Kitabı oku: «Ruth Fielding at Lighthouse Point: or, Nita, the Girl Castaway», sayfa 4
CHAPTER X
THE DOUBLE CHARGE
But again the line fell short.
“They’ll never be able to make it,” Tom Cameron said to the shivering girls.
“Oh, I really wish we hadn’t come down here,” murmured his sister.
“Oh, pshaw, Nell! don’t be a baby,” he growled.
But he was either winking back the tears himself, or the salt spray had gotten into his eyes. How could anybody stand there on the beach and feel unmoved when nine human beings, in view now and then when the billows fell, were within an ace of awful death?
Again and again the gun was shotted and the captain pulled the lanyard. He tried to catch the moment when there was a lull in the gale; but each time the shot fell short. It seemed to be merely a waste of human effort and gunpowder.
“I’ve ’phoned to the Minot Cove station,” the captain said, during one of the intervals while they were hauling in the line. “They’ve got a power boat there, and if they can put to sea with her they might get around to the other side of the reef and take ’em off.”
“She’ll go to pieces before a boat can come from Minot Cove,” declared one grizzled fisherman.
“I fear so, Henry,” replied the captain. “But we got to do what we can. They ain’t give me no leeway with this gun. Orders is never to give her a bigger charge than what she’s gettin’ now. But, I swan–”
He did not finish his sentence, but gravely measured out the next charge of powder. When he had loaded the gun he waved everybody back.
“Git clean away, you lads. All of ye, now! She’ll probably blow up, but there ain’t no use in more’n one of us blowin’ up with her.”
“What you done, Cap’n?” demanded one of his crew.
“Never you mind, lad. Step back, I tell ye. She’s slewed right now, I reckon.”
“What have you got in her?” demanded the man again.
“I’m goin’ to reach them folk if I can,” returned Cap’n Abinadab. “I’ve double charged her. If she don’t carry the line this time, she never will. And she may carry it over the wreck, even if she blows up. Look out!”
“Don’t ye do it!” cried the man, Mason, starting forward. “If you pull that lanyard ye’ll be blowed sky-high.”
“Well, who should pull it if I don’t?” demanded the old captain of the station, grimly. “Guess old ’Binadab Cope ain’t goin’ to step back for you young fellers yet a while. Come! git, I tell ye! Far back–afar back.”
“Oh! he’ll be killed!” murmured Ruth.
“You come back here, Ruth Fielding!” commanded Tom, clutching her arm. “If that gun blows up we want to be a good bit away.”
The whole party ran back. They saw the last of the crew leave the old captain. He stood firmly, at one side of the gun, his legs placed wide apart; they saw him pull the lanyard. Fire spat from the muzzle of the gun and with a shriek the shot-line was carried seaward, toward the wreck.
The old gun, double charged, turned a somersault and buried its muzzle in the sand. The captain dodged, and went down–perhaps thrown by the force of the explosion. But the gun did not burst.
However, he was upon his feet again in a moment, and all the crowd were shouting their congratulations. The flying line had carried squarely over the middle of the wreck.
“Now, will they know what to do with it?” gasped Ruth.
“Wait! see that man–that man in the middle? The line passed over his shoulder!” cried Heavy. “See! he’s got it.”
“And he’s hauling on it,” cried Tom.
“There goes the line with the board attached,” said Madge Steele, exultantly. The girls had already examined this painted board. On it were plain, though brief, instructions in English, French, and Italian, to the wrecked crew as to what they should do to aid in their own rescue. But this schooner was probably from up Maine way, or the “blue-nose country” of Nova Scotia, and her crew would be familiar with the rigging of the breeches buoy.
They saw, as another light was burned on the wreck, the man who had seized the line creep along to the single mast then standing. It was broken short off fifteen feet above the deck. He hauled out the shot-line, and then a mate came to his assistance and they rigged the larger line that followed and attached the block to the stump of the mast.
Then on shore the crew of the life saving station and the fishermen–even the boys from the bungalow–hauled on the cable, and soon sent the gear across the tossing waves. They had erected a stout pair of wooden “shears” in the sand and over this the breeches buoy gear ran.
