Mrs Tyson was looking at it. This time, somehow, she seemed much more pleased to see them. Perhaps Mrs Blackett had told her that they were a careful lot, not likely to set the fell on fire.
“Ah, here you are,” she said. “Mrs Blackett didn’t wait for you. She’s a mort to do at home, so she said, so she was off again. But we’ve a grand place for you to camp. Here in the orchard, close by the house so you’ll be handy if you want owt. And we’ve turned the old sow out, so she won’t come tumbling your tents at night. And you’ll find good water at yon pump across the yard, and plenty of it for all the drought. You’ll be as well here as in your own house, better likely, with the workmen up and down with their papering and painting. You’ll likely be putting yer tents up right away, I reckon. Mrs Blackett did say you’ll be wanting to make a fire now and then. I don’t hold with fires, but there’s just one spot on the shingle by the bridge where there’s no fear of owt catching. Things are that dry, you never know. And you’ll be close by the house at night so that if you want owt, you’ve only to call and I’ll hear you …”
She rattled on, friendly and kind, making them at home. And with every word she said their spirits sank deeper and deeper.
To be camped within hearing of the house and its natives, no matter how friendly … To draw water from the farm pump instead of dipping it from lake or beck … To have the tents not in a wood, or on the fell, or even in an ordinary field, but in an orchard, with apple and damson trees in their neat rows … Why, Mrs Tyson was quite right, and they might almost as well be in the Beckfoot garden.
Dick and Dorothea, perhaps, felt nothing of this, because, poor things, they hardly knew what camping was, but Roger and Titty looked at each other and then at John and Nancy and Susan and Peggy, waiting to see what their elders would have to say about it. Surely they would find some way out.
But no. The captains and mates pulled themselves together. Anybody who did not know them might easily have thought that they were very pleased. They followed Mrs Tyson into the orchard and said, “Thank you,” almost as if they meant it, when she showed them the clear space along the wall where they could pitch their tents.
“You’ll be tired after all that traipsing,” said Mrs Tyson. “I’ll be having supper ready for you in the parlour as soon as you’ve your tents fit up. And breakfast’ll be at eight in the mornings … and your suppers at half-past six.”
“But we’d rather do our own cooking,” began Susan, but Mrs Tyson would not listen to her.
“I’ve the table set out now,” she said, “and the kettle’s on the fire. So I’ll be ready as soon as you are, as the saying is.”
There was nothing to be done about it. Mrs Tyson meant it all so kindly that even Nancy could not say no to her.
“And I was telling your mother I’ll put you up some sandwiches each day, and with your flasks of tea you’ll be able to picnic where you like. Well, well,” she broke off. “I’ll leave you to it. You’ll be all right setting your tents up anywhere along under this wall.”
NICE AND HANDY TO THE HOUSE
She went back to the farmhouse.
The prospectors waited silently till she was gone.
“Barbecued billygoats,” said Captain Nancy, “but this is pretty awful.”
CHAPTER X
PROSPECTING
“PRETTY awful,” Nancy had called the new camp, with its row of tents along an orchard wall, and a pump handy, and meals ready cooked in the farmhouse. But, after all, it was nearer High Topps than the garden at home. From Beckfoot, prospecting would have been impossible. From Mrs Tyson’s orchard, something could be done. They all knew that it had been a very near thing, getting leave to come at all. They were all tired, and by the time they had pitched the tents, and divided out the bedding, and had a bit of a wallow in what was left of the river, and a good hot high-tea or tea-supper in the farmhouse, they were inclined to think that things might have been a great deal worse. They slept well, after they had grown accustomed to the irregular bumps of apples, dried up before their time, dropping from the trees. In the morning, even Nancy liked waking up in a strange place, though Mrs Tyson calling them in to breakfast did rather make it seem as if civilisation was jogging the prospectors’ elbows. And, of course, the pump in the farmyard was a bit of civilisation, too, but able-seamen Dick and Roger did not on that account the less enjoy pumping cold water on each other’s heads.
