SEAWARD BOUND
There were very few people on the seaward-bound train; indeed Miss Jane
Moore, Nann and Dories were the only occupants of the chair car. After
settling herself comfortably in the chair nearest the front, the old
woman, with a sweep of her arm toward the back, said almost petulantly:
“Sit as far away from me as you can. I may want to sleep, and I know
girls. They chatter, chatter, chatter, titter, titter, titter all about
nothing.”
Her companions were glad to obey, and when they were seated at the rear
end of the car, they kept their heads close together while they visited
that they might not disturb the elderly woman, who, to all appearances,
fell at once into a light doze.
As soon as the train was under way, Dories asked: “Now do tell me how
this perfectly, unbelievably wonderful thing has happened?”
Nann laughed happily. “Maybe your Great-Aunt Jane is a fairy godmother in
disguise,” she whispered. They both glanced at the far corner, but the
black veiled figure was much more suggestive of a witch than a good
fairy.
“The disguise surely is a complete one,” Dories said with a shudder. “My,
it gives me the chilly shivers when I think how I might be going to spend
a whole month alone with her. But now tell me, just what did happen?”
“Can’t you guess? You wrote your aunt a letter, didn’t you, telling all
about me and even giving the name of the hotel where Dad and I were
staying?”
Dories nodded, “Yes, that’s true. Mother wanted me to write to Aunt Jane
and I couldn’t think of a thing to tell her about, and so I wrote about
you.”
“Well,” Nann continued to enlighten her friend, “she must have written me
that very day inviting me to be her guest at Siquaw Point for the month
of October, but she asked me not to let you know. I sent the last picture
postcard, the one of our hotel, just after I had received her letter, and
you can imagine how wild I was to tell you. I hadn’t started going to the
Boston High. Dear old Dad said a month later wouldn’t matter, and so here
I am.” The girls clasped hands and beamed joyfully at each other.
Dories’ next glance toward the sleeping old woman was one of gratitude.
“I’m going to try hard to love her, that is, if she’ll let me.” Then,
after a thoughtful moment, Dories continued: “Great-Aunt Jane must have
been very different when Dad was a boy, for he cared a lot for her,
Mother said.” Then with one of her quick changes she exclaimed in a low
voice, “Nann Sibbett, I have lain awake nights dreading the dismal month
I was to spend at that forsaken summer resort. I just knew there’d be
ghosts in those boarded-up cottages, but now that you’re going to be with
me, I almost hope that something exciting will happen.”
“So do I!” Nann agreed.
It was four o’clock when the train, which consisted of an engine, two
coaches and a chair-car, stopped in what seemed at first to be but wide
stretches of meadows and marsh lands, but, peering ahead, the girls saw a
few wooden buildings and a platform. “Siquaw Center!” the brakeman opened
a door to announce. Miss Jane Moore sat up so suddenly, and when she
threw back her veil she seemed so very wide awake, the girls found
themselves wondering if she had really been asleep at all. The brakeman
assisted the old woman to alight and placed her bags on the platform,
then, hardly pausing, the train again was under way. Meadows and marshes
stretched in all directions, but about a mile to the east the girls could
see a wide expanse of gray-blue ocean.
“I guess the name means the center of the marshes,” Dori whispered,
making a wry face while her aunt was talking to the station-master, a
tall, lank, red-whiskered man in blue overalls who did not remove his cap
nor stop chewing what seemed to be a rather large quid.
“Yeah!” the girls heard his reply to the woman’s question. “Gib’ll fetch
the stage right over. Quare time o’ year for yo’ to be comin’ out, Mis’
Moore, ain’t it? Yeah! I got your letter this here mornin’. The supplies
ar’ all ready to tote over to yer cottage.”
The girls were wondering who Gib might be when they heard a rumbling
beyond the wooden building and saw a very old stage coach drawn by a
rather boney old white horse and driven by a tall, lank, red-headed boy.
A small girl, with curls of the same color, sat on the high seat at his
side. “Hurry up, thar, you Gib Strait!” the man, who was recognizable as
the boy’s father, called to him. “Come tote Mis’ Moore’s luggage.” Then
the man sauntered off, having not even glanced in the direction of the
two girls, but the rather ungainly boy who was hurrying toward them was
looking at them with but slightly concealed curiosity.
Miss Moore greeted him with, “How do you do, Gibralter Strait.” Upon
hearing this astonishing name, the two girls found it hard not to laugh,
but the lad, evidently understanding, smiled broadly and nodded awkwardly
as Miss Moore solemnly proceeded to introduce him.
To cover his embarrassment, the lad hastened to say. “Well, Miss Moore,
sort o’ surprisin’ to see yo’ hereabouts this time o’ year. Be yo’ goin’
to the Pint?”
