SMUGGLERS’ ISLE
For the first two weeks hardly anything was done, except steady, earnest
lessons in swimming and sailing. The excitement and novelty of it made
the sport a delightful one to the girls, and they were out whenever the
weather was good. During the morning hours the bay held many bathers,
over on the hotel shore, and on the strip of beach at the Knob likewise.
Afternoons the white sails spread and dipped like gulls out on the
water, and the _Tidy Jane_ was usually the first out and the last one
in. After the first week or so, Tom and Nancy helped only occasionally,
but the girls were doing so well they did not need much direction now.
The Admiral returned south at the end of the second week, but promised
to run up for the regatta in the latter part of August, and make sure
they were getting along.
“If it wasn’t for the Careys I’d feel as though it were risky, my
leaving you girls up here with just Welcome to see that you have plenty
to eat and don’t come down with croup—”
“We don’t have croup, grandfather,” Polly interposed, that last day,
when he dined with them in state at the little cottage.
“Well, never mind, whatever you should be threatened with, I know that
the Captain has you on his mind, and you’ll be looked after and made to
behave if you get too headstrong.”
“What will he do to us?” Ted and Sue leaned eagerly forward.
“Put you in irons down below,” laughed the Admiral, and he sang a line
or two of a rollicking sailor song,
“Down below, down below.
Sailors often go below,
Storms are many on the ocean.
Sailors have to go below.”
But they missed him until the duties and excitement of the yacht club
made them even forget his departure. Like everything else she undertook,
Polly went into the thing heart and soul, with both feet and hands and
her sleeves rolled up, as Sue said. She was up at five and down on the
beach with Ruth, hunting over the last tide’s treasures for new
specimens for their collections. Although Ruth was seventeen and Polly
not quite fifteen, they had been such staunch, firm friends at school
that the summer vacation seemed to draw the ties of friendship all the
closer.
“Ruth always understands just what I mean,” said Polly. “Everybody else
thinks I am too quick-spoken and changeable. But I’m not, truly I’m not;
am I, Ruth?”
“Yes, you are, too,” Ruth answered, in her placid way. “But I like you
for it. You’re like a sea anemone. They can change their colors, you
know, to match their surroundings. And I think it’s a good plan, the
same as the chameleon. Somebody, Emerson or Thoreau, I forget which,
says we should all keep our natures in tune with the harmony of the
spheres. What does that mean but adapting yourself to your immediate
environment—”
“Cut out the big words, Grandma,” Polly said, briefly. “It makes me
think of Honoria, and I’ll get homesick if you don’t stop.”
“Well, you know what I mean, Polly, don’t you? It’s why you’re always a
favorite with us, even your very first year you could sit down at
Calvert Hall and listen sympathetically to Miss Calvert’s detailed
description of how much she had suffered from neuralgia; then you’d go
right down to the kitchen and cheer up poor Annie May and tell her the
sun was surely coming out right away, and her ‘rheumatuz’ would be
better. Then upstairs you’d fly, and help Crullers with her Algebra, Sue
with her English Literature, and me with my Civics, and still have time
to get your own work done before class-time. And you never grumbled one
bit.”
“No, but I lose my temper all at once,” said Polly dolefully, as she
picked up a starfish out of a tiny pool left by the tide and
straightened out its arms. “Never mind me now, though. Let’s not talk
psychics. Look at this fellow, Ruth. Wonder if Sue would want to tame
him to walk a tight-rope.”
Polly lay flat down in the sand, despite her fourteen years, and
examined the starfish at close range, in true youngster fashion, while
Ruth poked it over gently with a long splinter of wood.
“They say if one of its arms breaks off, another will grow in its
place,” said Ruth.
“Will it? I wish ours would. Think how nice it would be for all the
cripples if their arms and legs would only sprout again. Can starfish
see, Ruth?”
“Indeed they can. See that tiny red speck at the end of each arm? That’s
the eye. Its mouth is underneath, and look at all the feet on the under
side of the rays, Polly. They say a starfish is like a sieve, all tiny
holes that the water runs through.”
“Well, this one is going to be dried, neatly dried,” said Polly. “It’s a
shame to do it, but in the interests of science he must be dried.”
