Chapter VI.
CAMPING ON THE BEACH.
The kelp-gatherers, with their tip-cart and ox-team, had in the meanwhile entered the belt of woods which stretched along the coast, back from the sea. Tall trees rose on both sides of the narrow, sandy road, their tops meeting overhead. There was on the outskirts a scanty undergrowth, which, however, soon disappeared, leaving the open aisles of the forest, with here a brown carpet of pine-needles, and there a patch of bright moss.
The sun was going down. The spots and flickers of wine-colored light vanished from the boughs. The long bars of shadow, cast by the great trunks, became merged in one universal shade, and evening shut down upon the woods.
Soon another sound mingled with that of the wind sweeping through the pines and firs. It was the roar of the sea.
The boys were more quiet now, the solemn scene filling their hearts with quiet joy. The large trees soon gave place to a smaller and thicker growth of spruce and balsam, the boughs of which now and then touched the cart-wheels as they passed. Somewhere in the dim wilderness, a thrush piped his evening song.
"Hark!" said Perce. "I heard something besides a bird. Is somebody calling?"
"A loon," said Moke.
"A loon out on the water," said Poke. "The sea is just off here."
They soon had glimpses of it through openings among the trees. But now the sound of it became louder; the woods, too, moaned like another sea in the wind, and the cries were no longer heard.
They came out upon a spot of low grassy ground behind the sand-hills. There was a fresh-water pool near by. Perce thought it a good place for the oxen; and he turned them out on the road-side. Mrs. Murcher's boarding-house was in sight.
"Suppose I run up there and find Olly before it gets any darker," said Perce. "You can be unhitching the steers from the cart, and getting 'em around in a good place to feed. Fasten 'em to the cart-wheel by this rope; tie it in the ring of the yoke. Let 'em drink first."
"All right," said the twins. "Go ahead."
And off Perce ran to summon his friend to their festivities.
The twins turned the cattle into the grass, and then began to make things ready for their camp and supper; keeping up all the time an incessant dialogue, which prevented them from hearing again the cries of the supposed loon, growing fainter and fainter on the distant waves.
Neither did Perce hear them as he hastened along the path in the gloomy hollow, and mounted the piazza steps. In the hall-door of the boarding-house, he was met by a tall girl of seventeen, with a fine brunette complexion, piercing dark eyes, and a high, thin, Roman nose.
Overawed a little by her rather imposing style of dress and features, Perce took off his cap, and begging her pardon, inquired for Oliver Burdeen.
"Burdeen? Oliver?" she queried. "Oh!" with a pleasant smile, "you mean Olly!"
"Yes," he replied. "We all call him Olly where he lives, but I wasn't sure he would be known by that name here."
"He isn't known by any other!" replied the young lady with a laugh. "He's about, somewhere; I believe he's always about, somewhere! Mrs. Merriman," she called to a lady in the parlor, "where's the ubiquitous Olly?"
"I don't know, Amy," replied the lady. "Didn't he go with the gentlemen in the yacht?"
Amy "almost thought he did"; yet it seemed to her she had seen him that afternoon; a position of uncertainty on the part of that young lady, which wouldn't have been highly flattering to the vanity of Master Burdeen, even if he hadn't been at that moment beyond the reach of flattery.
"Mrs. Murcher can tell you," she said, turning to walk back to the end of the hall. "She is here, in the dining-room."
Mrs. Murcher thought Olly must be in his room.
"I believe he is going home this evening," she said; "he wants to show his folks a new suit of clothes that has been given him. I guess he's trying them on."
"I am a neighbor of his," said Perce. "I am camping on the beach with some friends; and we want him to join us."
"Well!" exclaimed the landlady, "you can go right up to his room and find him. It's in the old part of the house; but you'd better go up the front way; it's lighter."
She was explaining to Perce that he must go up one flight, proceed to the end of the corridor, and then step down into a lower passage—when the tall young brunette called over the banisters, "I'll show him!"
He mounted after her; and she threw open the door of what seemed an unoccupied room, to let more light from its windows into the corridor.
"Be careful not to stumble!" she warned him. "That's his room, right before you, as you go down those steps."
So saying, she disappeared in some other room, and Perce was left alone in the dim hall. He paused a moment to get a glimpse of the sea through the door and window of the room she had opened, which happened to be Mr. Hatville's room; then he groped his way to Olly's door and knocked.
In a little while, he returned alone to his friends on the beach.
"I couldn't find him," he said. "Mrs. Murcher sent me up to his room, but he wasn't there; and I went all over the place. Then she said she thought he must have gone home, to show his folks a new suit of clothes; he had asked her if he might; but she didn't expect him to go so soon."
"Olly's made, if he's got some new clothes!" said Moke.