It went out empty, but the moment it reached the staggering wreck the men there popped the woman into the sack and those ashore hauled in. Over and through the waves she came, and when they caught her at the edge of the surf and dragged the heavy buoy on to the dry land, she was all but breathless, and was crying.
“Don’t ye fear, Missus,” said one rough but kindly boatman. “We’ll have yer little gal ashore in a jiffy.”
“She–she isn’t my child, poor thing,” panted the woman. “I’m Captain Kirby’s wife. Poor Jim! he won’t leave till the last one–”
“Of course he won’t, ma’am–and you wouldn’t want him to,” broke in Cap’n Cope. “A skipper’s got to stand by his ship till his crew an’ passengers are safe. Now, you go right up to the station–”
“Oh, no, no!” she cried. “I must see them all safe ashore.”
The huge buoy was already being hauled back to the wreck. There was no time to be lost, for the waves had torn away the after-deck and it was feared the forward deck and the mast would soon go.
Ruth went to the woman and spoke to her softly.
“Who is the little girl, please?” she asked.
“She ain’t little, Miss–no littler than you,” returned Mrs. Kirby. “Her name is Nita.”
“Nita?”
“That’s what she calls herself.”
“Nita what?” asked Ruth.
“I don’t know, I’m sure. I believe she’s run away from her folks. She won’t tell much about herself. She only came aboard at Portland. In fact, I found her there on the dock, and she seemed hungry and neglected, and she told us first that she wanted to go to her folks in New York–and that’s where the Whipstitch was bound.”
“The Whipstitch is the name of the schooner?”
“Yes, Miss. And now Jim’s lost her. But–thanks be!–she was insured,” said the captain’s wife.
At that moment another hearty shout went up from the crowd on shore. The breeches buoy was at the wreck again. They saw the men there lift the girl into the buoy, which was rigged like a great pair of overalls. The passenger sat in this sack, with her legs thrust through the apertures below, and clung to the ring of the buoy, which was level with her shoulders.
She started from the ship in this rude conveyance, and the girls gathered eagerly to greet her when she landed. But several waves washed completely over the breeches buoy and the girl was each time buried from sight. She was unconscious when they lifted her out.
She was a black-haired girl of fourteen or thereabout, well built and strong. The captain’s wife was too anxious about the crew to pay much attention to the waif, and Ruth and her friends bore Nita, the castaway, off to the station, where it was warm.
The boys remained to see the last of the crew–Captain Kirby himself–brought ashore. And none too soon was this accomplished, for within the half hour the schooner had broken in two. Its wreckage and the lumber with which it had been loaded so covered the sea between the reef and the shore that the waves were beaten down, and had it been completely calm an active man could have traveled dry-shod over the flotsam to the reef.
Meanwhile Nita had been brought to her senses. But there was nothing at the station for the girl from the wreck to put on while her own clothing was dried, and it was Heavy who came forward with a very sensible suggestion.
“Let’s take her home with us. Plenty of things there. Wrap her up good and warm and we’ll take her on the buckboard. We can all crowd on–all but the boys.”
The boys had not seen enough yet, anyway, and were not ready to go; but the girls were eager to return to the bungalow–especially when they could take the castaway with them.
“And there we’ll get her to tell us all about it,” whispered Helen to Ruth. “My! she must have an interesting story to tell.”
CHAPTER XI
THE STORY OF THE CASTAWAY
There was only the cook in the station and nobody to stop the girls from taking Nita away. She had recovered her senses, but scarcely appreciated as yet where she was; nor did she seem to care what became of her.
Heavy called the man who had driven them over, and in ten minutes after she was ashore the castaway was on the buckboard with her new friends and the ponies were bearing them all at a spanking pace toward the Stone bungalow on Lighthouse Point.
The fact that this strange girl had been no relation of the wife of the schooner’s captain, and that Mrs. Kirby seemed, indeed, to know very little about her, mystified the stout girl and her friends exceedingly. They whispered a good deal among themselves about the castaway; but she sat between Ruth and Helen and they said little to her during the ride.