The old woman looked at him scathingly. “Well, Gibralter, where in
heaven’s name would I be going? I’m not crazy enough yet to stay long in
the Center. Here, you take my bags; the girls can carry their own.”
“Yessum, Miss Moore,” the boy flushed up to the roots of his red hair. He
knew that he wasn’t making a very good impression on the young ladies. He
glanced at them furtively as they all walked toward the stage; then, when
he saw them smiling toward him, not critically but in a most friendly
fashion, there was merry response in his warm red-brown eyes. What he
said was: “If them bags are too hefty, set ’em down an’ I’ll come back
for ’em.”
“O, we can carry them easily,” Nann assured him.
The small girl on the high seat was staring down at them with eyes and
mouth open. She had on a nondescript dress which very evidently had been
made over from a garment meant for someone older. When the girls glanced
up, she smiled down at them, showing an open space where two front teeth
were missing.
“What’s your name, little one?” Nann called up to her. The lad was inside
the coach helping Miss Moore to settle among her bags.
The child’s grin grew wilder, but she did not reply. Nann turned toward
her brother, who was just emerging: “What is your little sister’s name?”
she asked.
The boy flushed. Nann and Dori decided that he was easily embarrassed or
that he was unused to girls of his own age. But they better understood
the flush when they heard the answer: “Her name’s Behring.” Then he
hurried on to explain: “I know our names are queer. It was Pa’s notion to
give us geography names, being as our last is Strait. That’s why mine’s
Gibralter. Yo’ kin laugh if yo’ want to,” he added good-naturedly. “I
would if ’twasn’t my name.” Then in a low voice, with a swift glance
toward the station, he confided, “I mean to change my name when I come of
age. I sure sartin do.”
The girls felt at once that they would like this boy whose sensitive face
expressed his every emotion and who had so evident a sense of humor. They
were about to climb inside of the coach with Miss Moore when a shrill,
querulous voice from a general store across from the station attracted
their attention. A tall, angular woman in a skimp calico dress stood
there. “Howdy, Miss Moore,” she called, then as though not expecting a
reply to her salutation, she continued: “Behring Strait, you come here
right this minute and mind the baby. What yo’ gallavantin’ off fer, and
me with the supper gettin’ to do?” Nann and Dori glanced at each other
merrily, each wondering which strait the baby was named after.
The small girl obeyed quickly. Mrs. Strait impressed the listeners as a
woman who demanded instant obedience. As soon as the three passengers
were settled inside, the coach started with a lurch. The sandy road wound
through the wide, swampy meadows. It was rough and rutty. Miss Moore sat
with closed eyes and, as she was wedged in between two heavy bags, she
was not jounced about as much as were the girls. They took it
good-naturedly, but Dories found it hard to imagine how she could have
endured the journey if she had been alone with her queer Aunt Jane. Nann
decided that the old woman feined sleep on all occasions to avoid the
necessity of talking to them.
At last, even above the rattle of the old coach, could be heard the
crashing surf on rocks, and the girls peered eagerly ahead. What they saw
was a wide strip of sand and a row of weather-beaten cottages, boarded
up, as Dori had prophesied, and beyond them white-crested, huge gray
breakers rushing and roaring up on the sand.
The boney white horse came to a sudden stop at the edge of the beach, nor
would it attempt to go any farther. The boy leaped over a wheel and threw
open the back door. “Guess you’ll have to walk a piece along the beach,
Miss Moore. The coach gets stuck so often in the sand ol’ Methuselah
ain’t takin’ no chances at tryin’ to haul it out,” he informed the
occupants.
The girls were almost surprised to find that the horse hadn’t been named
after a strait. Miss Moore threw back her veil and opened her eyes at
once. Upon hearing what the boy had to say, she leaned forward to gaze at
the largest cottage in the middle of the row. She spoke sharply:
“Gibralter, why didn’t your father carry out my orders? I wrote him
distinctly to open up the cottage and air it out. Why didn’t he do that
when he brought over the supplies, that’s what I’d like to know? I
declare to it, even if he is your father, I must say Simon Strait is a
most shiftless man.”
The boy said at once, as though in an effort to apologize: “Pa’s been
real sick all summer, Miss Moore, and like ’twas he fergot it, but I kin
open up easy, if I kin find suthin’ to pry off the boards with. I think
likely I’ll find an axe, anyhow, out in the back shed whar I used to chop
wood fer you. I’m most sure I will.”
