s have a look,” said the mate.
Between them they made a pretty fair job of the seam. John’s reef points were very good indeed. “If life was only splices,” his father had said the year before, “you would have nothing left to learn.”
With Susan’s help he stretched the sail along the yard and began to lace it. They were both so intent on this that they saw nothing of a boat that pulled in to the landing-place until they heard it scrunch on the beach.
They looked up to see a large policeman, in his shirt-sleeves, pulling in his oars. He got up, balancing heavily, and stepped ashore. Then he picked up his coat, which was lying in the bows of his rowing boat, and walked straight up to the camp. He was very hot, and as he walked he struggled with his coat until at last he got out of it a big red handkerchief, with which he mopped his face. He looked down on the captain and the mate.
“Good morning,” said John politely.
“Morning,” said the big policeman. “Busy?”
“Yes, rather,” said John.
“Cooler work than rowing in this weather.”
“Have you come a long way?” asked Susan, who was wondering what she could give him to drink.
“Aye,” said the policeman, “I have. And what might you be doing here, is what I want to know.”
“This is our camp,” said John. “Won’t you sit down and rest yourself? I’m sorry we haven’t any beer, but there are one or two bananas still left on that tree.”
The policeman grunted and did not say “Thank you.” With another struggle he pulled a notebook and a pencil out of his coat.
“Name and address, please,” said the policeman.
“My name is John Walker,” said John. “This is our address.”
“Walker, John,” said the policeman,
writing. He mopped his face again. “Address?”
“Here.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“That won’t do,” said the policeman. “Where do you live?”
“In these tents.”
The policeman walked round to the tents and looked into them.
Susan protested.
“We haven’t made our beds yet,” she said.
Just then there was a cheerful noise of whistling from the other end of the island.
“Any more of you?” said the policeman.
“Lots,” said John.
“Now, look here,” said the policeman, “and answer me straight. When did you go aboard Mr. Turner’s houseboat?”
“We’ve never been near it,” said John, “except once when I went to talk to Mr. Turner.”
“Come, come,” said the policeman. “That won’t wash at all. Why, the mess it’s in …”
“Sammy!”
A clear, ringing voice made the policeman turn round sharp.
“Sammy, I’m ashamed of you. If you don’t go away at once I’ll tell your mother.”
“I’m sure I beg pardon, Miss Ruth,” said the policeman, turning redder than ever. “I thought they’d know something about the burglary if anybody did, seeing that they’ve been at the houseboat before. I had no sort of idea they were friends of yours.”
“Of course they are,” said Captain Nancy, coming into the camp and dumping a bundle of tent poles. “They’ve never had anything to do with Uncle Jim’s houseboat. You go away back to Uncle Jim and tell him so. Or shall we take his boat and keep him prisoner?” she added, turning to John.
“No, don’t do that, Miss Ruth,” said the policeman. “Not today. I’ve got to row right down to the foot of the lake.”
Peggy Blackett came along the path from the harbour, with a huge white bundle on her shoulder, followed by Titty and Roger with blankets and a bundle of fishing rods.
“Hullo, Sammy,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“It was all a mistake, miss,” said the policeman.
“Run away, Sammy, and don’t make those mistakes again,” said Nancy.
The big policeman went down to his boat again and pushed off.
“Miss Ruth and Miss Peggy,” he begged, “don’t you say anything to Mother.”
“All right, Sammy, not if you are good.”
He rowed quickly away.
“What did he want?” said Titty.
“Why was he frightened?” said Roger.
“Did you know him?” said Susan.
“Of course we did,” said Captain Nancy. “His mother used to be Mother’s nurse, and she was our nurse too when we were very young. He’s our policeman. He isn’t afraid of anybody except his mother … and us, of course. I say, you know what’s happened?”
“What?”
“You know that message the old Billies gave you to give to us, about telling Uncle Jim to put a padlock on his houseboat? Well, they were right.”
“Uncle Jim’s houseboat has been burgled,” said Peggy.
“I knew something had happened when I saw all those boats there this morning,” said John.
“The other pirates attacked Captain Flint’s ship while he was away,” said Captain Nancy. “He had gone, you know, when you said he had. We were wrong. Those lights we saw in the houseboat when we were sailing down here in the dark weren’t his. They belonged to the burglars, to the other pirates. At that very moment they were about their fell work.”
“Someone else saw those lights too,” said Peggy. “The motorman who knew that Uncle Jim was away. So in the morning he went to see and found the cabin door swinging open and the whole place upside down. He came over to tell Mother and Mother sent a telegram to Uncle Jim. He got here last night, and went to his houseboat, but everything was in such an awful mess that he came back with his parrot to our house to sleep.”
“He was raging mad,” said Nancy. “And the parrot was too cross to talk.”
“Sometimes he was mad and sometimes just glumpy,” said Peggy. “He said he wouldn’t have minded if they’d taken everything he had except what they did take. They’ve taken his old cabin trunk, with his typewriter in it and the book he’s been writing all summer, the book he’s been writing so that he couldn’t be one of us like he used to be. He said he supposed they took it because it was heavy. He didn’t know what else they’d taken. But they’d emptied all the lockers out on the floor and pulled everything in the boat to pieces. Worse than a spring cleaning, he said it was. Sometimes he was just miserable and saying nothing at all, and then other times he would start raging away about the lake being covered with boys, and about you.…”
“He always thinks it’s us,” said John.
