The envelope was a square, thinnish one, addressed in very small,
black handwriting.
"It _must_ be from The Bottle," Jerry said; "otherwise they wouldn't
have thought you were a boy and put Christopher."
I had been thinking just the same thing while I was trying to open
the envelope. It was one of the very tightly stuck kind that
scrumples up when you try to rip it with your finger, and we had to
slit it with a fruit-knife before we could get at the letter. There
were sheets of thin paper all covered with writing, and when Jerry
and Greg saw that, they both fell upon it so that none of us could
read it at all. I persuaded them that the quickest thing to do would
be to let me read it aloud, and as we'd finished breakfast anyway,
we each took our last piece of toast in our hands and went out and
sat on the bottom step of the porch. I read:
_Fellow Adventurers and Mariners in Distress:_
By this time there may be naught left of you but a whitening
huddle of bones, surf bleached on the end of Wecanicut,--for
I know well what meager fare are eiligugs' eggs and barnacles.
However, I take the chance of finding at least one of you
alive, and address you fraternally as a companion in distress.
I am myself stranded on a cheerless island where, against my
will, I am kept captive--for how long a time I cannot guess.
I was brought here at night, only forty-eight hours ago, and
landed from a vessel which almost immediately departed whence
it had come, into the darkness. My captors left me to go with
the vessel, the chief of them threatening to return every week
to torment me unless I obeyed his slightest command. I stand in
great fear of this man, who is tall and bearded, for he brings
with him instruments of torture and bottles containing, without
doubt, poison.
Can you imagine my joy when, tottering down the beach this
morning, supporting my frame upon two sticks, I beheld your bottle
cast up on the sands? Now, thought I, I can unburden myself to
these three unfortunate men, obviously in even greater distress
than my own, and we can, perhaps, ease each other's monotonous
maroonity. Scholars, too, I perceive you to be,--witness the
Latin following your signatures. Ah well, _Grata superveniet quae
non sperabitur hora_, as the poet so truly says, and I cannot
express to you how eager, how happy I am, in the thought of
communicating with some one other than the natives of this
desolate isle. These inhabitants, though friendly on the whole,
are uncouth and barbaric. They spend their entire time fishing
from boats which they build themselves, or squatting beside their
huts mending their fishing implements.
The good soul with whom I am lodging is calling me to my scanty
repast. In the rude language of the place she tells me that there
is "Krabss al ad an dunny." How can I live long, I ask, on such
fare?
Hopefully, your
CASTAWAY COMRADE.
P.S. My address--mail reaches me from time to time, by aforesaid
vessel--is P.O. Box 14, Blue Harbor, Me. ME stands for Mid
Equator, but the abbreviation is sufficient. Blue Harbor is my own
literal translation of the native Bluar Boor. Box 14 refers to the
native system of delivering messages. P.O. has, I think, something
to do with the P. & O. steamers, which, however, do not very often
touch here.
"I _told_ you it would go around the world!" Greg said, when I had
finished, and Jerry and I were staring at each other.
"_Well!_" Jerry said at last. "_What_ luck!"
"I should rather say so," I said; "suppose a fisherman had found it,
or no one at all."
"Bless his old heart," said Jerry, taking the letter.
I wanted to know why "old."
"He must be ancient if he has to totter along on two sticks," Jerry
said. "Besides, he has a stately, professorish sort of style. Do you
suppose he really does want us to write to him?"
"Of course he does," Greg said; "he tells us to often enough. Think
of being alone out there with savages, and that bearded chief coming
with poison bottles and all."
"Shut up, Greg," said Jerry; "you don't understand. There's more in
this than meets the eye, Chris. I didn't get on to this crab salad
business when you read it."
Neither had I; in fact, I hadn't got on to it until Jerry said it in
proper English.
"He's a good sort, poor old dear," I said. "Why do you suppose they
keep him out there?"
"He's there of his own free will, right enough," Jerry said.
But I didn't think so.
We were still confabbing over the letter, and explaining bits to
Greg, who was hopelessly mystified, when Mother came out to
transplant some columbine that had wandered into the lawn. We did a
quick secret consultation and then decided to let her in on the
Castaway. So we bolted after her and took away the trowel and showed
her the letter. She read it through twice, and then said:
"Oh, Ailsa must hear this, and Father!" But what we wanted to know
was whether or not we might write to the Castaway, because we didn't
quite want to without letting her know about it. She laughed some
more and said, "yes, we might," and that he was "a dear," which was
what we thought.
We decided that we would write immediately, so Jerry dashed off to
Father's study and got two sheets of nice thin paper with "17 Luke
Street" at the top in humpy green letters, and I borrowed Aunt
Ailsa's fountain-pen, which turned out to be empty. I might have
known it, for they always are empty when you need them most. Jerry,
like a goose, filled it over the clean paper we were going to use
for the letter, and it slobbered blue ink all over the top sheet.
But the under one wasn't hurt, and we thought one page full would be
all we could write, anyway. We took the things out to the porch
table, and Greg held down the corner of the paper so it wouldn't
flap while I wrote. Jerry sat on the arm of my chair and thought so
excitedly that it jiggled me.
