Читать книгу Billy, Lone Scout - Annie Mabel Hayes - Страница 4

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The spring call to Adventure was in the air; the warm winds thrilled with it, the wood things leaped to it, the grasses rustled to its tune. It is the call that sends men out on the Long Lone Trail, that lures them over mountain and sea, that sets their axes gleaming in the fair virgin forests where no man before has ever trod.

Billy Greenwood closed her book so violently that it slipped from her hands and fell downwards right to the foot of the walnut tree. Then she looked out through the branches over the woods and hills.

“What’s the good of reading—reading?” she cried impatiently. “Oh, I wish I were a man! I’d be a prospector, an explorer, an Indian tracking through the forest, a Lone Scout on some dangerous frontier. I wish I were a boy, for they do have adventures, and they’re trained in all sorts of splendid ways to meet them. Being a girl is awful—when you’re just tingling to do things!”

She hunched up her knees and clasped her hands around them, her back against the tree trunk, feet on a high, thick bough.

“Billy” (Millicent) Greenwood had no brother and no sister; her father was dead, and her invalid mother liked to have Billy near under the care of a governess. The outcome was much loneliness for Billy, especially since, six months ago, they had made their home in Morthscoor, far from towns, or even villages. Now the clear country air was beginning to set Billy’s slow town blood running to the spring tune of the woodland. As she gazed longingly into the distance, up in the walnut tree, the Great Idea was born.

A new dancing light sparkled swift and suddenly in Billy’s eyes. Millicent Greenwood climbed the walnut tree that afternoon, but the girl who now scrambled down and ran on flying feet of excitement into the house was Billy, Lone Scout.

A week later, as Dan Cobham, the gamekeeper, patrolled the estate next to the Greenwoods, he had one of the surprises of his life. The undergrowth of young wood and bramble rustled and then parted, and from its midst a strange figure crept with infinite caution. It wore a green hunting-shirt with cut fringe at the end of the sleeves and lower edge, laced in front and belted at the waist. Below, a brief serge skirt appeared, and on its feet (brown legs were bare) were a pair of sheepskin moccasins. A green band on its hair bore a crisp upstanding little cock’s feather. And, of course, the figure was Billy.

Dan chuckled. “And what may be the meanin’ of this, Miss Billy?”

Billy rose to her feet with an exclamation of disgust.

“Oh, bother! You’d have had me right off! I never even knew you were there!”

“I’m not shootin’ nobbut rabbits to-day, thankee, miss,” said Dan. “What new game be this?”

She and Dan were old friends now, and strictly preserved as the Heathcote estate might be, Billy was free to go where she would.

“It isn’t a game, Dan,” said Billy, somewhat severely. “These are moccasins”—she thrust one out. “I made them myself of sheepskin, but it was hard work, and I haven’t had time yet to sew beads and things on them. They’re so’s you can go softly. And the hunting-shirt’s magyar pattern. I made it as much as I could like that in the picture of Daniel Boone. He was a great Kentucky scout and back-woodsman, you know. Don’t be surprised if you see me doing a lot of this sort of thing.” She pointed to the bushes. “I’ve got to get into training somehow. I’ll tell you, Dan—but it’s a secret—that I’m a Lone Scout, like frontiersmen and people. My goodness, isn’t it hard to get along without making a sound! But I’ve got to stalk animals, imitate birds, and all that kind of thing.”

“If it’s stalking ye’re after,” said Dan, with his dry smile, “I wish you’d maybe do a bit for me. And it’s not animals, either, let me tell you, however. I found a trapful this mornin’.”

“Oh, Dan, not another rabbit caught by the leg?” cried Billy. She had vague ideas of the rights of ownership, but she and Dan shared a common hatred of traps which broke their captives’ limbs and held them in agony.

“The same,” nodded Dan. “Me and my nevvy Tom we be here, there, and everywhere, an’ still it goes on. The master’s took it so serious that I’ve me orders as Williams is to get notice from the cottage there come a fortnight if the work don’t stop. This is a secret, as I’ve told nobbut you, Miss Billy.”

“Oh, Dan, but you don’t know that it’s him!” Ben Williams, with his family of six and his thin wife and his smile, to be turned out into the world!

“It’s him or Norrist—and he be nearer the Green End,” said Dan, beginning to walk off. “Well, Miss Billy, you knows how to save him if he be innocent. If so be you wants trackin’, here be your chance!” And he strode off again, chuckling.

Billy spent the next few days studying “lonecraft” books and also all the footprints and fragments of them she could find in the wood; but they all, on investigation, turned out to be those of Dan or his nephew Tom, a big loose-limbed boy of sixteen, who helped his uncle on the estate. This fact she elicited solely by observation of their boots, for she meant to let Dan know nothing of her progress until she had made some definite discovery and had bound him to secrecy. Perhaps the poacher was crafty and wore moccasins?