She had been wrapped in a thick blanket at the station and was not likely to take cold; but Miss Kate and old Mammy Laura bustled about a good deal when Nita was brought into the bungalow; and very shortly she was tucked into one of the beds on the second floor–in the very room in which Ruth and Helen and Mercy were to sleep–and Miss Kate had insisted upon her swallowing a bowl of hot tea.
Nita seemed to be a very self-controlled girl. She didn’t weep, now that the excitement was past, as most girls would have done. But at first she was very silent, and watched her entertainers with snapping black eyes and–Ruth thought–in rather a sly, sharp way. She seemed to be studying each and every one of the girls–and Miss Kate and Mammy Laura as well.
The boys came home after a time and announced that every soul aboard the Whipstitch was safe and sound in the life saving station. And the captain’s wife had sent over word that she and her husband would go back to Portland the next afternoon. If the girl they had picked up there on the dock wished to return, she must be ready to go with them.
“What, go back to that town?” cried the castaway when Ruth told her this, sitting right up in bed. “Why, that’s the last place!”
“Then you don’t belong in Portland?” asked Ruth.
“I should hope not!”
“Nor in Maine?” asked Madge, for the other girls were grouped about the room. They were all anxious to hear the castaway’s story.
The girl was silent for a moment, her lips very tightly pressed together. Finally she said, with her sly look:
“I guess I ain’t obliged to tell you that; am I?”
“Witness does not wish to incriminate herself,” snapped Mercy, her eyes dancing.
“Well, I don’t know that I’m bound to tell you girls everything I know,” said the strange girl, coolly.
“Right-oh!” cried Heavy, cordially. “You’re visiting me. I don’t know as it is anybody’s business how you came to go aboard the Whipstitch–”
“Oh, I don’t mind telling you that,” said the girl, eagerly. “I was hungry.”
“Hungry!” chorused her listeners, and Heavy said: “Fancy being hungry, and having to go aboard a ship to get a meal!”
“That was it exactly,” said Nita, bluntly. “But Mrs. Kirby was real good to me. And the schooner was going to New York and that’s where I wanted to go.”
“Because your folks live there?” shot in The Fox.
“No, they don’t, Miss Smartie!” snapped back the castaway. “You don’t catch me so easy. I wasn’t born yesterday, Miss! My folks don’t live in New York. Maybe I haven’t any folks. I came from clear way out West, anyway–so now! I thought ’way down East must be the finest place in the world. But it isn’t.”
“Did you run away to come East?” asked Ruth, quietly.
“Well–I came here, anyway. And I don’t much like it, I can tell you.”
“Ah-ha!” cried Mercy Curtis, chuckling to herself. “I know. She thought Yankee Land was just flowing in milk and honey. Listen! here’s what she said to herself before she ran away from home:
“I wish I’d lived away Down East,
Where codfish salt the sea,
And where the folks have apple sass
And punkin pie fer tea!”
“That’s the ‘Western Girl's Lament,’” pursued Mercy. “So you found ’way down East nothing like what you thought it was?”
The castaway scowled at the sharp-tongued lame girl for a moment. Then she nodded. “It’s the folks,” she said. “You’re all so afraid of a stranger. Do I look like I’d bite?”
“Maybe not ordinarily,” said Helen, laughing softly. “But you do not look very pleasant just now.”
“Well, people haven’t been nice to me,” grumbled the Western girl. “I thought there were lots of rich men in the East, and that a girl could make friends ’most anywhere, and get into nice families–”
“To work?” asked Ruth, curiously.
“No, no! You know, you read a lot about rich folks taking up girls and doing everything for them–dressing them fine, and sending them to fancy schools, and all that.”
“I never read of any such thing in my life!” declared Mary Cox. “I guess you’ve been reading funny books.”
“Huh!” sniffed the castaway, who was evidently a runaway and was not made sorry for her escapade even by being wrecked at sea. “Huh! I like a story with some life in it, I do! Jib Pottoway had some dandy paper-covered novels in his locker and he let me read ’em–”
“Who under the sun is Jib Pottoway?” gasped Helen. “That isn’t a real name; is it?”
