_IN THE GOOD GREENWOOD_
Mr. Seymour returned from the boat and reported that he had found
nothing unusual aboard her. He had not experienced the feeling of being
watched by some uncanny creature, which Fred had described so vividly.
And Fred acknowledged that while Mr. Seymour was with him he had found
the boat a different place, free from any unhealthy suggestion.
So Helen, Ben, and Ann were told that they might scramble about her as
they pleased, provided, of course, that they were careful not to fall
down the open hatches or slip over the sides where the rails had been
broken.
Ann was disappointed in her father’s report although she knew that
if he had found the boat unsafe she would have had no opportunity to
investigate for herself. She tried to be sensible and forget that a
mystery had ever been attached to the ship. But it was evident to her
mind that there must have been something. As Jo said, “Where there’s so
much smoke there must be some fire.” She had felt it so strongly last
night--were those shivers caused by nothing at all?
Jo, at least, was not convinced by Mr. Seymour’s report. He refused to
join the Seymour children in a hunt over the boat that afternoon and
consequently Ann and Ben were forced to wait until they could get a
ladder before they could get up the high steep side of the schooner. It
meant that they were not to go on the boat for some time to come, for
Mr. Seymour made no suggestions as to how they were to go about getting
up to the deck and Mr. Bailey seemed not to understand their hints that
one of his ladders would be useful if he were willing to lend it.
Each night Ann looked out of her window, hoping to see that light
flickering over the deck. It had not appeared again and she did not say
a word about it to Jo and Ben. She wanted to be sure that she really
had seen it and not imagined it while excited by that first glimpse of
the ship with its guardian demon. And so she watched faithfully every
night before she climbed into her high bed.
In the meantime she put her energy into helping her mother with the
housework, into hoeing the garden and hunting new thrills in the woods.
In the garden she did her stint shoulder to shoulder with Jo and Ben.
Fred Bailey had given each of them a section of the vegetable garden
for his own and had promised them a commission on all the vegetables
sold. Ann had already planned what she would do with her money; she
knew before any green had shown above the ground. She intended to put
it into the bank as the beginning of her fund for the purchase of her
western ranch.
Ben, of course, was going to spend his for paint and brushes.
Each of them had his own patch of potatoes, beans, and corn, a section
of the main planting allotted to his special care. And they put the
seeds in the ground themselves, with the experienced Jo as instructor.
It was difficult to believe that those small hard kernels would grow
into green plants.
One morning Ben reached the garden ahead of Ann and suddenly turned
and shouted to her to hurry. “The beans are coming through! I suppose
they’re beans, because that’s where we planted beans. Don’t they look
funny!”
Funny they did look, great curling stems that thrust through the soil
like crooked fingers, cracking and heaving the ground all around them.
In the rows where the children had planted them the earth hummocked up
and hundreds of plants were forcing their way up into the sunlight.
She knew they must be coming soon but the sight of them was a greater
surprise than any Christmas Day Ann ever had known. To think that the
little hard beans that she had dropped and covered with fine earth had
been growing and putting out such curly twisted sprouts that had shot
up overnight! The dear baby things! She knelt down to touch them but
Jo’s voice stopped her. He had walked while she ran forward in reply to
Ben’s call.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he suggested mildly. “The morning dew is on them
and nobody touches beans while they’re wet. It turns them black when
they get bigger.”
“But there are no beans yet,” Ann protested, looking up at Jo over
her shoulder. “I don’t see how I could hurt them if I touched them
delicately, just to find out whether they feel as strong as they look.”
“It doesn’t make any difference how young they are,” Jo answered. “It
won’t seem to hurt them when you touch them, but when the beans form on
the plants you have handled nobody will be able to eat them. They’ll be
black and spotted; rusted, the farmers call it. Of course sometimes you
can’t help beans rusting when there’s too much rain.”
“What makes them rust?” asked Ben. “You wouldn’t imagine that the
grown-up plants would remember anything that happened to them when they
were babies.”
“I don’t know why,” and Jo shook his head. “I wish I did know more
about it. I don’t know any reasons, but there must be some. I only know
that things happen, not why.”
“Well, I know this much,” said Ann decidedly. “When I go back to school
this fall I shall find out, and then I’ll write to tell you, Jo.”
“That would be fine. I’d like that,” Jo said shyly.
Ben had gone over to the rows of corn and potatoes, and he came back
with a perplexed expression on his face. “Where are they?” he asked.
“Do you suppose that some animal has eaten them? We shall have nothing
but beans in our gardens, or can we plant more corn and potatoes?”
