Pigeon Post

by Arthur Ransome

  “What about it now, Dick?” said Nancy at last. “It’s still pretty hot.”

  “If it’s under two thousand and sixty degrees,” said Dick, “the gold won’t be liquid any more.”

  “It must be less than that by now,” said John.

  “Better unbuild it from the top,” said Nancy.

  “So long as none of the stones fall down inside,” said Dick, who would have been ready to wait till everything was cold.

  Roger, gingerly, pushed a stone sideways off the top of the furnace. John pushed one off. So did Nancy. So did Titty.

  Dick stood watching them. Two thousand and sixty degrees. It seemed a tremendous lot. What if after all they had not got it hot enough even with the bellows? No. It must have been hot enough. Whose knife had a file on it? John’s. They would want that to clean the scum off the ingot, to turn it into a shining lump of pure gold. Pure? Carats. How did people measure carats? Captain Flint would do that.

  “Don’t all try to help at once,” said Nancy.

  One at a time the stones were pushed off. People pushed them off with lumps of earth or other stones, to save the burning of the fingers.

  “They do keep hot a long time,” said Nancy.

  “Poor conductors,” said Dick. “If they were iron they’d be cold again by now.”

  The furnace was growing lower and lower while a ring of stones grew wider round it.

  “Can you see the top of the crucible?” asked Titty.

  “Not yet.”

  “We’d better open the side now,” said Dick, “or that big stone’ll fall in.”

  Everybody pressed round. John and Nancy were pulling out the stones with which the opening at the side of the furnace had been closed after the crucible had been put in.

  “Steady!” said Nancy.

  Dick, as in all moments of great excitement, took off and wiped his spectacles.

  John suddenly gasped.

  “There’s no crucible,” he said.

  “Oh rot,” said Nancy.

  “Well, here’s where it was,” said John. “And there’s nothing but white ash.”

  “It’s slipped through the bars,” said Nancy.

  “It couldn’t,” said Dick.

  “Oh hurry up,” said Nancy.

  Stones flew from the furnace, pulled aside by tingling fingers. The furnace grew lower and lower. They had come to the four bent rusty bars on which the crucible had rested. It was not there. More stones were pulled aside.

  “There’s a bit of it,” said John grimly.

  “Bust,” said Nancy.

  With two sticks, John pulled a bit of blackened pottery from the ashes. Everybody knew what it was.

  “Well, he’s got lots of crucibles,” said Peggy.

  “The gold can’t have got away,” said Dick. “It’ll be in a lump at the bottom.”

  “He won’t mind what shape it is,” said Nancy. “Come on, let’s get at it.”

  The last stones were pulled aside, and they began raking apart the heap of hot ash that was left. It rose in clouds into their faces.

  “It’ll be right underneath,” said Dick.

  They found other bits of the crucible, the lid in two pieces, the bottom all in one, and curved fragments of the sides. But there was never a sign of an ingot. Worse. The gold dust had disappeared. There was nothing left but pale ash and a few small lumps of slag.

  “But there must be something,” said Nancy, scraping frantically among the stones.

  “There isn’t,” said John.

  Dick, with trembling fingers, fitted together two bits of the broken crucible.

  “It can’t just have gone,” he said.

  “But it has,” said Nancy.

  They looked at each other with despair. Two whole weeks had gone with the gold dust, and if Captain Flint were to come home now, they had nothing to show him. Crushing, panning, charcoal-burning and smelting … the result of all their labours was a little heap of hot stones and smoking ash.

  “Oh, Dick!” said Dorothea, and in spite of all she could do tears trickled slowly down and made white channels on her still charcoaled face.

  “We ought to have had a snake for luck,” said Titty. “Like the real charcoal-burners.”

  “We ought to have asked Slater Bob how to do it,” said Susan.

  “We couldn’t,” said Nancy, almost crossly. “Do be sensible. Nice and useful it would have been … giving away secrets when he and Squashy were seeing each other almost every day.”