“It’s ugly enough to be real; isn’t it?” retorted the strange girl, chuckling. “Yep. That’s Jib’s real name. ‘Jibbeway Pottoway’–that’s the whole of it.”
“Oh, oh!” cried Heavy, with her hand to her face. “It makes my jaw ache to even try to say it.”
“What is he?” asked Madge, curiously.
“Injun,” returned the Western girl, laconically. “Or, part Injun. He comes from ’way up Canada way. His folks had Jibbeway blood.”
“But who is he?” queried Ruth, curiously.
“Why, he’s a puncher that works for–Well, he’s a cow puncher. That’s ’nuff. It don’t matter where he works,” added the girl, gruffly.
“That might give away where you come from, eh?” put in Mercy.
“It might,” and Nita laughed.
“But what is your name?” asked Ruth.
“Nita, I tell you.”
“Nita what?”
“Never mind. Just Nita. Mebbe I never had another name. Isn’t one name at a time sufficient, Miss?”
“I don’t believe that is your really-truly name,” said Ruth, gravely.
“I bet you’re right, Ruth Fielding!” cried Heavy, chuckling. “‘Nita’ and ‘Jib Pottoway’ don’t seem to go together. ‘Nita’ is altogether too fancy.”
“It’s a nice name!” exclaimed the strange girl, in some anger. “It was the name of the girl in the paper-covered novel–and it’s good enough for me.”
“But what’s your real name?” urged Ruth.
“I’m not telling you that,” replied the runaway, shortly.
“Then you prefer to go under a false name–even among your friends?” asked the girl from the Red Mill.
“How do I know you’re my friends?” demanded Nita, promptly.
“We can’t very well be your enemies,” said Helen, in some disgust.
“I don’t know. Anybody’s my enemy who wants to send me back–well, anyone who wants to return me to the place I came from.”
“Was it an institution?” asked Mary Cox quickly.
“What’s that?” demanded Nita, puzzled. “What do you mean by an ‘institution’?”
“She means a sort of school,” explained Ruth.
“Yes!” exclaimed The Fox, sharply. “A reform school, or something of the kind. Maybe an almshouse.”
“Never heard of ’em,” returned Nita, unruffled by the insinuation. “Guess they don’t have ’em where I come from. Did you go to one, Miss?”
Heavy giggled, and Madge Steele rapped The Fox smartly on the shoulder. “There!” said the senior. “It serves you right, Mary Cox. You’re answered.”
“Now, I tell you what it is!” cried the strange girl, sitting up in bed again and looking rather flushed, “if you girls are going to nag me, and bother me about who I am, and where I come from, and what my name is–though Nita’s a good enough name for anybody–”
“Anybody but Jib Pottoway,” chuckled Heavy.
“Well! and he warn’t so bad, if he was half Injun,” snapped the runaway. “Well, anyway, if you don’t leave me alone I’ll get out of bed right now and walk out of here. I guess you haven’t any hold on me.”
“Better wait till your clothes are dry,” suggested Madge.
“Aunt Kate would never let you go,” said Heavy.
“I’ll go to-morrow morning, then!” cried the runaway.
“Why, we don’t mean to nag you,” interposed Ruth, soothingly. “But of course we’re curious–and interested.”
“You’re like all the other Eastern folk I’ve met,” declared Nita. “And I don’t like you much. I thought you were different.”
“You’ve been expecting some rich man to adopt you, and dress you in lovely clothes, and all that, eh?” said Mercy Curtis.
“Well! I guess there are not so many millionaires in the East as they said there was,” grumbled Nita.
“Or else they’ve already got girls of their own to look after,” laughed Ruth. “Why, Helen here, has a father who is very rich. But you couldn’t expect him to give up Helen and Tom and take you into his home instead, could you?”
Nita glanced at the dry-goods merchant’s daughter with more interest for a moment.
“And Heavy’s father is awfully rich, too,” said Ruth. “But he’s got Heavy to support–”
“And that’s some job,” broke in Madge, laughing. “Two such daughters as Heavy would make poor dear Papa Stone a pauper!”
“Well,” said Nita, again, “I’ve talked enough. I won’t tell you where I come from. And Nita is my name–now!”
