CHAPTER III.
The Chase of the “Dido.”
REUBE uttered a cry of something like despair.
“Now, old man, what’s the matter with you?” queried Will, reprovingly. “Do you suppose the Dido’s gone? Why, you old chump, we’ll take one of the other boats and go after her. With this wind we’ll catch her before she goes half a dozen miles. She won’t get past the Joggins, anyway, I’ll bet you a red herring!”
Reube’s face brightened, beamed broadly, and resumed its old boyish frankness.
“Why, that’s so!” said he. “That’s just what we’ll do. What a perfect fool I’d be sometimes, Will, if you didn’t keep an eye on me!”
That half a mile across the marsh proved a long one owing to the many detours which our runners, now trotting slowly and deliberately, were forced to make by the windings of the full creek. At last they reached the landing place where the Dido had been moored. About the rickety old wharf stood four or five high reels, skeletons of light gray wood wound with the dark-stained folds of the shad nets. The fishing season was right at hand, but had not yet begun. Around the boats and the reels were many half-obliterated footprints, left by the feet of those who had been winding the nets and pitching the seams of the boats. Of fresh tracks there was but one set – the tracks of someone with long, narrow feet, who walked without turning out his toes. To these tracks Reube pointed with grim significance of gesture.
“Yes,” said Will, “I understand. Did you ever see a plainer signature than Mart Gandy makes with his feet?”
The smallest of the fishing boats at the wharf was a light “pinkie” – a name given by the Tantramar fishermen to a special kind of craft with the stern pointed like the stem. The pinkie, painted red and white instead of blackened with tar like the other boats, was a good sailer. She belonged to Barnes, the owner of the red bull; and to Reube’s judicial mind it seemed appropriate that she should be taken without leave. There was a further inducement in the fact that she could be got afloat more easily than any of the other boats. The tide had fallen so that her keel was high and dry; and the fine mud of Tantramar gripped it with astonishing tenacity. But after a few minutes of such straining as made the veins stand out on Will’s forehead, and brought a redness about Reube’s steel-gray eyes, she was afloat.
Up went her dainty jib; up went her broad white mainsail; and presently the red-and-white pinkie with Reube at the helm was nimbly threading the sharp curves of the creek. After a succession of short tacks the channel straightened, and heeling far over with the strong wind on her quarter the pinkie ran into the open with the tawny surf hissing at her gunwale. Reube held his course till they were a couple of hundred yards out, dreading some hungry shoals he knew of. Then he let out the sheet, eased up on the tiller, and put the pinkie’s head straight down the bay on the Dido’s track. Will loosened out the jib, belayed it, and lay down on the cuddy in its shadow. The Dido was out of sight beyond the rocks and high oak trees of Wood Point.
A stern chase, as has been said from of old, is a long chase; and while the red-and-white pinkie was scudding before the wind and shearing the yellow waves with her keen bow, Reube and Will had to curb their impatience. They did not even whistle for more wind, for they had all the wind the pinkie could well endure. When their ears had grown used to the slap and crumbling rush of the foam-wave past their gunwale they spoke of Mart Gandy.
Reube Dare’s father, whose farm adjoined that of the Gandys, had got himself embroiled with old Gandy over the location of the dividing line. While Reube was yet a very small boy old Gandy had pulled down the dilapidated line fence during one of Captain Dare’s absences, and had put up a new one which encroached seriously on the Dares’ best field. On Captain Dare’s return he expostulated with Gandy; and finding expostulation useless he quietly shifted back the fence. Then his ship sailed on a long voyage to the Guano Islands of the Pacific; and while he was scorching off the rainless coasts of northern Peru, Gandy again took possession of the coveted strip of field. From this voyage Captain Dare came back with broken health. He gave up his ship, settled down on the farm overlooking the marshes, and called in the arm of the law to curb old Gandy’s aggression. The fence had by this time been moved backward and forward several times, each time leaving behind a redder and more threatening line of wrath. When the case came into court the outcome was a surprise to both contestants. There were rummaging out of old titles and unearthing of old deeds, till Captain Dare’s lawyer made it clear not only that Gandy’s claim was unfounded, but also that before the dispute arose Gandy had been occupying some three acres of the old Dare property. The original grant, made a hundred years earlier to Captain Dare’s grandfather, required that the line should run down the middle of old Gandy’s sheep pasture – a worthless tract, but one which now acquired value in Gandy’s eye. Down the pasture forthwith was the new fence run, for Captain Dare, fired to obstinacy by his neighbor’s wanton aggression, would take no less than his rights. Then, the victory assured to him, the captain died, leaving to his widow and his boy a feud to trouble their peace. The farm was productive, but for some years old Gandy had vexed them with ceaseless and innumerable small annoyances. When the old man sank into imbecility, then his son Mart, a swarthy and furtive stripling, who betrayed the blood of a far-off Indian ancestor, took up the quarrel with new bitterness. In Mart Gandy’s dark and narrow soul, which was redeemed from utter worthlessness by his devotion to his family, hatred of the Dares stood as a sacred duty. It was his firm faith that his father had been tricked by a conspiracy between judge, jury, and lawyers. The persistency of his hate and the cunning of his strokes had been a steady check upon the prosperity of Reube and his mother.