“I was just going to tell him that it couldn’t have been you that night,” said Nancy, “because you were up the Amazon River when we saw the light in his ship, but Peggy nudged me just in time and I remembered that we were in bed that night, so I shut up. I began to think it was a good thing we’d already got leave to camp with you. Any minute someone might have told us not to, they were all in such a stew. So we slipped off and stowed our things in Amazon last night and hid her up the river. And then this morning we lay low until Uncle Jim had rowed away back to the houseboat. When we did start there wasn’t much wind, or we’d have been here before. We had to row through the islands, and then we waited for a bit watching all the boats taking people to Houseboat Bay to see the burglary.”
“You got back in time yesterday morning?” said Susan.
“It was a near squeak, but we did,” said Nancy.
“We just had time to get into bed with our clothes on when they came banging at the door,” said Peggy.
“I say,” said John. “Were they burgling the very night of our war?”
“Of course they were,” said Nancy. “I told you. We saw their light in the houseboat. If we’d only known we could have captured the lot of them and made Uncle Jim our grateful slave for ever.”
“Then perhaps Titty really did hear something that night,” said John.
“Perhaps the pirates I heard were the very ones who had sacked Captain Flint’s ship,” said Titty.
“Did you hear any?” said Nancy.
“They were in a rowing boat,” said Titty, “when I was anchored in Amazon.”
“They probably were the burglars,” said Nancy. “We saw their light and then you heard them. What beats me is why Uncle Jim should have got it into his head that you had anything to do with it.”
“Of course we didn’t,” said Captain John.
“Gaskets and bowlines,” said Captain Nancy, “you needn’t tell me that. What puzzles me is why he should think you did.”
Captain John was very uncomfortable.
“He didn’t believe me when I told him I hadn’t touched his houseboat, that time I went to tell him what the charcoal-burners had said.”
“But why wouldn’t he believe you?”
“Well,” said Captain John. “Look here, Captain Nancy, it really doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does,” said Captain Nancy. “Old Sammy would never have come nosing round here if he hadn’t heard something from Uncle Jim.”
“It was that day we first saw you,” said Captain John. “When we thought he’d fired at you. He saw us when we sailed up the lake to see where you went, and he thought it was us who put that firework on his cabin roof.”
Captain Nancy turned very red, even through her sunburn.
“I’ll put that matter right at once,” she said. “Was he very beastly?”
“He did call me a liar,” said John. “But it doesn’t matter now, really.”
“It does,” said Captain Nancy. “Peggy!”
“Sir.”
“Empty the rest of our stores out of Amazon, take the mast and sail out of her and bring her round to the landing-place. Mister Mate, Captain John, have you got a pencil and a bit of paper in the camp? And I�
�ll want a scrap of charcoal out of your fire.”
Captain John went into his tent and brought out the exercise book and the pencil. Captain Nancy lay on the ground and wrote for some minutes, sucking her pencil between each word and pressing very hard. Twice she broke the point of her pencil and had to sharpen it again.
“I suck it to make it good and black,” she explained, noticing that Susan watched her with surprise.
Titty and Roger stared at her open-mouthed.
When she had done she got up and took a bit of charred wood from the fire. She tore out the sheet on which she had been writing and smeared the back of it with burnt wood. Then she folded it up and put it in the pocket of her shirt.
“Boat ready, sir!” called Peggy from the landing-place.
“I’ll be back soon,” said Captain Nancy.
“But what are you going to do?” asked John as Nancy pushed off.
“Tip him the Black Spot,” said Nancy and rowed, rather splashingly, away.
CHAPTER XXV
CAPTAIN FLINT GETS THE BLACK SPOT
THE HOUSEBOAT MAN, Captain Flint, sometimes known as Uncle Jim, was alone with his green parrot in the cabin of his ship grimly trying to put things straight after his visitors. First there had been the burglars, and then this morning there had been all the people who wanted to see what damage had been done, besides Sammy and the other policeman and the sergeant from Rio, who had sent Sammy to the foot of the lake and the other policeman up to the other end to make inquiries. The burglars had turned everything upside down. Every one of the neat lockers and cupboards had its door swinging open and its contents raked out. The assegais and tomahawks and shark’s-tooth necklaces and boomerangs and green and scarlet painted gourds, that were relics of Captain Flint’s travels and had hung in honoured places on the cabin walls, had been torn down. It was like trying to tidy up after a whirlwind. Captain Flint trod on a little ebony elephant from Colombo. He picked it up, thinking of glue, but it had lost its tusks, its trunk and two of its legs, and he threw it desperately through the open cabin window.
The green parrot, perched on the edge of the cabin table, was trying to bite off the head of a little jade image of Buddha that Captain Flint had bought in Hong Kong.
Swallows and Amazons Page 23