Billy was engrossed in this problem as she returned one afternoon from the village, three miles away—so engrossed, indeed, that her foot slipped in a puddle. Sandy Lane ran through a seam of red clay, and as Billy went on she turned to see a trail of red, wet footmarks. A sudden idea went winging to the Lone Scout’s mind. Footsteps were easily lost in the wood, but supposing they were red footmarks? True, no poacher would be so obliging as purposely to dip his boots into red clay, but still—Billy stooped and filled her long-suffering pockets and her bag with dry, red clay.

She sought out Dan at once on her return.

“Yes; I found an empty trap to-day, what must have been set last night. No; it bean’t taken away yet.”

“Then, Dan,” said Billy earnestly, “will you please set it just as it was before, and go away, and not come near the place till I say you may to-morrow?”

“Well, well, all right,” said Dan, in a humouring kind of way.

The trap had been well concealed. It was set, of course, on a runway made by the rabbits. Billy scraped with a trowel a small circle round it, which any one must cross who touched the trap; it went amongst fronds of bracken, and so could not be more than about half an inch deep, and its width was that of a boot’s length. She spread the red clay over, made it wet with water from the brook, and went home to bed.

That night it rained and rained. Billy, whom excitement woke up several times in the night, could have cried with disappointment. Her fears when, as soon as the rain ceased in the morning, she hurried to the wood were sadly confirmed. Every footstep, had there been any, had been washed away. And yet she could not help feeling sure—she had carefully observed the position of the trap—that it had been opened and reset. Some one in the rain had found a rabbit there. There was only one encouraging part about it. The clay was thin batter. It must have marked the boots of the poacher.

With thumping heart she hurried off to the Green End. On the way she exchanged good-mornings with Dan. Preoccupied with the subject of boots, Billy abstractedly observed Dan’s. They were muddy with the dark mud of the woods.

But what was that? Billy almost started in her surprise, for upon the leather gaiters Dan wore above them were splashes of red clay.

In spite of his promise, Dan had been to look at the trap, to see what she had been doing! Slowly, and in hurt disappointment, she resumed her journey to the Green End.

Ben Williams was digging in his garden. He was so near the hedge, which was as high as her shoulders, that although Billy leaned forward she could not catch the least glimpse of his boots.

“Nice day after the rain, miss,” remarked Ben Williams, touching his cap, with that good-natured weak smile which always made Billy feel rather sorry for him.

Billy turned to the gate. “I’m coming in to see the way you plant the cabbages, Ben,” she said, and Ben, delighted, came forward.

Quickly Billy looked down, and then—her heart almost stood still with horror. For Ben Williams’s boots were covered with red clay!

At the instant of discovery Billy felt an intense desire to burst into tears. She hardly knew what remarks she made about the cabbages, nor how she got out of the garden again and down the lane. So it was Ben, after all! And all her scouting was of no avail. Poor, weak Ben, his smile and his thin wife and the six children would all be turned out into the world. And Billy had meant to persuade her mother to do so much for them all!

A slouching, burly figure scrambled over a stile on her left and bumped into her, dropping its stick as it did so. It was Peter Norrist.

“Sorry, missie,” he grunted crustily, as Billy gasped for breath. Even with the breath out of her, however, she instinctively dropped her eyes to Peter’s boots. But they had been newly and carefully rubbed with dubbin. If the dubbin had obliterated guilty marks of red clay—who could now tell? Baffled, she regarded Peter as he stooped to recover his stick. His coat swung forward. Something weighed down one of the great pockets. There was a bump there, too—curiously long and narrow. For the life of her, Billy could not take her eyes away—it looked so like the outline of a rabbit. As Peter rose, he caught her gaze fixed upon his pocket.

With a growl and a threatening glare of his narrow eyes, he swung away.

Billy, Lone Scout, stood with one hand to her bewildered head. Ben with red, guilty boots, Peter with clean ones—and a rabbit in his pocket! What could be the meaning of it? That clay—— And then suddenly her face brightened. Why, how could Ben possibly have so completely covered his boots with mud from the small circle in the Heathcote Wood? Could no one but herself go through Sandy Lane?

A load lifted from her mind, Billy hurried on. She was sorry for Peter, but how could one possibly like the gruff, surly creature as one did poor old Ben?

Ahead in the lane old Dan’s nephew Tom was tramping along, and turned into the wood on the right. At Billy’s call he halted in the midst of the bramble bushes and nettles, and Billy came dancing up.

