“Captain Andy says we were lucky to see a seal out of the water even at the cost of a ducking,” she ruminated further, “and that we, probably, wouldn’t have done so at all if that great big fellow, weighing a couple of hundred pounds or so, hadn’t gone far up the creek after the ‘feed,’ meaning the huge eel that he was devouring, half out of water, when we rowed round a marshy bend right on to him.... Goodness! of all the ‘mix-ups’ then! I’ll never forget it!” The last words formed themselves aloud in her laughter-filled throat. “Six of us girls struggling in the water! Sybil and Kitty an’ Betty up to their necks although ’Loaf Creek is shallow! And that big, spotted harbor seal which bumped into us and capsized us, just making for the creek’s mouth as hard as he could swim! I guess he knew where the deep water was, all right!”
She stood gazing out at the receding tide, seeing again the sleek head of the capsizing mammal as he put for the open water, the tidal channel, doubtless, vowing by the shades of his ancestors, the tidal tadpoles, that he would never be caught up a narrow creek again by a boat-load of shrieking girls.
“I hardly think it’s Kitty who is sorrowful or ‘peeved’ over something.” Sally was conscious of the thought which crowded out the seal as another low, gulping noise, mysteriously like a sob, came from the other side of the crusted barrier of rock. “That doesn’t sound like Kitty, either!” She put her ear to the crusty rock-heart. “Kitty Sill behaved as well as any of us all through the ducking in the creek—our wildest adventure as yet—all she said when it was over and we were safe in the boat again was: ‘Will you tell Mary-Jane Peg that I was brave?’ She’s simply killing with her talk about that pedigreed pig! She’s the funniest little thing! And Jessica vowed she’d make a special call on Mary-Jane.... Oh, gracious!” Sally’s hands came softly together upon a flame of dismay that scorched their palms. “Good gracious, I do believe it’s Jessica, herself—Morning-Glory, if you please—who’s having a quiet cry ‘all by her lonely’! And she’s the most popular girl in camp.”
The camp favorite, the most popular girl, had, nevertheless, if sounds could be trusted, a pent-up trouble of some kind which she wasn’t withholding from the sea; there was a restless movement on the other side of the rock as if somebody rolled over on the sands, followed by a lonely, grieved sobbing that appealed to the ebbing tide for comfort.
Now, all at once, impulsive Sally was filled with a jealousy of that low-ebb tide for being chosen as a confidant; she would have liked to thrust it farther out still. Before she knew what she was doing this feeling and another, overwhelming curiosity, spread wide their wings and wafted her lightly over the rock-barrier.
She descended with a pounce upon the other side and immediately began to flutter and cackle inarticulately, like a hen in a flowerbed.
The patch of white beach beyond the rock-fence was fairly abloom with colored articles which attracted the scanty sunshine that, to-day, was having a tilt with the ruffling southwesterly wind as to which should rule the weather.
One sunbeam poked his finger inquisitively among the small blocks of paint in a box of water-colors lying open upon the sands. Another slanted his eye like an amused connoisseur at a sheet of cardboard pinned down by a chunk of pale driftwood and bearing a crude, very highly colored painting of blue water between dauby green marsh-banks and of a boat being upset by some fabulous sea-monster that was apparently trying to climb into it.
Sally jumped to the conclusion that this was meant for a kind of “colored supplement” comic illustration of the accident which had happened in ’Loaf Creek, on which her thoughts had lately been dwelling, for the seal had the ears of a jackass and claws an inch long upon his fore-flippers which grappled the side of the boat.
She cackled exceedingly at sight of it and shuffled in the sand, like the hen who has found not colors only, but something fruitful, also, in the bed of bloom.