The trouble began when it came to starting for the goldfields.
Mrs Tyson gave them porridge for breakfast as well as eggs and bacon, but all the time they were eating it the grandfather clock in the corner of the farm parlour reminded them with its loud ticking that they had no time to lose.
“Buck up, Roger,” said John.
“Pitch it in,” said Nancy. “Giminy, we’ve seen him at it. It isn’t as if we didn’t know he was there. It’s been light for hours, and Squashy may be finding the place and staking his claim while we’re just sitting here hogging.”
But the whole expedition was ready and waiting in the farmyard long before Mrs Tyson was ready to serve out the sandwiches and flasks of tea they were to take with them.
“If only we’d been doing our own cooking,” said Susan. But the one thing Mrs Tyson did not want them to do was to cook. She preferred to cook for them, and said so, and, after all, she might very well have told Mrs Blackett she would rather they stayed at home. They hung about anxiously, thinking of their lucky rival lodging almost within a stone’s throw of the goldfields. Susan had a last look round the Swallows’ tents, to see that all bedding was neatly folded, in case any stranger might come along. Dick sat in the farm porch for the sake of the shade, and had another look through Phillips on the forms of gold. Nancy and Peggy were in the kitchen helping Mrs Tyson (who could have managed better without them) by buttering slices of bread. The others were amusing themselves by giving hempseeds to Homer, Sophocles and Sappho. The method was to wet the tip of a finger by licking it, to put one hempseed on the wet finger-tip, to poke the finger through the wire netting and to hold it steady, or as steady as possible, while a pigeon took it with a tickling peck.
“Who’s going to take the first despatch?” said Roger.
“Sappho,” said Titty.
“Why haven’t you got her in the basket?” said John.
“The basket’s all ready,” said Dorothea.
“I’m going to carry it,” said Roger.
“She’s to stay with the others till the very last minute,” said Titty. “Hey. Here they come.”
“Everybody collect a flask,” called Nancy. “They’re all in the porch. Susan’s got the sandwiches. Come on. Where’s that pigeon? Who’s postman?”
“I am,” said Roger.
“Here you are then,” and she held out a scrap of thin paper. “Don’t go and lose it. If we had to send her back without a letter, mother’d be bound to think we meant her as an S.O.S. Now then, Titty. Let’s see you catch her … Oh no. Better not today. We’re so awfully late already.”
In a moment Sappho, who did not seem to mind Nancy’s firm clutch, was in the travelling-basket.
“Have you thought of what to say in the letter?” asked Dorothea.
“Found a ten-ton nugget of pure gold,” said Roger.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely if we did?”
Sandwiches and thermos flasks were dealt out at last.
“Everybody got a hammer?” said Nancy.
“We’re to be back for tea at half-past six,” said Susan.
“Oh, look here,” said Nancy. “It’s as bad as being at school.”
“It can’t be helped,” said Susan.
“Let’s get started,” said John.
*
They climbed steadily up the path through the trees. It seemed even longer than it had the day before and the path was too steep for talking. Under the big rock face at the top of the wood they halted. Scouts, Nancy and John, went up the gully and disappeared, creeping low to the ground. The others wai
ted by the bramble thicket below the rock. Dick was looking through his notes. For a few minutes nothing happened. There was a shout. Then Nancy appeared, standing up, on the top of the rock, which, by this time, they had agreed to call The Great Wall.
“All clear,” she said. “Come on. We’ve got the Topps to ourselves.”
It was a funny thing, but you might almost have thought that she was disappointed.
“Perhaps he’s hiding,” said Dorothea hopefully.
They hurried up the gully and looked out across the rolling, broken Topps, all heather, bracken, rock and close cropped, dried-up grass, to the great mass of Kanchenjunga and the huge spur somewhere in the heart of which Slater Bob must be at work. The only living thing to be seen was John, who had raced across a hundred yards or so of open ground to climb a ridge of grey rock. He was signalling to them to come on.