  Dick, wiping his spectacles, blinked as he looked from face to face. He looked at them but hardly saw them. He knew mistily that they were all miserable. He was miserable himself. They had counted on him and everything had gone wrong, but his mind was not on their misery nor on his own. Everything had gone wrong. But why? How had it gone wrong?

  “I must have made a mistake somewhere,” he said slowly. “The same thing’s happened that happened when I tried a little with the blowpipe.” He took a half-burnt stick and raked among the ashes. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I can’t have read the book right. But if it wasn’t hot enough nothing would have happened, and I don’t believe we could have got it too hot.”

  “I wonder why the crucible broke,” said John. “We couldn’t have done it dropping in the charcoal …”

  “Hotter in one place than another,” said Dick. “But it’s the gold going I can’t understand …”

  “It probably wasn’t gold at all,” said Susan. “We ought to have made sure.”

  Dick looked up suddenly.

  “There is one way we could,” he said. “Did we put all the gold dust in the crucible?”

  “All but that pinch we got first,” said Nancy.

  “But I put that in with the rest,” said Peggy. “I thought it was being forgotten.”

  “Then the whole lot’s gone,” said Nancy.

  “We could try it with aqua regia,” said Dick. “You know, a chemical test. The book says gold dissolves in aqua regia. If it does, we’d know for certain. Captain Flint’s got the acids and test-tubes. They’re in the glass cupboard.”

  Nancy suddenly thumped the breath out of him.

  “Good for you, Dick,” she said. “Are you sure you can do it?”

  “He’s got both the right acids,” said Dick.

  “But there’s no time,” said Susan. “If Mrs Tyson’s going to say we’ve got to leave.”

  “Come on,” said Nancy. “We’ll get some more right away. Even if we don’t have time to smelt an ingot, the main thing is to prove the stuff is gold.”

  But Susan put her foot down.

  “Not the able-seamen,” she said. “If they don’t have some proper sleep they’ll all be dead.” And Nancy, looking round at their tired faces, agreed that she was right.

  “Well, I’ll go anyway,” she said.

  “Come on,” said John.

  “We’ll all four go,” said Susan. “But not the able-seamen. They ought to get to bed and sleep till teatime.”

  “Dinner time,” said Roger.

  “But what about Dick?” said Nancy.

  Dick stared at her. “I’ll sleep when I come back,” he said. ‘It’s no good trying till I’ve made sure.”

  Susan looked not at him but at Dorothea. Dot was Dick’s sister and ought to know. Dorothea remembered her father sitting up all night over a scrap of papyrus covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics, and her mother making hot coffee for him but not even trying to get him to go to bed. What was the good of going to bed if people could not sleep for thinking?

  “He’ll be all right,” said Dorothea.

  “And the sooner he goes the better,” said Nancy. “Where’s that frying-pan? And we’d better take the bucket. The crushing mill’s in the mine. We’ll get a pinch of gold panned for him to take, and then get as much as we can done before he comes back. There’s charcoal left, and we’ll mend the bellows, and have another go at an ingot.”

  “But Mrs Tyson …” began Susan.

 
“She isn’t going all the way down to Beckfoot just to tell mother we’ve got to clear out,” said Nancy. “We’ve got one more day, anyhow. Come on.”

  “What about the pigeons?” said Peggy. “We’ve only got Sappho here.”

  Dick heard her … Pigeons? … Bring back pigeons? … What had happened to everybody? Why was it that Peggy sounded almost cheerful? He never guessed for a moment that he himself had given them a new hope and plucked them out of their despair. What was that? Peggy was talking again to him …

  “The basket goes on the handlebars all right. We must have Homer and Sophocles back. Sappho’s no good. Whatever happens we mustn’t have mother not getting a letter at the proper time and coming up here before Mrs Tyson’s calmed down.”