Jo threw back his head and laughed heartily.
“What did you expect?” he asked. “Did you think that everything came
through at the same time? The potatoes ought to sprout within a day
or two, but corn is slow. It often takes three weeks. The weather has
hardly been hot enough to start it yet. You need hot weather to make
corn grow. Beans are about the quickest things.”
“Gee, what a lot you know!” said Ben admiringly. “I didn’t know there
was so much to learn about a real garden. I thought that a farmer put
his seeds in the ground and they came up, and then after a while he
picked his vegetables and sold them.”
“Lots of people think that,” said Jo in a stiff tone of voice as he
began to hoe his morning row. “That is why so many city people make
jokes about farmers, and think they don’t know anything. Most farmers
know very little about the city, but they understand their job of
getting food for the city people to eat. I should like to see some of
those sneering city fellows plow an acre of ground under the hot sun.
A man walks pretty near thirty miles doing such a stretch, and he has
to hold his plow nearly a foot in the ground while he does his walking,
so as to turn over a six or twelve inch furrow. It takes a pretty good
man to do that.”
“I never laughed at farmers, Jo,” Ann protested mildly. “It is only
that I never knew anything about farming.”
“That’s all right,” answered Jo, smiling at her. “I wasn’t thinking
about any of you folks. I was calling to mind some of these summer
tourists who come through camping by the wayside. We don’t get pestered
by them because we’re too far from the main highway, but the farmers
nearer the village go well-nigh crazy trying to protect their gardens
and fruit from stealing. Why, last summer Les Perkins had all of his
pears just ready for picking and shipping to Boston. It took him three
years to grow those pears for a perfect crop all free from worms and
spots. He had sort of hoped to make something of them at last. He got
to his trees one day in time to see a dozen city folks piling into a
first-class car, all loaded up with pears. Not only that, but they had
shaken the trees and the fruit was all stripped off. What they hadn’t
stolen was too bruised to sell.”
“They ought to have been arrested for that!” Ann exclaimed breathlessly.
“Yes.” Jo laughed half-heartedly. “Catch ’em if you can. I caught one
of them stealing Pete Simonds’ raspberries. He had a bunch of kids with
him. I heard him tell ’em to pick the ripe ones and throw the green
ones away. They were stripping the bushes. I told them to get out, but
the man only laughed and said that all berries were common property.”
“What did you do then?” asked Ben eagerly.
Jo was rather shamefaced. “Well, I shouldn’t have done it. But the way
the man said it made me mad, so I hauled off and gave him a punch in
the jaw. He looked so funny, the way he sprawled with raspberries all
over him! He was a good-sized feller, and he got up on his feet and
came after me ugly, but he saw Pete coming on the run and I can tell
you he legged it for his car with all the kids streaming after him. He
knew just as well as I did that he was stealing.”
“Well,” said Ben slowly, “if any one stole my beans I’d punch him in
the jaw, too. After a farmer has planted seeds on his own land the crop
is his exactly as much as the vegetables in my mother’s kitchen are
hers after she has brought them home from the market.”
“There ought to be policemen to watch city people,” said Ann. “They
ought to be made afraid to steal, if they are not the kind of persons
who would be ashamed to take what isn’t theirs.”
“There don’t seem to be many of that last kind,” said Jo.
“It makes me feel rather queer,” said Ann. “I don’t like to think that
you have learned to have such a bad opinion of people who live in the
city.”
“Tell us some more about farming, Jo,” begged Ben. “What happens to
beans after they have sprouted and begun to be plants?” He looked
fondly at his row with their yellow-green stems.
“Oh, we’ll have plenty of work from now on,” began Jo. “We’ll have to
hunt for cutworms right away. See--here is one now.” He uncovered a
small gray worm about an inch long and crushed it with his hoe.
“Let’s see!” said Ben excitedly, and he and Ann began to examine their
own allotments.
“They work at night and dig in under the soil when the sun comes out,”
Jo explained. “They bite the young plant off just where it goes into
the ground. Whenever you find a plant lying on the ground you know that
a cutworm has eaten it off and he is hiding under the dirt a few inches
away. You’ll have to dig each one up and kill it before he does any
more damage. He would come back again and again and finally eat off the
whole row.”
“I’ve found one!” Ben cried. “I hate them! Why do they have to come?”
he asked as he stamped on it.
“I guess they have to eat like the rest of us,” answered Jo. “But if we
didn’t watch there would be more cutworms than beans in the world. They
sure were invented to pester us farmers.”