In answer to a remark of Reube on this subject Will exclaimed, “But you’ve got him all right this time, old man. There can be no difficulty in identifying those footprints.”
Reube laughed somewhat sarcastically.
“Do you suppose,” he inquired, “that the tide is going to leave them as they are while we go after the Dido, fetch her back, and then go and get those holes in the mud examined by the authorities?”
“Well, perhaps my suggestion was hasty,” acknowledged Will.
After an hour’s run Wood Point was left behind, and there was the Dido not a mile ahead and well inshore. She had been delayed in the eddies of the cove below the Point. Reube gave a shout of joy and twisted his helm to starboard, while Will warned him to look out for the mud flats with which the cove was choked.
“O,” said Reube, confidently, “I know the place like a book.”
The red-and-white pinkie was now rapidly overhauling the vagrant craft when a stiff current caught the latter and she began to race along the curve of the farther shore. Reube was anxious to catch her before she should round the next headland, and get back into rough water. The headland was a low, humped promontory of mingled plaster rocks and yellowish sand, without a tree upon its grassy crest. Shifting his course to intercept the Dido, Reube steered the pinkie straight for the point. Just then the Dido was seen to give a lurch, stop short, and keel over to the gunwale.
“She’s run aground!” cried Will.
“But we’ve got her safe and will sail her back on next tide,” said Reube, heaving a sigh of relief as he saw that his beloved craft stood still, refusing to be rolled over by the push of the yellow tide upon her ribs.
The pinkie was sailing at a great pace.
“Better take in the jib, Will,” said Reube.
Will sprang up to obey. Just as he rose there was a staggering shock. The pinkie buried her nose in a hidden mudbank. The waves piled over her gunwales; the mast bent without breaking, like the brave, tough timber it was; and Will shot overboard headlong into the foam.
CHAPTER IV.
The Cave by the Tide
ACTING instantly on the impulse of an old sailor, Reube had sprung forward almost with the shock, and started to haul down the mainsail in order to relieve the strain. The next moment, however, while the half-lowered sail was bulging and flapping, he leaped into the bow to help Will. The latter rose with a gasp and stood waist deep, clinging to the bowsprit. His head and arms were bedaubed grotesquely with the mud into which he had plunged with such violence. He gazed sternly at Reube, and exclaimed:
“Perhaps you’ll claim that you know these mud banks as well as I do! I earnestly hope you may, some day, gain the same intimate knowledge of them!”
Then he climbed aboard and finished the furling of the sails, while Reube rolled convulsively in the bottom of the boat, unable to control his laughter. He recovered himself only when Will trod upon him without apology, and threatened to put him overboard.
When the sails had been made snug, and the pinkie bailed out, and the mud cleaned with pains from Will’s face and hair and garments, there was nothing to do but watch the Dido in the distance and wait for the tide to fall. In another half hour, or a little more, only a waste of red flats and yellow pools separated the two stranded boats. Reube took off his shoes and socks, rolled his trousers up high, and stepped overboard. These precautions were for Will superfluous; so he went as he was, and congratulated himself on being able to defy all hidden clam shells. Before he went, however, he took the precaution to put out the pinkie’s anchor, for which Reube derided him.
“The pinkie’s no Western stern-wheeler, to navigate a field of wet grass!” said he. “I fancy she’ll wait here till next tide all right!”
“Yes – but then?” queried Will, laconically.
“Then,” replied Reube, “we’ll come back for her with the Dido.”
“There’s lots one never knows!” said Will, as he looked carefully to the anchor rope. And as things turned out it was well he did so – a fact which Reube had to acknowledge penitently.
The distance between the stranded boats was little more than a quarter of a mile, yet it took the boys some time to traverse it. The bottom of the cove was for the most part a deep and clinging ooze, which took them to the knee at every step, and held their feet with the suction of an airpump. Here and there were patches of hard sand to give them a moment’s ease; but here and there, too, were the dreaded “honey pots” for which that part of the coast is noted, and to avoid these they had to go most circumspectly. The “honey pot” is a sort of quicksand in which sand is replaced by slime – a bottomless quagmire which does its work with inexorable certainty and deadly speed. Both Reube and Will knew the strange, ominous olive hue staining the red mud over the mouths of these traps, but they knew, also, that all signs sometimes fail, so they took the boathook with them and prodded their path cautiously. At last, after wading a long, shallow lagoon, the bottom of which was thick with shells, and unfriendly to Reube’s bare feet, they reached the runaway Dido.