“Don’t show it to Sue, then,” Ruth suggested. “She’ll want to tame it,
surely. She wants to tame everything we find and make a pet of it. Tom
brought her two turtles this morning, besides a tin box half full of
periwinkles. She’s trying to train them to come out of their shells when
she whistles to them; think of it, Polly.”
“Ruth, what’s a chambered nautilus?” Polly picked up a round shell,
white and fragile, with little raised dots on it like lace work.
“That is not,” laughed Ruth. “That’s a sea urchin, I think. You can find
the nautilus only in the tropics. They call them Argonauts too, did you
know it? I think it’s pretty, for they say they can rise to the surface
of the sea and spread a little sail.”
Polly leaned back her head, her hands clasped behind it, and repeated
softly:
“This is the ship of pearl, which poets feign
Sails the unshadowed main.
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer winds its purple wings,
In gulfs enchanted where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
And the cold sea maids rise to sun their streaming hair.”
“Oh, I love that,” Ruth exclaimed, pushing back her hair from her face,
as she, too, leaned back to listen. “Say it all, Polly?”
“Not now,” Polly shook her head, “wouldn’t it be a good idea, though,
for us to have a sea-poetry night while we’re here? Build a great
driftwood fire on the beach, and invite everybody we know, and toast
marshmallows, and each one recite or sing her favorite piece about the
sea.”
“Fine, Polly, fine,” Ruth nodded her head emphatically. “The Vaughan
girls might come over, and Nancy and Tom and maybe Mrs. Carey. Let’s.”
They wandered away, then, towards the long line of rocks that appeared
at low tide at the head of the Knob. Polly said they looked like the
Aleutian Islands in miniature, and she felt like a lady Colossus
stepping out over them. By hunting very closely around them, one could
find what Ruth called “the enchanted gardens of the sea;” little pools
in the rocks, with sea moss that, when turned over, was full of life,
crawling, sprawling, atomic life. The finest strands of seaweed were
away out there also, great loose bunches, some like fern fronds, others
like live moss, and some like chains of big brown beads or beans.
“Have you found any limpets yet, Polly?” called Ruth. “They’re the
wisest ’possums you ever saw. They shut their shells up closely when
they know the tide has gone, and then when it comes in, they lift up the
top like a little tent, and let the water in to take a drink.”
Polly had taken off her shoes and stockings, and she paddled intrepidly
about in the water, and poked after new things. There had been a heavy
sea the night before, and the beach was strewn with strands of seaweed,
and driftwood, and a fringe of shells at the high tide mark.
Among the odd things they found were oysters fastened in all sorts of
strange shapes to bits of rock and wave-worn stones. Polly found a
smooth white one, nearly a perfect oval, with two shells opening upward
from it, like wings, and she called it Mercury’s slipper. Another flat,
green rock had ten tiny baby oysters clinging to it, the shells
overlapping one another like barnacles.
So it went every day. When they had a good-sized collection, they would
go up on the porch, to sort out, and share, and trade. The prettiest
ones they saved for paper weights, but Isabel and Kate refused to
declaim over the oystered rocks. With pails they hunted up and down the
shore for the pink and green and opal tinted shells that Marbury had
nicknamed Neptune’s finger nails. These shells were very shy of the
land. You had to walk along the very edge of the water, and watch each
incoming wave, then catch the wisps of shells before they slipped back
into deep water. Some were pale green, some a cloudy pearl like opals,
and others were deep salmon pink. Some were iridescent, and gleamed in
the sunlight beautifully. Isabel had set her heart on stringing a
portìere to carry back to her mother, and Kate was making one for Miss
Calvert as a memento of their summer vacation.
Sue’s hobby was the live castaways of the sea. While the other girls
hunted for shells and seaweed, she it was who sought crabs, lobsters,
fish, and turtles. Tom brought her some fish poles, and Nancy would join
her as she sat on the little, lopsided landing place, fishing tranquilly
hour after hour. Good luck attended her, too. Many a savory mess did she
bring up to Aunty Welcome for their dinner, and several mornings, long
before the other girls were awake, she had sailed away out with Tom and
Nancy to what the former called the Little Banks, where the cod ran. One
day when the wind had been in the right quarter, they even sailed out
around the Point, and caught a glimpse of the open channel out to sea,
and the life saving station.