“They are almost as bad as the tourists,” and Ann laughed.
“Well, in a way we don’t mind them so much as we do tourists. We expect
the cutworms.”
“I don’t believe the tourists would enjoy being cut in two,” said Ann.
So the days went happily by, full of new experiences for the Seymours.
Whenever the short rains came the children sat before the open fire in
the living room, or, as Jo called it, the parlor, while Mrs. Seymour
read to them, or while Jo told stories of the country near Pine Ledge;
for Jo was always included in the circle.
Ann never grew tired of watching the sea. While the others watched the
fire she often sat by the window, listening, of course, but with her
eyes fixed on the ocean. How the waves shone in the sun, and how they
tumbled and grew dark when the squalls rushed over them! At such times
she wondered about what had happened on the schooner cast up on the
shore, lying on its side almost at her very feet. Fred believed what
he had felt while he was on her, and Jo so evidently had a horror of
everything connected with the wreck; there was her father’s testimony
that nothing was wrong there. And as a climax to that, there was what
her own eyes had seen, the moving light.
Mr. Seymour was working hard and getting a great deal done. His
sketches grew rapidly under his hands. Already he had a number of
canvases leaning against the walls of the living room and he had asked
Jo if he might paint his portrait.
Then one day a heavy northeaster broke and gave promise of lasting two
days at the very least. It was a good time for indoor work and Jo was
called into service as a model. He did not know the story of Robin
Hood, so Mrs. Seymour read it aloud while he sat for Mr. Seymour. The
others had heard it many times, but they were never tired of those
adventures in the glade and the good greenwood and they listened as
eagerly as did Jo.
Then came clear days that were the best of all, for after their gardens
had been hoed, Maude, the cow, milked and put to pasture, and the
chickens watered and fed, they followed Jo’s lead into the dense pine
woods, where they held forth as Robin Hood and his band.
Jo was, of course, Robin Hood, for he knew all the trails through the
merry greenwood and could find clear fresh springs no matter in which
direction they tramped. Ben was Allan-a-Dale, although he couldn’t sing
very well. In fact, after he had proved to know only one tune and had
sung that one a great many times, the entire band requested him to stop
it.
“Allan-a-Dale was a minstrel and he was supposed to sing,” Ben
protested.
But Helen, who was taking the part of Ellen, had a good reason for
wishing that Ben would be quiet and she did not hesitate to tell him.
“I want to watch the birds, and you scare them away. Can’t you just
pretend to sing? It would be very much nicer.”
[Illustration: _In the lookout tree they mounted guard in turn._]
As the band contained only one woman besides Ellen, Ann finally
consented to be Maid Marian, although she much preferred to be Friar
Tuck.
“You’re a girl,” Ben said decidedly. “And a girl can’t be Friar Tuck.”
“What difference does that make?” protested Ann. “I can swing a stave
as well as you do; better.”
“I know you can,” said Jo. “But Maid Marian is far more important than
Friar Tuck. Robin Hood couldn’t have done a thing without her. She went
everywhere the band did and thought things out for them, but Friar Tuck
didn’t do much except eat and drink.”
“It is such a nice name,” mourned Ann. But Maid Marian she decided to
be.
The band discovered a place high up in the wood that was exactly suited
to be their glade. It was a wide bare spot covered with pine needles,
and along its edges a few walnut trees were scattered, one of which
the boys could climb easily. This was the lookout tree, and after Ann
learned how to get up it they mounted guard in turn. From its branches
one could see far away across the green forest to the village, a
cluster of white dots. On the other side the watcher looked over the
home meadow and the house to the sea beyond. From such a high perch
the expanse of water seemed much greater and the house and meadow very
small in contrast.
“What ho, what ho,” Ben called the first time Ann settled herself among
the branches. “Sister Ann, do you see anybody coming?”
“Pooh!” exclaimed little Helen contemptuously. “That’s Bluebeard!
That’s not Robin Hood.”
“So it is,” admitted Ben. “What ho, what ho, Maid Marian, doth an enemy
draw nigh?”
“I see only one,” Ann answered as a small blue figure that was Fred
Bailey crossed the meadow far away, “but he holds at a distance and is
seemingly unaware of our hiding place.”
No band is complete without its longbows and staves. Jo quickly filled
this lack. He made staves by cutting branches from the straight alder
bushes that grew in the brook, peeling them until they were white and
shining. They whipped lithely in the air with a clear whistling sound.
