“I was,” said Joan. “I was there all the time an’ I heard Walter an’ Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an’ the wood-ladies laughed like leaves rustling.”
“But where did you sleep last night?”
“I didn’t sleep,” said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. “I’se very sleepy now.”
She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and mother and Joyce looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious face.
“God help us,” said mother, in a whisper. “What is the truth of this?”
There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan’s. And she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.
ON THE FEVER SHIP[[6]]
By RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
[6]. From The Lion and the Unicorn. Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
There were four rails around the ship’s sides, the three lower ones of iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them from the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held him in. Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water which ended in a line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged palms. Beyond that again rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck upon the loftiest peak of all, a tiny block-house. It rested on the brow of the mountain against the naked sky as impudently as a cracker-box set upon the dome of a great cathedral.