“Nancy,” Sue had said solemnly that day, when they tacked and started
homeward, “I should think you would be so proud of your father you
wouldn’t know what to do. Don’t you know that a life saver is a hero?
Why, down home, if a man saves anybody else’s life, he gets a medal,
sometimes from Congress, and it is all written up in the papers, and
away off up here, these men go on saving people and saving them, and no
one hears anything about it or seems to think it’s wonderful.”
Nancy nodded. “Oh, yes, they have medals too, sometimes.”
“But not enough. How many people do you really suppose the Captain has
saved?”
“Oh, my, I don’t know,” laughed Nancy. “There are ever so many of them.
I don’t think even father has kept track. He says it’s just his day’s
work, and his duty. His favorite hymn is the one we so often sing at
church over in the village, ‘Brightly Gleams Our Father’s Mercy.’”
Nancy’s strong young voice sang out the sweet old hymn until it fairly
echoed over the waters. She was at the tiller of the _Pirate_, Tom’s
catboat, while Sue sat up on what Nancy called “the lid,” the little
deck between the cock pit and the coaming, her feet dangling over in
true sea-rover fashion.
The lighthouse and life-saving station stood out in silhouette against
the bright, sapphire sky, and the sea had the glimmer and the sheen of a
blue bird’s glancing wing, with tints that changed prismatically with
every cloud shadow.
“Nancy,” called Sue, suddenly, bending forward to take a better look at
an island they were passing, “what’s that pile of rock over there,
shaped like a tower?”
“It is a tower, or used to be. That’s Smugglers’ Cove. Father says he’s
heard his father tell how a band of Nova Scotia pirates used to put in
this bay years and years ago, and land their goods on this island, and a
family of fishermen lived here who were really smugglers.”
“Are there any left now?” asked Sue, her blue eyes wide with interest.
Nancy shook her head, the fresh breeze blowing her yellow hair back from
her tanned, happy face, that always seemed to be smiling like the
Captain’s.
“They didn’t play fair with the pirates, and one night a ship was seen
just outside the harbor, and nobody knows her name, or where she was
bound. But after that night no living soul was ever seen on the island
again, and the pirates never entered Eagle Bay after that. Father says
after a few years some fisher boys ventured to land there, but they
didn’t find anything. The pirates had carried away everybody, and all
that belonged to them.”
“Maybe they left some buried treasure there.” Sue’s tone was brimful of
romance and wonderment, but Nancy answered in a matter-of-fact way:
“Maybe. Nobody knows. And years ago, too, there was a big French boat
wrecked off our coast that was blown southward down the shore, and folks
say there was treasure on board, money for the French provinces up in
Nova Scotia and Canada. So that’s down with the fishes too, probably.”
“Oh, dear,” said Sue, ruefully, “and here I thought it might be some
place where we could get it. Polly’d find a way if there was any sort of
chance. I wish we could train a tommycod to go down and bring up one
piece of gold at a time.”
“It isn’t in pieces. It’s gold bars, bullion, father called it.”
“Then it will have to be a tame tommycod. Just wait till I tell Polly.”
Polly’s opinion was given swiftly. Her eyes sparkled as soon as she
heard the story of Smugglers’ Cove.
“Let’s take lunch, and all sail over there to-morrow and explore.”
“The Commodore’s word is law,” replied Kate, laughing. “Aye, aye, sir.”
They had found out the very first week after their arrival that a
row-boat was a necessity for shore trips.
“Something like a dory or a ‘dink,’” Ted suggested. “I know my brothers,
when they took the yacht out, talked about the ‘dink,’ and it was a
little boat swung up handily to use when the yacht wasn’t needed.”
“That’s the dinghey, you mean,” Tom told her. “You folks over here need
a dory.”
“Well, what’s the difference between the two, Tom?” Polly called from
the inner room, where she sat writing letters home, so Tom could take
them over to Eastport that afternoon.