“Not a sign of him,” said John, when the rest of the prospectors joined him.
“Let’s begin at once,” said Nancy. “Does everybody know what to look for?”
“Gold,” said Roger.
“Gummock,” said Peggy. “Everybody knows that.”
Dick pulled out his pocket-book.
“Read it out, Professor.”
Dick found the right page.
“Sometimes gold is found in the form of dust. Sometimes in nuggets. Sometimes mixed with other minerals, particularly in quartz.”
“Why not in gallons?” said Roger. “Two gallons one quart. Even pints wouldn’t be bad.”
“Shut up,” said John.
“I looked up quartz,” said Dick gravely. “It’s a white, semi-opaque, crystalline substance.”
“People are keen on it for rockeries,” said Nancy. “There’s lots of it about.”
“What we’ve got to look for first,” said John, “is an old working. Slater Bob said the gold was found in a dip by an old working, and we’ll know it because of some heather in a crack in the rock.”
“There are dozens of old workings,” said Nancy. “Some are just burrows. Some are caves. Some used to be caves and have got choked up. Some you can only tell by the lump outside where the turf has grown over the rubbish the old miners threw out.”
“Jolly easily miss the right one,” said John. “High Topps is a whacking big place.”
They looked out over the rolling fell, all grey rock, and drab withered grass, and dusty bracken, with here and there a patch of purple heather.
“We’ll work backwards and forwards in a long line,” said Nancy.
“Not too far apart,” said John.
“Right across the Topps to the foot of Grey Screes and back again. Strip by strip.”
“Like lawn-mowing,” said Titty.
They spread out, twenty or thirty yards apart, so that the eight of them, moving abreast, could search a strip of ground about two hundred yards wide. It would have been easy if the ground had been flat or all alike. But it was not. Some people found themselves going slowly over rocks and heather where anything might be discovered any minute. Other people galloped ahead over dry bent and dusty earth cracked in the August heat. The line was hardly straight for two minutes together. Nobody liked to hear the hammers of the others tapping on stone while they themselves might just as well be walking in a field.
Peggy, in the middle of the line, was the first to find one of the old workings. It must have been a very old one, perhaps one of those left by the Germans who came to these lake-country fells and mined copper in the time of Queen Elizabeth. It was not high enough to stand up in. Just a narrow hole that would have pleased a fox. All the others closed in to see it.
“No heather anywhere near,” said John.
They spread out again, and pretty soon a shout from Nancy at the northern end of the line brought everybody running. She, too, had found an old working, this time a good-sized cave. There was no heather here, either, but it was too good a cave to pass by, and everybody went inside it and fingered the rough, chipped walls by the light of pocket torches. They even used Titty’s ball of string, though there was no need, because Slater Bob had said that the working where the gold was found was not a deep one, and, anyhow, they were never out of sight of the entrance. Then, as they moved on, they came to a long, low ridge, where rocks stood up, bare of grass, and most inviting to the hammer. Everybody put on sun-goggles and did a little stone-breaking, and Dick, as geologist to the company, was shouted for by one after another of the prospectors to decide if this or that bit of stone was or was not valuable ore. At first people were inclined to keep specimens, just in case, and pockets and knapsacks grew heavier as the day went on, and then lighter again as hopes waned, and the specimens, no longer valued, were dropped by the way.
COMBING THE TOPPS
At last Susan, after a word with Peggy, blew three long blasts on her mate’s whistle.
Everybody knew what that meant, and a few minutes later the line had closed in on itself, and the prospectors were wriggling out of the straps of their knapsacks, throwing themselves on the hot, dry ground, and opening thermos flasks and packets of Mrs Tyson’s sandwiches.
“I say,” said Titty, as she put the pigeon’s basket carefully on the ground. “We forgot to bring a drink for Sappho. She won’t like tea, and she’ll be as thirsty as anybody.”
