From the windows of Carne, Sir Denzil watched the novel craft careering wildly over the flats, and snuffed more hopefully.
"A sufficiently dangerous-looking toy, Kennet. It seems to ate that it might quite well kill one or more of them if it upset at that speed. Let us hope for the best!" And he and Kennet watched the new goings-on with interest.
Incidentally, the sand-boat one day came very near to solving the riddle of Carne on the lines of Sir Denzil's highest hopes.
There was something in the wild headlong motion that appealed with irresistible power to Jim's half-tamed nature. The mad bumping rush, with now one huge wheel barely skimming the ground, now the other; the hoarse dash through the pools, when, if the sun shone, you sat for a moment in a whirling rainbow of flying drops the keen zest and delicious risks of the turn; the novel sense of power in the lordship of the helm; these things thrilled him through and through, and he could not get too much of them.
He made himself the devoted slave of the sand-boat--spent his spare time in anointing its axles with all the fat he could coax, or otherwise procure, from Mrs. Lee, till the great wheels almost ran of their own accord, scraped the long tiller till it was as smooth as a sceptre--handled the ropes till they were as flexible almost as silk.
It was he who insisted on naming the boat Gracie--"because it jumped about so," but in reality, of course, because the word Gracie represented to him the brightest and best that life had yet brought him.
They had all tried their hands at names. Sir George--The Flying Dutchman, because it certainly flew and was undoubtedly broad in the beam; Margaret--The Sylph, because it was so tubby; Gracie--The Sand-fly, because it flew over the sand; Jack, for abstruse reasons of his own--Chingachgook; Eager was quite content to leave it to them. But no matter what the others decided on, Jim always called it Gracie--to the real Gracie's immense satisfaction; and as he talked Gracie ten times as much as all the rest put together, Gracie it finally became.
When wind and weather put the Gracie out of action she lay under the walls of Carne, with folded wings and docked tail--for Jim always carried away the tiller into the house, for love of the very feel of it, and partly perhaps in token of proprietorship. It stood in a corner where he could always see it, and slept by his bedside.
No one, however, ever thought of meddling with the sand-boat. In the first place, she belonged to Mr. Eager, and they held "passon" in highest esteem. And, in the second place, Carne was a dangerous place to wander round at night. Mr. Kennet had a gun, with which he was no great shot, indeed, but even the wildest bullet may find unexpected billet in the dark.
It happened, one afternoon in the late autumn, that Eager was away on the confines of his wide sheepfold, about his Master's business. It had been wet and blusterous all day, and the boys were desultorily employed on their books in a corner of the kitchen; Jim with the Gracie's polished tiller twisting fondly in his hand, as a devoted lover toys with a ribbon from his mistress's dress; Jack somewhat absorbed in the doings of Themistocles and Xerxes at Salamis, in a great volume which he had abstracted from the library the day before.