Miss Moore sank back. “Well, hurry up about it, then. I’ll stay in the
coach till you get the windows uncovered.” When the boy was gone, the
woman turned toward her niece. “Open up that small black bag, Dories; the
one near you, and get out the back-door key. There’s a hammer just inside
on the kitchen table, if it’s where I left it.” She continued her
directions: “Give it to Gibralter and tell him, when he gets the boards
off the windows, to carry in some wood and make a fire. A fog is coming
in this minute and it’s as wet as rain.”
The key having been found, the girls ran gleefully around the cabin in
search of the boy. They found him emerging from a shed carrying a
hatchet. He grinned at them as though they were old friends. “Some
cheerful place, this!” he commented as he began ripping off the boards
from one of the kitchen windows. “You girls must o’ needed sea air a lot
to come to this place out o’ season like this with a—a—wall, with a old
lady like Miss Moore is.” Dories felt sure that the boy was thinking
something quite different, but was not saying it because it was a
relative of hers about whom he was talking. What she replied was: “I
can’t understand it myself. I mean why Great-Aunt Jane wanted to come to
this dismal place after everyone else has gone.”
They were up on the back porch and, as she looked out across the swampy
meadows over which a heavy fog was settling, then she continued, more to
Nann than to the boy: “I promised Mother I wouldn’t be afraid of ghosts,
but honestly I never saw a spookier place.”
The boy had been making so much noise ripping off boards that he had only
heard the last two words. “Spooks war yo’ speakin’ of?” he inquired.
“Well, I guess yo’ll think thar’s spooks enough along about the middle of
the night when the fog horn’s a moanin’ an’ the surf’s a crashin’ out on
the pint o’ rocks, an’ what’s more, thar _is_ folks at Siquaw Center as
says thar’s a sure enough spook livin’ over in the ruins that used to be
ol’ Colonel Wadbury’s place.”
The girls shuddered and Dories cast a “Didn’t I tell you so” glance at
her friend, but Nann, less fearful by nature, was interested and curious,
and after looking about in vain for the “ruin”, she inquired its
whereabouts.
Gibralter enlightened them. “O, ’tisn’t in sight,” he said, “that is, not
from here. It’s over beyant the rocky pint. From the highest rock thar
you kin see it plain.”
Then as he went on around the cottage taking off boards, the girls
followed to hear more of the interesting subject. “Fine house it used to
be when my Pa was a kid, but now thar’s nothing but stone walls a
standin’. A human bein’ couldn’t live in that ol’ shell, nohow. But—” the
boy could not resist the temptation to elaborate the theme when he saw
the wide eyes of his listeners, “’long about midnight folks at the Center
do say as how they’ve seen a light movin’ about in the old ruin. Nobody’s
dared to go near ’nuf to find out what ’tis. The swamps all about are
like quicksand. If you step in ’em, wall, golly gee, it’s good-bye fer
yo’. Leastwise that’s what ol’-timers say, an’ so the spook, if thar is
one over thar, is safe ’nuf from introosion.”
While the boy had been talking, he had removed all of the wooden blinds,
his listeners having followed him about the cabin. Dories had been so
interested that she had quite forgotten about the huge key that she had
been carrying. “O my!” she exclaimed, suddenly noticing it. “But then you
didn’t need the hammer after all. Now I’ll skip around and open the back
door, and, Gibralter, will you bring in some wood, Aunt Jane said, to
build us a fire?”
While the boy was gone, Nann confided merrily, “There now, Dories Moore,
you’ve been wishing for an adventure, and here is one all ready made and
waiting. Pray, what could be more thrilling than an old ruin surrounded
by an uncrossable swamp and a mysterious light which appears at
midnight?”
The boy returned with an armful of logs left over from the supply of a
previous summer. “Gib,” Nann addressed him in her friendliest fashion,
“may we call you that? Gibralter is _so_ long. I’d like to visit your
ruin and inspect the ghost in his lair. Really and truly, isn’t there any
way to reach the place?”
The boy looked as though he had a secret which he did not care to reveal.
“Well, maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t,” he said uncommittedly.
Then, with a brightening expression in his red-brown eyes, “Anyway, I’ll
show you the old ruin if yo’ll meet me at sun-up tomorrow mornin’ out at
the pint o’ rocks.”
“I’m game,” Nann said gleefully. “It sounds interesting to me all right.
How about you, Dori?”
“O, I’m quite willing to see the place from a distance,” the other
replied, “but nothing could induce me to go very near it.” Neither of the
girls thought of asking the advice of their elderly hostess, who, at that
very moment, appeared around a corner of the cabin to inquire why it was
taking such an endless time to open up the cottage. Luckily Gib had
started a fire in the kitchen stove, which partly mollified the woman’s
wrath. After bringing in the bags and supplies, the boy took his
departure, and they could hear him whistling as he drove away through the
fog.