“It is getting late,” said Ruth, mildly. “Don’t you all think it would be a good plan to go to bed? The wind’s gone down some. I guess we can sleep.”
“Good advice,” agreed Madge Steele. “The boys have been abed some time. To-morrow is another day.”
Heavy and she and Mary went off to their room. The others made ready for bed, and the runaway did not say another word to them, but turned her face to the wall and appeared, at least, to be soon asleep.
Ruth crept in beside her so as not to disturb their strange guest. She was a new type of girl to Ruth–and to the others. Her independence of speech, her rough and ready ways, and her evident lack of the influence of companionship with refined girls were marked in this Nita’s character.
Ruth wondered much what manner of home she could have come from, why she had run away from it, and what Nita really proposed doing so far from home and friends. These queries kept the girl from the Red Mill awake for a long time–added to which was the excitement of the evening, which was not calculated to induce sleep.
She would have dropped off some time after the other girls, however, had she not suddenly heard a door latch somewhere on this upper floor, and then the creep, creep, creeping of a rustling step in the hall. It continued so long that Ruth wondered if one of the girls in the other room was ill, and she softly arose and went to the door, which was ajar. And what she saw there in the hall startled her.
CHAPTER XII
BUSY IZZY IN A NEW ASPECT
The stair-well was a wide and long opening and around it ran a broad balustrade. There was no stairway to the third floor of this big bungalow, only the servants’ staircase in the rear reaching those rooms directly under the roof. So the hall on this second floor, out of which the family bedrooms opened, was an L-shaped room, with the balustrade on one hand.
And upon that balustrade Ruth Fielding beheld a tottering figure in white, plainly visible in the soft glow of the single light burning below, yet rather ghostly after all.
She might have been startled in good earnest had she not first of all recognized Isadore Phelps’ face. He was balancing himself upon the balustrade and, as she came to the door, he walked gingerly along the narrow strip of moulding toward Ruth.
“Izzy! whatever are you doing?” she hissed.
The boy never said a word to her, but kept right on, balancing himself with difficulty. He was in his pajamas, his feet bare, and–she saw it at last–his eyes tight shut.
“Oh! he’s asleep,” murmured Ruth.
And that surely was Busy Izzy’s state at that moment. Sound asleep and “tight-rope walking” on the balustrade.
Ruth knew that it would be dangerous to awaken him suddenly–especially as it might cause him to fall down the stair-well. She crept back into her room and called Helen. The two girls in their wrappers and slippers went into the hall again. There was Busy Izzy tottering along in the other direction, having turned at the wall. Once they thought he would plunge down the stairway, and Helen grabbed at Ruth with a squeal of terror.
“Sh!” whispered her chum. “Go tell Tom. Wake him up. The boys ought to tie Izzy in bed if he is in the habit of doing this.”
“My! isn’t he a sight!” giggled Helen, as she ran past the gyrating youngster, who had again turned for a third perambulation of the railing.
She whispered Tom’s name at his open door and in a minute the girls heard him bound out of bed. He was with them–sleepy-eyed and hastily wrapping his robe about him–in a moment.
“For the land’s sake!” he gasped, when he saw his friend on the balustrade. “What are you–”
“Sh!” commanded Ruth. “He’s asleep.”
Tom took in the situation at a glance. Madge Steele peered out of her door at that moment. “Who is it–Bobbins?” she asked.
“No. It’s Izzy. He’s walking in his sleep,” said Ruth.
“He’s a regular somnambulist,” exclaimed Helen.
“Never mind. Don’t call him names. He can’t help it,” said Madge.
Helen giggled again. Tom had darted back to rouse his chum. Bob Steele appeared, more tousled and more sleepy-looking than Tom.
“What’s the matter with that fellow now?” he grumbled. “He’s like a flea–you never know where he’s going to be next! Ha! he’ll fall off that and break his silly neck.”
And as Busy Izzy was just then nearest his end of the hall in his strange gyrations, Bob Steele stepped forward and grabbed him, lifting him bodily off the balustrade. Busy Izzy screeched, but Tom clapped a hand over his mouth.