“We’ll send her off now,” said Peggy. “And there’ll be some hope of her flying straight so as to have her drink when she gets home.”
“What shall I say?” said Roger, pulling out his bit of paper.
“ALL WELL,” began Nancy. “PROSPECTING BEGUN. NO SIGNS OF HATED RIVAL. Mother’ll be jolly pleased to hear that. She was a bit stewy, you know, for fear it might come to a battle.”
Roger wrote it down carefully, making his handwriting as small as he could.
“Shove in a skull,” said Nancy. “Or let me. I know how they go with doing them all over the place.”
Skull and cross-bones were duly added. The paper was rolled up till it was smaller than a match.
Titty and Roger were busy with the pigeon.
“Don’t try holding her in one hand,” said Peggy.
“I’ve got her,” said Roger. “But be quick with the message. She doesn’t a bit like keeping still.”
The message was pushed under the rubber band. All was ready.
“Give her a good start,” said Peggy. “Go on. Up into the air and away …”
“She’s off …”
“News from the desert,” murmured Dorothea.
“Why doesn’t she go?” said Roger.
“She’s gone …”
The pigeon swung round and round above their heads, rising higher and higher till it hurt their eyes to watch her in that blazing sky. Suddenly she flew off, towards the valley of the Amazon, but so high that after the first two moments not even Roger could persuade himself that he could see her.
“I wonder whether cook’ll drop a tray,” said Peggy, with a grin.
“Pity we can’t be both ends at once,” said Nancy. “I’d like to hear that bell go.”
With Sappho well on her way to a drink of cool water in the Beckfoot pigeon-loft, and a feast of pigeon meal, they settled down to their own dinner.
“Anybody who didn’t know might easily think we were a picnic party,” said Peggy.
“Galoot,” said Nancy. “How could anybody think anything else? No real camp. No real cooking. Susan’s mincing machine all wasted. Sandwiches in paper packets, some marked ‘beef’ and some marked ‘jam.’ Of course it’s a picnic.”
“They’re not half bad sandwiches,” said Roger.
“Remember the pemmican in Swallowdale,” said Peggy.
“And the shark steaks when we were on Wild Cat,” said Titty.
“Hang the drought!” said Nancy. “If we could only use the charcoal-burners’ camp and be free of natives altogether.”
“There is one thing,” said Susan. “No signs of Squashy Hat. And if he isn’t prospecting, we aren’t in such a hurry.”
&nbs
p; Five minutes later she herself was the first to see him.
They had eaten their sandwiches and drunk the hot tea out of the thermos flasks, hot tea which, in spite of its hotness, is the most refreshing of drinks on hot days. Peggy had surprised everybody by serving out a ration of chocolate from a secret store of her own … “only just in time,” as Roger pointed out, because it was on the point of melting and pouring away out of the paper in which it was wrapped. It was time to go on with the search. Nancy had jumped to her feet to shame the general laziness. Roger was pretending to be asleep. Dick was looking towards Kanchenjunga, thinking of rock-faults and geological strata and likely places for mineral deposits. Titty and Dorothea were cramming the wrappings from the sandwiches into the outer pockets of their knapsacks. Susan had already slung her knapsack on her back and was looking across the Topps towards the Great Wall and Tyson’s wood, when she saw something moving in the bracken. Someone was coming up towards the goldfields from the Dundale road.
CHAPTER XI
FENDING OFF THE ENEMY
“LURK!” said Susan.
Nancy dropped as if she had been clubbed.
“Dick!” said Dorothea. “Lie down!”
“It’s Squashy Hat,” hissed Titty.
“Oh, all right,” said Dick, and lay down, while Nancy wriggled like a snake towards a largish tussock of rank grass. All the others were flattening themselves to the ground.
“He’s coming up from Atkinson’s,” said Peggy.
“It’s him all right,” said John.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Dorothea, looking eagerly at the wriggling Nancy.
“Probably hide,” said Titty.
“He may have been watching us all day,” said Roger.
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