Breathless with anxiety, Reube climbed over the side, suddenly imagining all sorts of damage and defilement. But his darling was none the worse for her involuntary cruise. She had shipped some muddy water, but that was all that Reube could grumble at. Gandy had been too shrewd to do anything that might look like malice aforethought. In a trice the trim craft was bailed out and sponged dry. Then Will admired her critically from stem to stern, from top to keel, asking a thousand learned questions by the way, and feeling almost persuaded to build a boat himself. But even this interesting procedure came to an end, and at length the comrades threw themselves down on the cuddy roof, and realized that they were hungry. It was long past their dinner time. The tide was not yet at its lowest ebb, and it would be four or five hours ere they could hope to get the boats again afloat.
The only thing they had to eat was a pocketful of dried dulse which Reube had brought with him. This they devoured, and it made them very thirsty. They decided to go ashore and look for a spring. Far away, on the crest of the upland, were some houses, at which they gazed hungrily, but the idea of leaving the Dido and the pinkie for any such long jaunt was not to be entertained for a moment. As they again stepped out into the mud Will repeated the precaution which he had taken in regard to the pinkie. He put out the little anchor, and paid no heed to Reube’s derision. To be sure, Reube was both owner and captain, but Will stood not on ceremony.
Not far from high-water mark our thirsty explorers found a clear, cold spring bubbling out from beneath a white plaster rock. The water was very hard, carrying a great deal of lime in solution, and Will lectured learnedly on the bad effect it would have upon their stomachs if they drank much of it. As usually happens, however, this theorizing had small force against the very practical fact of their thirst. So they drank till they were perfectly satisfied, and were afterward none the worse. This, Will insisted, was thanks to the abundance of sorrel which they found amid the grass near by, whose acid was kind enough to neutralize the lime which they had swallowed.
“But I say,” urged Reube, “there are folks back yonder who drink water like this all their lives. The wells in this plaster belt are all hard like this, and some of the people who drink from them live to over ninety.”
“That proves nothing,” said Will, “except that they are a long-lived stock. If they had sense enough to go somewhere else and drink soft water they might live to over a hundred!”
Reube cared little for argument, always finding it hard to know whether Will was in earnest or not. He lazily changed the subject.
“By the way,” he remarked, “now’s just the chance to visit the cave at the end of the Point!”
“Cave!” cried Will, jumping up from the grass. “What cave? How can there be a cave round here without me knowing it?”
“Why, I only heard of it myself last fall,” said Reube. “You see, the mouth of it isn’t uncovered till near low water; and nobody comes near this point at any time, there being nothing to come for, and the shoals and eddies so troublesome. I’ve sailed round here a good deal at high and half tide, but no one comes near it when tide’s out. You see all the broken rocks scattered away out across the flats from the Point. And as for the “honey pots” between them – well, old Chris Boltenhouse, who told me all about the place last fall, said they were a terror. You couldn’t step without getting into one. Chris also told me that the Acadians, at the time of their expulsion, had used the cave as a hiding place for some of their treasures, and that when he was a boy quite a lot of coin and silver ornaments had been found there.”
“Queer, too,” muttered Will, “how things like that drop out of people’s minds, come back, and are forgotten again! Well, let’s look into the hole while we’ve got time;” and the two ran hastily to the narrow end of the turf.
Over the slippery rocks below tide mark they had to move more deliberately, but in a short time they reached the foot of the promontory and stood on the verge of the flats not half an hour above low water. Very villainous indeed looked the flats, with the olive-hued menace spread over them on every hand. But there was no sign of a cave. Scanning the rocks minutely, our explorers skirted the whole front of the headland, but in vain. Then they started to retrace their steps, inveighing against the falsity of traditions. But now, their faces being turned, the rocky masses took on for them a new configuration, and they discovered a narrow strait, as it were, behind a jutting bowlder. It was a most unlikely-looking place for a cave entrance, but Will poked his nose into it curiously. The next moment he shouted:
“Found!”
Reube sprang to his side. There, behind the sentinel rock, was a narrow, triangular opening of about the height of a man. Its base, some four feet wide, was thickly silted with mud, and its sides dripped forbiddingly. Will stepped inside, and then turned.
“It’s darker than Egypt!” he exclaimed. “How are we going to explore it without a light?”
“Ah,” said Reube in tones of triumph, “I’ve got ahead this time, Will! I happened to bring a whole bunch of matches from home in my pocket to supply the Dido’s cuddy. And I picked up this on the Point when you were running ahead in such a hurry.” And he drew a sliver of driftwood pine from under his jacket.
“Good for you, old man!” cried Will, joyously. In a second or two the sliver was ablaze, and the explorers plunged into a narrow passage whose floor sloped upward swiftly.