Читать книгу In the Path of La Salle or Boy Scouts on the Mississippi - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 6

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Yet there was nothing, he reflected, to be nervous and agitated about. And he was quite impatient with himself that he should give way to this strange uneasiness over nothing. So with a fine air of unconcern, he plunged his paddle vigorously, as if to have done with all such nonsense. Of course, he told himself, it wasn’t as if he intended to—he didn’t finish the sentence, the thought was so absurd. If he had allowed himself to finish, he would have found himself using a word he did not like, and which—which had no connection with him at all. Wesley never liked to confront things, or even thoughts, that were troublesome and unpleasant.

He was not in any trouble, he assured himself. His course was perfectly plain. In two hours everything would be all right, and then—then he would never again let a snip of a girl cause him to do anything that was—foolish. That was just the word—foolish. He would be in Oakwood by two o’clock. After he had put the canoe in locker 53 he would go home, get his bicycle, and ride it up to Billy Ackerson’s. Billy was going to buy the bicycle this very day. He had said he would have the money on Saturday, and he always came out on the 3:10 train. The scouts wouldn’t be home till the 5:10 train.

You see how nicely everything was going to come together.

Again he roused himself and gave his little, sneering chuckle.

“Huh, I’d like to meet them,” he mused, thinking of his talk with Sparrow. “I know that cowboy brand, all right. They’ve got Charlie hypnotized, that’s one sure thing. If they handed me any of those Hans Christian Andersen wonders, it would be a case of ‘ring off, you’ve got the wrong number, boy,’ believe me!”

He had just rounded the upper bend into the quiet shade of “Perch Hole” where the pungent odor of damp wood and rotting foliage seemed to emphasize the solitude. On one side the trees crowded down to the water’s edge and here and there among them stood dead trunks, white and conspicuous. On the other shore the trees were more sparse, and through them one could see, beyond the fields, the state road running along its high embankment.

Wesley paused, letting the water drip from his paddle and listening to it idly. Then a faint chugging caught his ear and he listened intently. About him all was very still; there were no other loiterers. Now the chugging seemed near, now far, now died altogether, and then he heard it again, confused with its own echoes. The river was so winding that an approaching boat might be very near and yet have to pass away again following the bend of the stream. Of a sudden Wesley espied a motorcycle speeding along the distant road and decided that from this came the sound he had heard.

“If I had two hundred dollars,” he mused, “I’d—”

But suddenly the long cry of a siren sounded close upon him, he heard voices which seemed strangely clear, and he paddled furiously out of the channel to escape a good-sized launch which came darting around the bend. As it passed, his quick glance caught only a suggestion of white hull, a large highly-polished brass searchlight and a Rough Rider hat.

He was nearing the wooded shore when he felt a quick jar, there was a sound of scraping, then of ripping, the canoe jerked, heeled over, and Wesley was aware of the water pouring through a great jagged rent in its frail side. It had been simply torn open, several of its ribs wrenched out of place and a big, gnarled, slimy piece of wood with a great spike in its end was projecting through the side. Then, all in an instant, the boat filled and Wesley was floundering in the water. All that was visible of the craft was its mahogany gunwale which became instantly submerged as he grasped it. His feet groped frantically and finding no foothold, he became panicky. Again and again he grasped the rail of the canoe, only to go down with it as it rolled over. Once his foot rested on some slimy object, but slid off. In terror he tried to grasp the high curving end of the ruined craft, but it gave gently, and he went down, down, then presently rose again sputtering and shrieking desperately.

“Hold on to the canoe!” he heard some one call.

“I—I—can’t,” he spluttered. “Help—help—I’m—”

“Hold on to the canoe, and keep your mouth shut!” the voice insisted. “I’m not going to bend my shaft in all that trash!”

“I—I—it goes under,” Wesley yelled. “I’m—”

“What of it?” said the voice, sternly. “Hold on and keep your mouth shut, and don’t be a baby!”

He held fast and felt himself dragged briskly through the water. The next thing he realized he was pulled, shivering and sputtering, into a launch where a young fellow was unlashing a boat-hook from the end of a long rod with a scale printed on it.

“Hold her there a minute, Bobby,” said a man. “Huh,” he added as he examined the submerged canoe, “torn like a paper bag. ’Fraid she’s done for. Good frame, too. She’ll lodge in those bushes over there and you can get her—she won’t sink. What’d you want to run in there for?”

It seemed to Wesley that a fellow who had been all but drowned should have a little more sympathy and attention. But, on the contrary, this man showed not the least symptom of excitement. He was distressingly calm and matter-of-fact. And Wesley had a misgiving that the man was not altogether favorably impressed with him.

“How did I know what was in there?” he answered, petulantly. “I’m not a mind reader.”

“You saw there were dead trees and part of an old float on shore, didn’t you? You might have known that where there are dead trees on shore, there are dead ones under the water. Where were your eyes? What’s the matter, can’t you swim?”

“N-not for—I haven’t swam for—”

“You never forget how to swim,” the man interrupted crisply. “Guess you never learned, eh?”

