The despondent groan in which the complaint ended seemed to rock the very sand-hill to its shifty foundations.
CHAPTER X
THE ASTRONOMER
“It’s a Boy!” Both girls burst forth simultaneously, explosively, with the discovery. The explosion was followed by an inarticulate rumble made up of mirth, that was one part trepidation at this boy’s very singular behavior, and of the gratification which variety always brings in its train, for in three weeks and three days of camping they had not seen a boy, saving at long range.
One of Captain Andy’s wooden camps upon the Sugarloaf beach, flanking their own Camp Morning-Glory, was unoccupied. The other sheltered an elderly naturalist and his wife—young people there were none, outside of their own group.
“But what a fat boy!” Penelope’s gaze was measuring the padded breadth of the yellow-brown shoulders, hunched and bowed. “Ever see such a fat thing in your life?” The hills rang with her giggle, half-hysterical now, for the sun was departing, shadows creeping among the dunes; she was not absolutely sure that this bloated yellowish back, persistently toward her, was human.
Was it a swollen spectre of the Sugarloaf?
And while the girls stood clinging to each other in nervous indecision they became definitely conscious of a distant, organ-like volume of sound coming from no point in sight; they had heard it right along, but, knowing whence it boomed, paid no attention to it. It was the roar of the breakers at high tide, breaking upon the sand-bar, half a mile off, where the tidal river met the open bay, or sea.
It sounded louder here than on the beach near their camp and the incessant, invisible sobbing added to the mystery enveloping that surly back.
All of a sudden the Mystery turned plump around and addressed them.