  “And we want a bit of leather for the bellows,” said Nancy. “My old purse. Mother’ll give it you. And good strong needles. And a box of tacks to nail the leather down when it’s mended. Right-hand drawer in the table in the hall. Come on, John. And what about you, Susan? The sooner we get the stuff for him, the sooner he can start.”

  “I’m coming. Go to bed, you three.”

  Even Susan sounded hopeful. Dick gave up trying to understand.

  *

  Ten minutes later the camp was silent.

  Roger, Titty and Dorothea slept in their tents, tired out.

  Nancy, John, Susan and Peggy were hurrying across the Topps to Golden Gulch.

  Dick strapped the pigeon-basket on the handlebars of Peggy’s bicycle, tucked his blowpipe into the handkerchief pocket of his shirt, put the red mineralogy book into his knapsack, pulled it out again, just to have another look at “Tests for gold,” left the dromedary to lean against a tree, and hurried off after the others.

  It was the hottest of a whole fortnight of hot days. The hot air over the Topps made everything seem to quiver in a haze. Away in the valley a motor-car was hooting through the woods. It roared up and along the Dundale road. Its noise stopped. Another of these picnic parties, Dick supposed. How awfully hot it was. Hullo. There was Squashy out on the Topps. On the far side of Golden Gulch. Very near it, too? And Dick thought of that other blowpipe, and wondered whether Squashy had been more successful than himself. And with that he was thinking again of the opening of their own furnace. What really had happened? What had he done wrong? Had the gold just trickled away into the earth? Or had there been no gold? He would find out now, for certain.

  He came to the gulch, and at the opening to the mine heard the thud, thud of the crushing mill inside.

  “You don’t want much panned, do you?” said Nancy, as he came in. “We’ve got a bit nearly all gold.”

  John had quarried out some splendid lumps of quartz, with yellow glinting in the cracks.

  The panning took longer than the crushing, but it was done at last, and the greeny gold sediment was poured into Dick’s handkerchief. He brought the four corners together, and John, with a bit of string, put a lashing round the handkerchief so that the precious dust was as safe as if it was in a bag. Dick took two or three small lumps of quartz and put them in his pocket.

  FORLORN HOPE

  “I might want to try with a raw bit,” he said.

  “We’ll get all this lot crushed before you get back,” said Nancy. “Good luck to you, Professor.”

  Dick was off.

  “Don’t forget the pigeons,” Peggy called after him.

  “Tacks,” shouted Nancy. “And the old purse for the patch.”

  He was out in the sunshine, racing across the narrow gulch, climbing the side of it, and hurrying across the Topps.

  He had gone perhaps a hundred yards when he stopped short.

  “Better write them down,” he said to himself. “I’m sure to forget them if I don’t.” He pulled out his pocket-book and wrote “Pigeons, Nails in drawer in hall, Nancy’s old purse.”

  Then he ran on, stumbling and hot, over the uneven ground.

  *

  Squashy Hat, with problems of his own, was coming nearer to the gulch. He had noticed that boy, hurrying through the bracken. He looked back at the white spots up on the hillside behind him, and along the line they pointed out across the Topps. He must have another look in daylight. If only those children were playing somewhere else …

  Susan, Nancy, Peggy, and John were in the mine.

  Dorothea, Titty, and Roger slept in their tents.

  Dick, his mind full of mineralogy, tiptoed through the camp, pushed off on Peggy’s dromedary, found his balance on it after one frantic wobble and, braking fairly hard, began the steep descent down the old track, through Tyson’s wood.

  The motor-car that had stopped at the side of the Dundale road was gone. The visitors who had rested there, eaten their sandwiches by the roadside and admired the view over the hills, were already a dozen miles away. A thin wisp of blue smoke curled in the grass where they had been. No one saw it. This time there were no watchers on the Great Wall.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  SMOKE OVER HIGH TOPPS

  THE camp dozed in the sweltering heat. Titty, Roger and Dorothea slept their well-earned sleep. Even Sappho, alone in the big cage, was silent, and slept upon her perch, her bill buried in the feathers of her breast.