He did not seem at all annoyed at Wesley’s weak attempt to deceive him. But he clipped the deception off as one clips a wire with a pair of nippers.

Wesley was about to make a sarcastic reply, but the clear brown eyes that were looking straight at him abashed him and he refrained. He was not going to let the man off too easily, however.

“I suppose that’s what you call deduction,” he said, with as much of a sneer as he dared display.

“What?”

“That about the trees.”

“No, that’s just plain horse sense,” said the man quietly. “You cold?” he added, seeing Wesley shiver.

“I’m getting pneumonia by the minute, believe me.”

“Oh, no, you’re not; take off your shoes; you don’t get cold as long as your feet are bare. Take off your coat, too, the sun’ll dry you out.— Pull that clutch over, will you, Bobby? And you take the wheel, Mack.”

The launch started downstream, the man, apparently oblivious of Wesley’s presence, busying himself with the engine. He turned one of the grease cups, then another, filled the oil cup, adjusted it, watched it a minute, turned the cock in the muffler to see if she was pumping, oiled the pump eccentric, and then stood, watching her and listening in a knowing, inquisitive way to the explosions.

“Little more gas?” he queried of the young man who was steering.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Mack; “better turn off that cup, hadn’t you?” he added, looking back along the outside of the boat. “She’s smoking like blazes.”

“Guess you’re right,” said the man.

He shut off the oil cup and still stood watching the mechanism.

The young fellow called Bobby perched himself on the after-deck and began to play a harmonica. Mack, at the wheel, kept his gaze ahead. The unexpected guest could not help feeling that he was not at all the hero of the occasion. Not only was he denied the sympathetic attention that he felt he was entitled to, but no one seemed disposed to notice him at all.

So he fell into a kind of sullen observation of his rescuers. The man, who was stocky in build, wore a khaki suit and a Rough Rider hat with the brim turned up in front, and a lead pencil stuck in its cord. He was perhaps thirty-five years old, his face was tanned almost to the hue of a mulatto and he had a short mustache, black as ebony. Through his rimless glasses looked a pair of calm, clear, brown eyes which, somehow, were very disconcerting to Wesley, and he had a way of speaking in a crisp, clear-cut manner and listening for an answer as if he expected it to be prompt, concise and explicit. He seemed agreeable enough but this cheerful definiteness and alertness in his manner confounded any attempt at deception. Wesley felt that if he were going to say anything he had best think it out beforehand and get it just right.

The two young men, who were dressed in khaki trousers and flannel shirts, did not seem to stand at all in awe of the man and, though always respectful, laughed at him uproariously at times, particularly Bobby who positively declined to accept any of his opinions regarding the management of the engine. There was a tent stowed aboard, two or three duffel bags, a surveyor’s transit, rods, chain and various odds and ends incidental to roughing it and camp life. They seemed to Wesley a carefree, happy trio, making game of each other’s foibles, the man being a sort of incongruous combination of a scholar, a scientist and a tramp.

After a few minutes the man sat down beside Wesley.

“Trouble with these ‘make-and-break’ engines is your contact points wear out without your knowing it,” he said. Wesley stared. The man removed his glasses carefully with the thumb and finger of each hand, held them up to the light and replaced them accurately on his nose. Then he nodded amusedly toward Bob and winked at Wesley.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” he said, referring to the harmonica. “We’d get rid of him if it wasn’t for Civil Service.”

“Who’d cook your supper for you then?” queried Bobby, “and your surpassing coffee?”

“Well, we’re going to break up and board a while, anyway,” said Mack, at the wheel.

“Well, we get pretty good ‘eats’ on the R.S.,” answered Bobby, removing his harmonica to speak.

“Look at the appropriations they get,” said Mack; “even Bull Hungerford was satisfied.”

“Was he with them?”

“Sure—he went all the way down the Colorado with them last summer—he and Rinkey Brown; they were using dill pickles for plumb-bobs.”

“Do tell!” said Bobby.

“And bags of oatmeal for a bankhead revetment down the Columbia. They used a sack of dried apricots in a levee leak—it swelled right up and filled the hole fine.— They have a regular cook in the R.S.”

“That is, a real cook, a good one,” observed the man, winking at Wesley again.

“They lined up the whole north quadrangle of the Yellowstone with strings of spaghetti,” continued Mack. “Oh, they live high in the R.S.!”

“But no music,” said the man, slyly.

“No, thank goodness for that!” said Mack. “When are we going to get started, Captain?”

“Monday night.”

“We going to stop off at Washington, Captain?” asked Bobby, with affected innocence. Mack looked around, laughing.

“We are not” said the Captain, crisply.

“Oh, we’d better stop in Washington, hadn’t we?” Bobby persisted, with a twinkle in his eye.

“We wouldn’t be delayed more than a month or so,” said Mack.

“Just till Senator Flumdum gets over his attack of the pip.”

“It would be such fun sitting around waiting for Secretary—”

“We will make a long detour around Washington,” said the Captain.

