Four Afloat: Being the Adventures of the Big Four on the Water

by Ralph Henry Barbour

From the direction of the sound it was evident to him that he had left the river almost directly behind him. But what bothered him at the present moment more than the location of the river and the Vagabond was the location of the house and something to satisfy the craving of his empty stomach. He strove to remember what he knew about farms. Usually, he thought, the vegetable fields were near the buildings and the meadows at a distance, although he didn’t suppose there was any hard and fast rule about it. Then it dawned on him that for a meadow this one was unusually well kept. The grass was short and thick and the field quite level. He wondered if it could be a lawn. He would explore it.

So, rather stiff by this time, he slipped off the wall and started straight ahead across the turf. Presently he came to a ridge some three feet high, rounded and turfed. He stopped and wondered. It disappeared on either side of him into the surrounding grayness. He climbed to the top of it and looked down. On the other side was a six-foot ditch of coarse sand. He was on a golf links and the ridge was a silly old bunker!

He slid down on the other side of it and rested there with his wet shoes in the sand. It was all very nice, he told himself, to know that you were on a golf course, but it didn’t help very much. A chap could be just as lost, just as wet and miserable and hungry on a golf course as anywhere else. Somewhere, of a certainty, there was a clubhouse, but if he knew where it stood and could find it it was more than probable that it would be closed up on a day like this. And, anyhow, they wouldn’t be serving breakfast there! The idea of sitting just where he was until some one came along suggested itself but didn’t appeal to him. Once he thought he heard a noise of some sort, but he wasn’t sure. However, he got up and headed in the direction from which it had seemed to come. After a minute or two he came to a green with a soggy red tin disk, numbered fourteen, sticking out of a hole.

“Glad it wasn’t thirteen,” said Tom to himself as he went on. “That might have been unlucky.”

Presently it seemed that the fog had lessened and that his range of vision had enlarged; he was quite sure that he could discern objects at a greater distance than before. But as there wasn’t at that moment anything particularly interesting to discern the discovery didn’t bring much encouragement. He was going up a steep hill now and when he had gained the summit and seated himself for a moment on the edge of the sand box, which stood there at the edge of a tee, he saw that the fog was thinner because he was higher up. Behind him the ground sloped away again, but not so abruptly as in front. As he sat there, struggling for breath after his climb, it seemed that he was the only person in existence. On all sides of him the hill lost itself in the enveloping mists. He was alone in an empty gray space in which there was neither food nor fire. He got quite discouraged about it and a little watery at the eyes until he shook himself together and told himself that he was a baby.

“There are houses and people all around you,” he said disgustedly, “only you can’t see them. All you’ve got to do is to brace up and keep on walking until you find them.”

But that was easier said than done, for he had been walking a long time, and for much of that time over hard ground, and his legs were tired out. But he went on presently, slowly and discouragedly, down a long slope and up another. He had begun to talk aloud to himself for very loneliness, and some of the things he said would have sounded quite ridiculous had there been anyone else to hear them.

At the summit of the slope he paused again to rest, and as he did so he suddenly lifted his head intently, straining his eyes before him into the fog. Of course it was all perfect tommyrot, but, just the same—well, it did sound like music! In fact, it was music, very faint and sometimes dying away altogether, but still music!

“Maybe,” said Tom aloud, “I’ve starved to death and got to heaven. But I don’t feel dead.” Then, with returning animation, he strode forward again. “Me for the music,” he said.

Less than a minute later a great dark bulk took shape and form ahead of him. At first it seemed like the edge of a woods, but as the music increased momentarily that was out of the question. No, plainly it was a building, and a big one! And in another minute Tom was standing in a gravel roadway in front of a big hotel which stretched away on either side of him. There were lights inside, and an orchestra was playing merrily. The windows of the lower floor were dimmed with the fog, but he could see the indistinct forms of persons inside and the dancing light of a fire. Directly in front of him was a covered porch and beyond it the wide glass doors.