  Hour after hour went by.

  There came a change in the air. The pigeon was the first to notice it, stirring uneasily in her cage. A smell of burning found its way into the dreams of the three sleeping miners. Roger patted the ground in his sleep. He was closing a leak in the earthy crust of the charcoal pudding, where the smoke was coming through. Dorothea dreamed of singeing a handkerchief in taking off a kettle. Titty was the first to be actually waked by the strange new smell. She rolled over and sniffed and sniffed again. Was it Susan’s cooking fire? Had the embers of the charcoal-burning somehow started again? As for the furnace, she remembered miserably how everything had gone wrong, and how the furnace had been pulled to pieces and the fire in it killed by anxious seekers for gold among its ashes. Susan must be making tea. Perhaps it was already late. How long had she slept? Titty did not know. Perhaps it was already next day.

  “Susan,” said Titty quietly, so as not to wake the others. “Is he back? Is it gold after all?”

  There was no answer.

  Instead there was the whirr of wings overhead and the startled cry of frightened grouse … “Go back. Go back. Go back!” Several times during the last ten days the prospectors had put up grouse from among the heather, and Titty herself had once all but fallen backwards when an old cock grouse whirred up from under her feet with that sudden, loud, disturbing cry.

  Why didn’t Susan answer? Or was it one of the others at the fire? Titty sat up and flung herself round so that she could see out into the camp. There was no one there. The camp-fire, damped down by Susan, was dozing peaceably under its clods, from which little thin wisps of smoke were rising. All that smell of smoke could not be coming from there. It was a different smell, too. The ashes and ruins of the furnace were not smouldering. Nor were the remains of the charcoal. But how strong that smell was. And there was something funny about the camp. For the first time in daylight since they had been there, things were not casting shadows. No pattern of dappled leaves was dancing over the pale gold canvas of the tents. Something had happened to the sun.

  More grouse whirred overhead.

  Titty crawled out of the tent. On all fours at the mouth of it she sniffed again, and listened. A smell of burning, but not quite like the smell of wood smoke. And what was that noise? Sharp, sudden crackling. And the haze above the trees?

  “Roger … Dot … Get up … Get up at once.”

  She reached into Roger’s tent, caught him by a foot and pulled him out. Dorothea’s face, startled, questioning, showed that she was at least awake.

  “Come out,” said Titty. “It’s … At least I think it is. There’s a fire somewhere …”

  “Where?” said Roger. “Anyway, you shouldn’t pull me out like that … It’s my foot …” But Titty was gone.

 
“There really is a fire,” said Dorothea.

  Titty ran out of the camp by the little path that led to the well and so to the hedgehog’s bramble thicket and the narrow gully that made a pathway for them up the Great Wall. If there was a fire someone ought to tell the others at once. They would know what to do. That crackling was quite near. And she knew now that the haze overhead was smoke. She raced up the gully.

  A huge wall of smoke lay across High Topps. Dimly, above it she saw the summit of Kanchenjunga. Along the foot of it was a line of crackling flames, now thin and broken, now suddenly leaping upwards like the tossed crest of a wave. Everything beyond it, until, far away, the top of the mountain climbed into the sky, was hidden by the rolling smoke. Somewhere over there was the gulch, but Titty knew at once that it was no use trying to get there. It never came into her head that the elders might be themselves in danger. They were cut off from the camp by this wall of smoke and the fire that made it. It would take them a long time to come to the rescue. Meanwhile she had to do the best she could. What would Susan be doing if she were here? Or John? And anyway, what was there to be done? Minute after minute passed and she still stood there looking at the smoke and the line of fire along the foot of it.

  Dorothea and Roger climbed up and stood beside her.

  “Golly,” said Roger. “Mrs Tyson’ll be saying ‘I told you so’.”

  “Dick’ll be safe at Beckfoot by now, won’t he?” said Dorothea.