But minutes went on, and the fountain pen began to ooze from being
too full, and none of us could think of a single thing to say.
"If we just write to him ourselves,--in our own form, I mean," Jerry
said, "it'll be stupid. And I don't feel maroonish here on the
porch. We'll have to wait till we go to Wecanicut again, and write
from there."
I felt somehow the way Jerry did, so we put away the things again
and went out under the hemlock tree to talk about the Castaway. Greg
didn't come, and we supposed he'd gone to feed a tame toad he had
that year, or something. The toad lived under the syringa bush
beside the gate, and Greg insisted that it came out when he whistled
for it, but it never would perform when we went on purpose to watch
it, so I don't know whether it did or not.
Under the hemlock is one of the best places in the garden for
councils and such. The branches quite touch the grass, and when you
creep under them you are in a dark, golden sort of tent, crackley
and sweet-smelling. You can slither pine-needles through your
fingers as you discuss, too, and it helps you to think. We thought
for quite a long time, and then I got out the letter and spread it
down in one of the wavy patches of sunlight, and we read it again.
"Did you really think anybody'd find it?" Jerry asked suddenly, and
I told him I hadn't thought so.
"Neither did I," he said; "let alone such a jolly old soul. Why,
he'd be better than Aunt on a picnic."
"I do wonder why he has to stay there," I said.
"Perhaps he's a fugitive from justice," Jerry suggested; "or perhaps
he's a prisoner and the bearded person comes out with Spanish
Inquisition things to make him confess his horrible crime."
"He _sounds_ like a person who'd done a horrible crime, doesn't he!"
I said in scorn.
"Well, then," said Jerry, who really has the most inspired ideas for
plots, "perhaps he's an innocent old man whose wicked nephews want
to frighten him into changing his will, leaving an enormous fortune
to them. And they're keeping him on the island till he'll do it."
"Well, whatever it is," I said, "I don't think he's awfully happy
somehow, and it's nice of him to write such a gorgeous thing."
So we both decided that whether he was staying on the island of his
own free will, or in bondage, in any case it must be frightfully
dull for him and that our letter ought to be interesting and
cheerful.
Just then the hemlock branches thrashed apart and Greg crawled under
with pine-needles in his hair. He sat back on his heels and blinked
at us, because he'd just come out of the sunlight.
"I thought _some_body ought to write to the Bottle Man," he said,
"so I did."
"Well, I never!" Jerry said.
Greg fished up a bent piece of paper from inside his jumper and
handed it to me.
"You can see it," he said, "but not Jerry."
"As if I'd want to!" Jerry said; but he did, fearfully.
Greg is the most unexpected person I ever knew. He's always doing
things like that, when everyone else has given up.
I spread his paper out on top of the other letter, and he sprawled
down beside me, all ready to explain with his finger. What with his
dreadfully bad writing and the sunlight moving off the paper all the
time as the branches swayed, it took me ever so long to read the
thing. This is what it was:
Dear Bottle Man:
To-day we got your leter wich surprised us very much.
Although I kept hopeing and hopeing some body would find the
bottle. We are not so distresed now because we were picked up
and now have toast and other things beter than barnicles. I
mesured from here to the equater on the big map and it is an
aufuly far way for the bottle to go. Only I thought it would.
I am sorry you are so imprisined on the iland and please dont
let the cheif with the beard poisen you because we would like
to hear from you agan. If there is tresure on that iland I
should think you could look for it and it would be exiting.
But prehaps there is none. We hope there is some on Wecanicut.
But it is hard to know sirtainly. Chris and Jerry are going to
do a leter. But I thought I would first. I hope the saviges will
be frendly allways.
Your respecfull comrade,
GREGORY HOLFORD.
P.S. None of us are Bones yet.
"Will it do?" Greg asked anxiously, when I folded it up. His eyes
grow very dark when he's anxious, and they were perfectly inky now.
You never would have guessed that they were really blue.
"It'll do splendidly," I said, for I did think the Castaway man
would like Greg's letter tremendously.
"Better let me see it, my lad," said Jerry, rolling over among the
pine-cones and sitting up.
Greg got his precious letter with a snatch and a squeak, and
scurried off with it. I pitched Jerry back on to the pine-needles,
because I knew he'd never let the thing go if he saw it.
"Oh, _let_ him send it," I said. "It's perfectly all right, and it
will do the Bottle Man heaps of good."
But Jerry growled about "beastly scrawls" and wasn't pleased with me
until supper-time.
Somehow we all began calling our island person the "Bottle Man"
after Greg did, for it seemed as good a name as any for him, seeing
that we didn't know his real one. We read the letter from him after
supper to Aunt Ailsa, and she laughed and liked it, and so did
Father. We also asked Father what the Latin meant, and he made a
funny face and said he'd forgotten such things, but then he looked
at it again and told us it meant something like this:
"The happy hour shall come, all the more appreciated because it
comes unexpectedly."
So we went to bed thinking about our poor old Bottle Man consoling
himself out there on his island with Latin quotations.