“Oh, good-morning, Tom,” she smiled. “I want you to tell me something. Did Ben Williams go to Huxstead yesterday, as far as you know?”

Tom answered her quite politely, but without any of Dan’s friendliness. “Yes, he did, miss. I seen him a-goin’ that way, and he said as he was off to buy some baccer at Bullock’s.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” cried Billy, clapping her hands. “How silly of me not to think of it! Tom, is your uncle a man of his word? I mean, does he keep promises and always do what he says he will?”

Tom’s face darkened curiously. “Oh aye, you can lay on it nothing’s goin’ to turn uncle aside when he be set on it.”

There was so much bitterness in his voice that Billy glanced at him curiously. She had never been able quite to understand Tom. However, what he said about his uncle made the broken promise about the trap seem all the more strange.

“Well,” she said, “I won’t keep you from your work, Tom.” Tom, she saw, was longing to be away. A vicious-looking spray of bramble waved from a tree near, and as Billy turned to go it seized on her hair and made all efforts to escape futile.

“Wait a minute, miss,” said Tom coldly. “I’ll set yer right.” He climbed out of the undergrowth and released her.

“Thank you,” said Billy. Mechanically she glanced at Tom’s boots. They were stained with dark wood mud—and with splashes of red clay.

After a pause, she said: “Tom, you didn’t go to Huxstead yesterday, did you?”

“Not been for a good week, miss,” answered Tom.

Billy’s brain was trying hard to work out something.

“Do you and Dan ever wear each other’s gaiters?”

Tom stared at her in amazement and with much impatience. “They be the same size, miss. We do sometimes get mixed up like.”

“Another thing, Tom—’scuse my worrying you—have you found a trap set in the wood to-day?”

“This is the first time I been in the wood to-day,” said Tom shortly. He had turned away, and his voice seemed to have altered. Billy felt herself turning white and then red. An extraordinary idea occurred to her.

“Tom,” she said, “last night I put a circle of red clay round a secret trap that Dan found in the woods—and there’s clay on your boots.”

The following silence was so long that she seemed to hear her heart beating. Then Tom swung round on her. His face was dark, bitter, angry, and ashamed. “So you be a-trackin’ of me, be yer?” he flashed fiercely. “That’s what all the talk meant. Well, you’d better be goin’ to me uncle, quick. He’ll be fine and pleased.”

In spite of the anger in his face, which made Billy feel quite frightened, she took a step nearer.

“Tom,” she said, “why on earth did you do it?”

“Why don’t he let me go to be a sailor?” flashed the boy. “I hates this life and the stillness and the woods. My fayther he wer a sailor, and his fayther before him. We ain’t land folk. But no; Uncle Dan ses I got to be a gamekeeper like him, and my folks is dead. So I took the rabbits. I slipped out at night, and I sold ’em, and I’ve near got the money to pay me fare and food to the coast. I knowed well if so be I tried to walk he’d have me back in no time.”

“Oh, Tom!” Billy’s head was whirling. “But Norrist—he was carrying a rabbit just now!”

Billy’s record in picture-writing of the adventures of the Mystery Poacher.

“I couldn’t get ’em away this week,” said Tom sullenly. “I begged him to sell ’em for me till Saturday, and then I meant to be off. He didn’t much like it. Now go and split on me!”

But Billy’s interview with Dan was not at all of the character he had imagined. It was a terrible one for Billy. She had not dreamed the old man so hard, unyielding, and wrathful. No one was more surprised than Billy when, quite suddenly, the battle was won. Old Dan capitulated. He carried the matter to the owner of the Heathcote estate, insisting on paying for the rabbits, and, through old friends of his brother’s, he found a good ship for Tom and paid his fare to the coast. What is more, he lived to be proud indeed of his sailor nephew.

A few weeks after these events, Tom came to say good-bye. His eyes shone, and his smile flashed out as he shook Billy’s hand.

“I can’t thank you, Miss Billy,” he said huskily. “But I won’t ever forget you.”

“Oh, Tom, I’m so glad it’s all happy for you!” cried Billy. “Heaps of good luck!”

“And, miss,” said Tom, fingering his cap and laughing awkwardly, “you did say as how you be wantin’ a name, like, to call yerself. I got a book at home all about a great scout and trapper. Blood brother to the Injuns, he was, and a great one for peace, and plucky, too, and the smartest hand at trackin’ as ever you saw. And, bein’ as he was small like, they called him ‘Little Black Panther.’ ”

And so it came to pass, at the end of the day, that a happy Lone Scout sat down to make the first entry in picture-writing in her big white log-book and signed it “Little Black Panther.”