“Shut up! want to raise the whole neighborhood?” grunted Bobbins, dragging the lightly attired, struggling boy back into their room. “Ha! I’ll fix you after this. I’ll lash you to the bedpost every night we’re here–now mark that, young man!”
It seemed that the youngster often walked in his sleep, but the girls had not known it. Usually, at school, his roommates kept the dormitory door locked and the key hidden, so that he couldn’t get out to do himself any damage running around with his eyes shut.
The party all got to sleep again after that and there was no further disturbance before morning. They made a good deal of fun of Isadore at the breakfast table, but he took the joking philosophically. He was always playing pranks himself; but he had learned to take a joke, too.
He declared that all he dreamed during the night was that he was wrecked in an iceboat on Second Reef and that the only way for him to get ashore was to walk on a cable stretched from the wreck to the beach. He had probably been walking that cable–in his mind–when Ruth had caught him balancing on the balustrade.
The strange girl who persisted in calling herself “Nita” came down to the table in some of Heavy’s garments, which were a world too large for her. Her own had been so shrunk and stained by the sea-water that they would never be fit to put on again. Aunt Kate was very kind to her, but she looked at the runaway oddly, too. Nita had been just as uncommunicative to her as she had been to the girls in the bedroom the night before.
“If you don’t like me, or don’t like my name, I can go away,” she declared to Miss Kate, coolly. “I haven’t got to stay here, you know.”
“But where will you go? what will you do?” demanded that young lady, severely. “You say the captain of the schooner and his wife are nothing to you?”
“I should say not!” exclaimed Nita. “They were nice and kind to me, though.”
“And you can’t go away until you have something decent to wear,” added Heavy’s aunt. “That’s the first thing to ’tend to.”
And although it was a bright and beautiful morning after the gale, and there were a dozen things the girls were all eager to see, they spent the forenoon in trying to make up an outfit for Nita so that she would be presentable. The boys went off with Mr. Stone’s boatkeeper in the motor launch and Mary Cox was quite cross because the other girls would not leave Miss Kate to fix up Nita the best she could, so that they could all accompany the boys. But in the afternoon the buckboard was brought around and they drove to the lighthouse.
Nita, even in her nondescript garments, was really a pretty girl. No awkwardness of apparel could hide the fact that she had nice features and that her body was strong and lithe. She moved about with a freedom that the other girls did not possess. Even Ruth was not so athletic as the strange girl. And yet she seemed to know nothing at all about the games and the exercises which were commonplace to the girls from Briarwood Hall.
There was a patch of wind-blown, stunted trees and bushes covering several acres of the narrowing point, before the driving road along the ridge brought the visitors to Sokennet Light. While they were driving through this a man suddenly bobbed up beside the way and the driver hailed him.
“Hullo, you Crab!” he said. “Found anything ’long shore from that wreck?”
The man stood up straight and the girls thought him a very horrid-looking object. He had a great beard and his hair was dark and long.
“He’s a bad one for looks; ain’t he, Miss?” asked the driver of Ruth, who sat beside him.
“He isn’t very attractive,” she returned.
“Ha! I guess not. And Crab’s as bad as he looks, which is saying a good deal. He comes of the ‘wreckers.’ Before there was a light here, or life saving stations along this coast, there was folks lived along here that made their livin’ out of poor sailors wrecked out there on the reefs. Some said they used to toll vessels onto the rocks with false lights. Anyhow, Crab’s father, and his gran’ther, was wreckers. He’s assistant lightkeeper; but he oughtn’t to be. I don’t see how Mother Purling can get along with him.”
“She isn’t afraid of him; is she?” queried Ruth.
“She isn’t afraid of anything,” said Heavy, quickly, from the rear seat. “You wait till you see her.”
The buckboard went heavily on toward the lighthouse; but the girls saw that the man stood for a long time–as long as they were in sight, at least–staring after them.
“What do you suppose he looked at Nita so hard for?” whispered Helen in Ruth’s ear. “I thought he was going to speak to her.”
But Ruth had not noticed this, nor did the runaway girl seem to have given the man any particular attention.