Jo gathered them up every evening and kept them in the running water of
the brook, so that they would not dry out and become brittle.
At first he was puzzled as to how he could make longbows that were
strong as well as limber, but soon he thought of the young willows.
These he cut and bent into a regular bow-shape without destroying the
springiness of the wood. And for bowstrings they used old fishing line.
There was no problem concerning life in the greenwood that Jo could
not solve; the making of proper arrows, for instance. He built a small
fire after scraping away the dry pine needles and sprinkling the ground
with fresh moist earth, and cut some thin lead into strips. These he
fastened to the points of the short arrows he had made, so that the
tips would have weight to carry them straight to the mark. Of course
each member of the band took great care not to shoot his fellow members
and only one person was allowed to practice at a time, so that the
arrows would be easy to locate after they had been shot.
At first the band made forays into the wood in pairs, Jo and Ann, then
Ben and Helen, so that the glade might not be left unprotected. Under
this arrangement Jo was always worried when it was his turn to stay in
the shelter. He knew that Ben was unfamiliar with big woods and might
get lost. So the band was called for conference and it was decided that
the entire band should foray together. Meeting enemies in full strength
they stood a better chance of beating them, and before starting out
they carefully concealed all the trails to the glade and knew that no
enemy could uncover them.
“To-day I shall get me a fine buck,” Ben said as he swung his longbow
over his shoulder and seized his stave. “I hanker much for fresh meat.”
“I’ll show you where the deer come to drink,” Robin Hood offered.
“Methinks if Allan be a good shot he can easily bring down a couple for
our goodly dinner. I saw tracks by the river a month or so ago.”
“Really?” exclaimed Ben. “Gee! I’d like to see a deer!”
The trip to the river was all downhill and they scrambled through
the prickly barberries and juniper like true outlaws, courageously
ignoring the thorns that pricked and tore. Great ledges of gray rock,
covered with lichens and holding small hemlocks and spruces in their
cracks, opposed their way and they were obliged to climb up the rocks
on one side and slide down over the steep slope beyond. Helen had the
most trouble because her legs were shorter, but after Jo and Ann had
pulled her down once or twice she lost her fear. With the aid of her
stave she sat down on the top of the rock and coasted, landing upright
on her feet in the soft underbrush at the bottom. It wasn’t very good
for her bloomers, but they were made of stout cloth and managed to hold
together.
As they drew near to the wide pool where the river spread out over the
low land Jo motioned for them to step quietly. He took the lead and
crept slowly foot by foot, crouching low in the underbrush. Finally
they came on a narrow trail through which they could just pass with the
bushes touching their shoulders. Ann noticed how Jo avoided touching
the branches so that they should not move any more than necessary and
she tried to imitate him. It was not easy. He twisted his shoulders
this way and that, all the time moving forward slowly. Ben went along
with his hands on his knees, bent forward, while Helen was so short
that she had no difficulty at all.
At last Jo looked back over his shoulder, put his finger on his lips
and beckoned for them to come beside him. He pointed to a mark in the
soft ground before him. It was the imprint of a small cloven hoof and
even Ann’s inexperienced eye could see that it was fresh.
“He’s been down here this morning,” Jo whispered. “I wish we had been
around--he’s a big fellow all right.”
“Isn’t he here now?” whispered Ann. “How do you know that he isn’t?”
“We’ll find out,” Jo answered. “He may be sleeping under the bushes,
but they don’t stay in this neighborhood generally; too many people in
the daytime, passing, and deer are nervous, nowadays. They like it best
back on the hills where there is more protection.”
As he spoke he turned at right angles from the trail and plunged
silently into the undergrowth. The bushes closed about him and it was
all Ann could do to follow. Suddenly he stopped.
He did not so much as whisper. Silently he motioned for them to come
forward quickly.
They looked to where his finger pointed.
Under a group of pines a few feet away a huge buck deer lay asleep,
with the sun through the trees splotching his dark coat and turning
it into shimmering velvet. His horns were short and looked like dull
leather; Jo told them afterward that was because he had not yet made
his full year’s growth.
As the band watched he leaped from the ground, fully awake in the
instant that he scented danger. He leaped almost as if his feet had
not touched the earth and he bounded lightly into a jungle of thorns
and scrub oak. And with that one beautiful jump he vanished.
“Well, Allan,” Jo turned toward Ben’s wide-eyed face with a laugh. “Why
didn’t you shoot him?”