Wesley could not help laughing in spite of himself. He was in no mood for laughter, to be sure, and when he thought of his return to Oakwood he was, as he might well have been, nervous and troubled. For a few minutes he had almost forgotten his trouble in listening to the banter of this apparently happy-go-lucky band. He knew well enough who they were, but he had lost all desire to “take them down” now. He wished that he had as little to worry his mind as they had. And even had he felt disposed to match himself against them, the captain, he felt, would prove more than his equal and simply make him ridiculous. All his fine bravado was gone now, and instead he confronted his shameful home-coming. What should he say about the canoe? And where was the mackinaw jacket? In the canoe, no doubt, and securely buttoned into its flap pocket was just three dollars and five cents less than should be there. Of course, it would be found and everything would be discovered. No doubt, Honor Sparrow would mention that he had handed her a Panamanian coin. He had not thought of that before.

“I’m in bad,” he said to himself; “I don’t know what in thunder to do now!”

He was surprised and angry that an act in which his intentions were perfectly honorable should leave him in such a predicament. Besides (though this seemed but a trifling matter now), he had an uncomfortable feeling of being inferior to these fellows in the launch. They knew that he could not swim, he felt that they attributed his accident to ignorance or bad judgment, and he had not been able to offer so much as a comment when the man had made a casual remark about a well-known feature of a common, everyday gas engine. How readily Arnold would have fallen into discussion of such a thing. The captain had seemed to assume that he would know something about gas engines.

Yet, uncomfortable as he was, he wished that the launch would go slower. He did not want to reach Oakwood till he had time to think. He wished now that he had tried to rescue the telltale jacket. Suddenly the shrill whistle of a distant train caught his ear and he fancied that the scouts might be coming home before he had a chance to—

To what? He had no plan now.

He listened abstractedly to the bantering shop-talk of his companions. Mack, at the wheel, was singing, and Wesley envied him that he felt in the mood to sing.

“Little bits of red tape,

Little drops of ink,

Knock our work all endways—

Put it on the blink.”

“I should think you’d like to go to Washington,” Wesley said after a while, feeling that he ought to say something.

“So we do,” said Bob. “We just love it; it’s as good as a three-ring circus. Did you hear about that congressman saying he’d never heard of white coal?” he added, calling to Mack; “wanted to see a piece.”

This produced great laughter.

“What is white coal?” Wesley ventured.

“Just water,” said the Captain.

“There’s a way to get past Washington,” said Mack.

“I’ve never heard of it,” said the Captain in his crisp, choppy way.

“In an aëroplane.”

“I don’t believe there’s any call for rush anyway, Captain,” said Mack. “It’s probably just like it was last year in Arizona. Soon as the wild water starts they go up in the air and have to have a storage survey. They can’t do anything now; they’ll just have to leave it to the levees. If it lights in below Cairo, it’ll be all right.”

“Well, we’ve got those Dakota quadrangles to line up, anyway,” said the Captain. “We might as well kill two birds with one stone.”

“Yes, but they’re always shrieking, ‘Help, help!’” said Bob. “Congress ought to vote a rattle or a bottle of milk or something to keep them quiet.”

“They’ve got a company of infantry now,” said Mack.

“And a cook,” observed the Captain tersely.

“Oh, very well, Captain Craig,” said Bob, with an assumption of girlish offense. “I shall remember this.”

The boathouse was now in sight, and never had it looked less welcome to Wesley. As they neared it he scanned the lawn and floats anxiously to see if any one was about, but the place seemed deserted.

“You boys better take in a show to-night,” said the captain, “and if I don’t see you again, get over to the Island by ten on Monday sure.”

“Obedience to superiors,” said Bob, apparently quoting, “is the keystone of success in the service. We will take in the show, Captain.”

The captain laughed and looked at Wesley.

“You get out here?”

For a moment Wesley did not answer. Bob, overhearing the Captain’s query, reached out for the clutch.

As far as Wesley had any plan at all it was to go straight home, wait till his father arrived from the city, and make a clean breast of everything. But now, suddenly, it came jumping into his head that a better plan might be to go on down to the city, wait at the station for his father and come out with him. That would give him a chance to talk on the train. Best of all, it would enable him to postpone doing anything for a while, to put off the evil moment. For uppermost in his mind was his disinclination to land at Oakwood.

“Get out here?” the Captain repeated.

“N-no,” said Wesley.

The Captain raised his eyes in surprise. “Nothing but marshes and brick-yards below here, is there?”

“I—I’ll go right down to the city—if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? No, indeed,” he said pleasantly, but looking at the boy sharply. “Did you paddle all the way up from the city? That was some paddle.”

“It’s where I be—it’s where I’m going,” said Wesley.

“False alarm, Captain?” called Bobby, still holding the clutch.

“False alarm, Bobby.”

And Bobby, settling himself again upon the engine-locker, replaced the harmonica at his lips and completely enveloping it from view with both hands, began a lively rendering, with startling trills and variations, of “I’m Afraid to go Home in the Dark.”

Wesley looked at him anxiously for a moment but seeing nothing in the least significant in Bobby’s guileless countenance, decided that the tune had been selected by mere chance.