Well, we managed to borrow some wire cutters from Tom, though it was a hard job. He was about as easy to borrow tools from as an ordinary person would be to borrow a nose or an ear from, but we wheedled it out of him.
Then we waited. We read, and played checkers, and ate whenever we could tease anything away from Naboth. It was a long time to wait, but after hours and hours, it got dusk, and then we rowed ashore. By the time we landed it was pretty dark, and so we started through town and out onto the beach. And by the time we left the lights of Nantucket town behind us, it was so dark you couldn’t feel the back of your neck.
“Just the kind of night I hoped for,” says Catty.
“Me, too,” says I, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t like it. I wished I had a lantern that threw a light like an arc lamp. I never did like the dark, and I don’t care who knows it, and every time I stepped in a hole and went onto my nose, I liked it less. One thing I was glad of. It was a long way to the place we were going to raid and the longer it was, the farther off the time was when we had to do it. I would have been willing to put it off till next year.
CHAPTER XIII
There are different kinds of dark. There is just common, everyday dark, like in a house before you light the lights; there’s the kind of dark there is in a cellar; there’s the spooky kind there is in corners and under beds; and there’s the kind of dark we ran into that night after we left Nantucket town and started for the barbed wire entanglement. That was a special, sticky, solid dark. It felt exactly like we were pushing our way through something that pushed against us and tried to hold us back. There wasn’t a sign of moon or stars, and there was a fog. It was a dripping kind of a fog that almost was a drizzle. You could hold your hand up at arm’s length before your nose, and you couldn’t see a thing.
“Say,” says I, “what did you stop at the drug store for?”
“Soothing syrup,” says Catty. “I thought maybe you’d get nervous, so I got something to quiet you down.”
“Huh,” says I, but I knew there wasn’t any use to ask him questions when he was in a tight-mouthed humor. Mostly he was willing to talk things over; but sometimes he got stubborn and in-growing, and then you couldn’t pry anything out of him with a crowbar. “What you should ’a’ got,” says I, “is some sweet oil to rub on your jaw.”
He didn’t answer right back, but pretty soon he says, “The next board you fall over—pick it up.”