“Shoot him-- Try to kill him? I couldn’t kill anything as lovely as
that, ever. I want to draw him, paint him, just as he jumped in the
sun, with the light on his skin and the green all around. Oh,” he cried
excitedly, “do you suppose that father could see a deer so that he
could show me how to make a picture that was halfway good?”
“If Mr. Seymour would really like to see one, we can come out some
morning at dawn and if we are quiet perhaps we can see a deer as he
comes down to drink. It is great fun to lie in the bushes when they
don’t know any one is watching; they walk about and drink.”
“We’ll go home and ask him now,” said Ann with determination. “It is
just too wonderful, and I know he’ll want to come, perhaps to-morrow.”
“And I want to tell mother about it,” said Helen.
“All right,” agreed Jo. “We’ll follow the river out to the road. That
will be easier than going back over those high ledges.”
[Illustration: _With one beautiful jump he vanished._]
The trail led down to a smooth swamp pond filled with such clear water
that the children could see the long grass moving at the bottom. A
short distance from the edge little heaps of leaves, straw, and twigs
rose here and there above the surface of the water. Jo said they were
houses that the muskrats had built to live in last winter.
“They build just before the cold weather sets in,” he said. “It is
great sport to come every day and see how the houses grow. Sometimes
the muskrats don’t bother very much with building, and the winters that
follow are open and warm, generally. But when old Mr. Muskrat builds
high, wide, and handsome, look out for thick ice and deep heavy snow.”
“How curious!” said Ann. “How do you suppose they know what the weather
is going to be?”
The band walked along beside the swamp until it narrowed into a running
river again.
“Gulls like the pond, too,” Jo said. “Especially when a storm is
blowing up. When the wind begins to be too strong the gulls sweep into
the cove and watch for the fish that are beating into the mouth of the
river. They hang up there in the air and laugh as if they liked the
storm. They laugh out loud and shriek and have a great time. When they
get tired and pretty well fed they let the wind carry them back here
to the pond, where they settle in droves on the sheltered water. They
wait until the storm blows over. Next nor’easter that blows up, I’ll
remember to show them to you. You can see them easily from the kitchen.”
He was leading the band and they were drawing nearer to the road.
Suddenly he stopped short, so short that Ann, who was next, bumped into
him.
“Hello!” he said. “What’s this?”
At his feet were the charred embers of a fire. They were still
smoldering and, as he brushed the ashes aside with his foot, the coals
gleamed brightly.
“Who do you suppose did that?” he exclaimed indignantly. “None of the
folks around here would ever leave a fire burning in the woods. Why, it
might spread and burn off the whole territory. Once a fire got started
up through the pines nothing could stop it.”
Ann looked down at the wicked gleam. She never would have dreamed
that it was wicked if Jo hadn’t told her it was, but what he had said
made her regard the fire from a very different standpoint. To her
imagination the live embers glowed and flickered like the lantern she
had seen on the wrecked ship.
She grew vaguely excited, for if no native of Pine Ledge could have
left that fire, then some stranger must be prowling around the
neighborhood, some one who didn’t want to be seen. Perhaps the very
person who lighted this fire to cook his breakfast was the same
invisible person who carried the swinging lantern across the deck, that
first night.
The keen-minded Jo saw her excitement. “What’s up?” he asked. “Is
something the matter?”
Ann hesitated. “Perhaps I am imagining, but I think I know of some one
who might have built this fire.”
So she told them about that tiny pin point of lantern light.
Jo listened silently until she had finished, although Ann could see
that he, too, was growing excited.
“I shouldn’t wonder if you were right,” he said at last. “It looks to
me as if some one who has no business here is hanging about. But if we
tell the other folks about it they will say that it is nonsense; they
think that we are too young to know much of what we are talking about.
I think we had better keep a good lookout, and if we actually discover
anything we can tell them then. This is a job for Robin Hood’s men all
right.”
Jo threw up his head and squared his shoulders.
“What ho, merry men!” he shouted. “How many will follow me in fathoming
the mystery of the wrecked ship?”
“I will follow,” Ann said quickly.
“I want to be in on it, too,” Ben cried breathlessly.
“Me, too,” Helen chimed in a voice that was a bit frightened but
nevertheless determined. “I want to help hunt for ghosts.”
“Then we are united?” Jo asked.
“Aye, aye,” shouted Ben. “Lead on.”
Before they started on their way again they dipped water from the river
in their cupped hands and threw it hissing upon the live coals until
the fire was out. As an extra precaution, for the fire might have gone
deep into the pine needles beneath, Jo raked away the leaves and twigs
and needles until he had made a wide circle of bareness.