"He never would speak to us, after that!" said Poke. "Never mind; we can 'wake Nicodemus' without him."
"Wake Nicodemus!" Moke shouted gleefully, to hear his voice resound in the woods.
"Wake Nicodemus!" Poke repeated. And the three joined gayly in the chorus of a song then popular:
"Now, run and tell Elijah to hurry up Pomp, And meet us at the gum-tree down in the swamp, To wake Nicodemus to-day!"
The very human biped whose cries had been mistaken for a loon's, heard their voices wafted to him by the wind—the same wind that was blowing him farther and farther from the shore.
He screamed again, wildly; but his own voice sounded weaker and weaker, while the merry chorus still went up from the little camping party on the beach:
"Wake Nicodemus to-day!"
The boys sang and chatted as they worked. They made their beds in a hollow of the windswept dunes, where there would be less annoyance from mosquitoes than in the shelter of the woods, and spread their hay and blankets upon the dry sand.
"Besides," said Perce, "the daylight will strike us here, and wake us early."
"Wake Nicodemus!" laughed Poke.
And then they all burst forth again:
"Wake Nicodemus to-day!"
The chasing clouds gathered, until the sky was almost completely overcast. The moon would not rise till late; it became dark rapidly. But as the gloom of night thickened on land and sea, a little golden flame shot up on the shore, and grew large and bright as the surrounding shadows became more dense.
It was the flame of the boys' camp-ire, which they kindled on the seaward side of the dunes, and fed with rubbish from the high-water mark of the recent storm. Later tides had not then reached it, and plenty of it was dry enough to burn.
PERCE AND THE TWINS ON THEIR WAY TO THE BEACH.
Chips and old shingles, bleached sea-weed, broken planks, strips and slabs from saw-mills on some far-away river, and other refuse, littered the strand,—here, a broken lobster-pot which the rolling waves had washed ashore, and there, a ship's fender, worn smooth, with a fragment of rope still held in the auger-hole by its knotted end.
Such of this fuel as best suited their immediate purpose the boys gathered for their fire; and Olly, in his wave-tossed boat, could see their agile figures running to and fro in the light of the flames.
"There'll be heaps of flood-wood, as well as kelp, for us to gather to-morrow," said Perce. "Don't put any more on the fire, boys."
"Why not?" asked the twins.
"There's no use wasting it," answered Perce, adding, "We've fire enough. We'll roast our corn and go to bed, so as to be up early. It'll be high tide before five to-morrow."
"Then wake Nicodemus!" cried Moke in a gleeful tone.
And again the three boys raised the wild chorus of the old plantation song.
"Olly ought to be here!" said Perce. "He must have gone home by the coast; and that's the way we missed him."
Even then, but for the noise of the surf and the whistling of the wind, they might have heard Olly's last screams; and by straining their eyes they might have seen far out on the gloomy deep a dim object, now rising for a moment against the line of the evening sky, and now disappearing in a hollow of the waves.
With hay about their heads to shelter them from the wind, and the light of their camp-fire gleaming over them, the kelp-gatherers lay under their blankets, in the hollow of the dunes. They talked or sang until the flames died to a feeble glimmer, that served to bring out by contrast the surrounding gloom of sea and land and sky.
"Isn't it dark, though!" exclaimed Perce. "I had no idea it would cloud so. I believe it is going to rain. Then shan't we be in a fix?"
"It can't rain," said Moke.
"No fear of that," added Poke, in a muffled voice from under his blanket.
"What's the reason?" Perce demanded.
"Uncle Moses said so," replied both the twins together.
"Oh, then, of course it can't!" laughed Perce. "And the wind wont change, and carry the kelp all off, and land it on some other beach, as it did the last time I was coming to get sea-weed here. The wind clipped around to the nor'ard and northeast, and in the morning this beach, that had been covered with it, was as clean as a whistle; while Coombs's Cove, where there hadn't been any, was full of it."
"Who's going to wake Nicodemus in the morning?" asked Moke.
"The one who's first awake himself," said Perce. And he sang, the others joining in:
"'Wake me up,' was his charge, 'at the first break of day, Wake me up for the great jubilee!'"
After that they became silent. The fire died on the beach. The breakers plunged and drew back, with incessant noise, in the darkness; the wind moaned in the woods, and whistled among the coarse sparse grass and wild peas that grew about the dunes. But notwithstanding the strangeness of their situation, the boys were soon asleep.
Uncle Moses proved a true prophet. There was no rain in the huddling clouds that at one time overspread the sky. They broke and lifted, and bright stars peeped from under their heavy lids. Then the moon rose and silvered them, and shed a strange light upon the limitless, unresting, solitary waves.