“A dory’s a freebooter, and her own mistress,” said Tom, “but a dinghey
belongs to the ship her painter’s fastened to.”
“Then we want a dory.”
Accordingly a dory found its way over, and became part of the club’s
equipment. The girls liked it, too; they averaged from two to six trips
a day in it over to Fair Havens. It was handy when they wanted to send
by Tom or the Captain to the village for groceries, for they could bring
them home in the dory from the Captain’s house.
Friday night it was when Sue told of Smugglers’ Cove, and they decided
to picnic there the next day; so early the next morning Polly rowed over
to ask Nancy to go with them.
“I had better help mother with the cleaning,” Nancy said, hesitatingly,
but Mrs. Carey smilingly waved her away.
“Land, Nannie, you’re only young once. Go along and be happy. There
isn’t much to do at all.”
“We’ll have to start away from the island at about five, Polly,” Nancy
said, as she slipped off her big apron and brushed her hair, “because
the Portland boat gets in to-day, and she’s due at six-thirty. We had
better keep out of her way.”
“Yes, and you children don’t want to catch her swell in those wisps of
boats,” Mrs. Carey added, firmly.
“They wouldn’t sink, would they, Mrs. Carey?” Polly asked.
“Maybe they wouldn’t, but they’d ship a lot of water, and rock so that
any one who wasn’t used to them, might be thrown overboard, and in a
heavy sea like the Portland boat leaves behind her there’d be no picking
you up.”
Polly forgot to tell the girls the warning, and in the hurry of
preparation for the day’s jaunt it slipped from her memory. Aunty
Welcome packed a mighty lunch for them, but flatly refused to be one of
the party. It was their first extended sail without Tom’s company to
reassure them against mishap, but the day was perfect for sailing, and
the yachts took the breeze as lightly and as easily as gulls. Polly led,
and took a course across the bay towards the hotel, then tacked, and
started straight for Smugglers’ Cove. The _Tidy Jane_ led the way
gallantly, clear to the Cove, as a flagship should, but the girls
declared it was no proof of the _Jane’s_ superiority as a sailing craft.
It was the way the Commodore handled her. While the others handled their
main sheets gingerly and cautiously, letting out and tacking slowly,
Polly was ready and waiting as soon as she reached the end of the first
course to let go, and the minute the point was reached, biff! Polly’s
sail slackened, the boom swung about, and the cotton caught the puff in
a jiffy, and was off on the new stretch.
“Some day you’ll do that, and you’ll tumble over into the water,” Isabel
told her. “I always expect to get hit on the head when my boom swings
about.”
“Then you’ll be like Yonny Yohnson, the little Swedish sailor from
Stockholm that the Captain told us about,” laughed Polly. “Listen,” and
she quoted: “‘Yonny Yohnson, he yump off yib-boom into yolly boat, and
spoil his yellow yacket.’”
Crullers was always the last to get started from the landing. Yachting
with Jane Daphne Adams, as Polly said, was a serious matter, and she
gave it her undivided attention. Her sail was different from those on
the other boats. It was shorter and wider, and ribbed crosswise like a
junk boat’s sails. Tom told them that Phil and Jack, Polly’s cousins,
had put it on, just as a freakish notion, and it surely was freakish to
look at; but it was easy to handle and Crullers liked it. There was no
cabin, but the cockpit was roomy and had several lockers underneath the
seats.
“Cabin,” she had said quite scornfully, when the girls had said it was
too bad she didn’t have one. “Call that little dark hole a cabin? Why,
it’s all you can do to turn around in it. And even if I did have one,
I’d only use it to sleep in, and then where would my yacht be?”
“You mean where would you be?” laughed Polly.
It was a little past eight in the morning when they arrived at
Smugglers’ Cove. There was a line beach to run up on, and the shores
looked inviting.
“This is a perfect cove,” said Ruth. “It must have given the place its
name years ago. Those little bunches of grass over yonder look like an
atoll, girls, the way they bob up here and there around the shore.”
It took some time for the newly fledged skippers to drop anchor, and
furl their sails, but finally it was done. The tide was out, and the
girls took off their shoes and stockings and waded up the beach from the
boats, carrying their lunch boxes and some pillows that Aunty Welcome
had put in at the last minute. It was comical to see the procession of
eight wading in, each with a gayly colored sofa pillow on her head, and
a box under one arm, but finally everything they wanted was ashore, and
the invasion of Smugglers’ Cove was complete.
Polly said it would be better to explore before the sun rose high, and
they started off, taking the beach as the surest path. It was even a
better strip of sand than they had at the Knob, firm and beautifully
white, with the remains of millions of infinitely tiny shells crumbling
into it. Polly took up a handful of sand and called Ruth to come and
look at it.
“I wish we had a microscope. It’s all fragments of shells. Isn’t it
lovely, Ruth?”
“Wait till you see the Castle,” Nancy called. “That’s what everybody
along shore calls it, Smugglers’ Castle. The walls are made of rocks and
shells, and a sort of clay with shells stuck in it.”
“Like the old walls at St. Augustine,” Polly exclaimed. “They are like
mosaic, the shells are matched in so perfectly.”
“Oh, girls, I just thought of a good plan,” Kate remarked, suddenly.
“Wouldn’t it be dandy for us to keep a log-book?”
“But do yacht clubs keep them?” Isabel said dubiously.
“I don’t know whether they do or not,” Kate returned. “But I think it
would be fine for this yacht club to. Keep a regular daybook of general
events, I mean, everything that happens to us of general interest. Then
at the end of the vacation, have eight copies, and bind them in linen
covers to keep as souvenirs.”
“Kate, we’ll do it,” Polly said, approvingly. “Call it the Memory Log
Book of the Castaways of Lost Island.”
“What a dandy place for ghosts,” Sue called back to them, as she climbed
up the rocks, her shoes and stockings in her hand.
“Girls, look at this!” Polly stopped short, and pointed down at the
beach. There were footsteps plainly to be seen in the sand.
“Who on earth could it be?” Isabel gasped, while Nancy ran down the
shore, and knelt to look at them more closely. Polly’s eyes danced with
fun, and she sang softly under her breath:
“Oh, Robinson Crusoe, he lived alone,
On a little island, he called his own,
No one to say when he came home,
Robinson Crusoe,
What made you do so?”
“Don’t, Polly, please,” Ruth said softly, her face rather anxious. “You
can’t tell who may be here now, looking at us, when we can’t see them.”
“Who cares?” Polly laughed, merrily. “It makes it all the better. I
never read about an island yet but what it had savages, or pirates, or
something on it to make it interesting. This pirate wears real shoes
anyway, so he’s partly civilized. You can tell by the footprints in the
sand. But what are all these other funny marks all around. One, two,
three, one, two, three, as if a campstool had danced a jig in the wet
sand.”
“Maybe it’s somebody clamming,” said Crullers, hopefully.
“You don’t clam that way,” Polly told her. “You dig for clams. You don’t
spear them.”
“I don’t,” Ted said quite seriously. “I take my mandolin and sit down on
the sand, and play to them, and they all come out and smile at me.”
“You silly goose,” Polly laughed, but Ted ran on ahead after Sue. She
had vanished suddenly over the rocky ledge ahead. They could hear her in
the distance singing “Nancy Lee” at the top of her healthy young lungs;
then all at once there was a dead silence.
“Maybe they’ve caught her,” whispered Isabel. “Let’s run for the boats.”
“Run, and leave Sue behind?” Polly’s tone was full of reproach. “Not if
I know it. Here are seven of us, and we’re all good and hearty. We’ll go
and find out the trouble.”
They turned away from the beach and started up the rocks, Nancy and
Polly leading. At the top they paused. The entire island lay outspread
before them. It was a mass of sand, with gradually rising rock ledges
towards its center, and scrub pines and willows everywhere. Right in the
center, on the highest rock, rose the Castle, or “Smugglers’ Tower,” as
it had been called. It was built over the site of the old fisherman’s
hut, and was half overgrown by moss, vines, and clambering shrubs.
Inside the ruins, willows and young birches had grown up in defiance of
the place. But Sue was nowhere in sight, and they could see all over the
island from where they stood.