The Ghost of Opalina

by Peggy Bacon

  “I ask you, what are you scamps adoin’?” the face hissed again.

  “We’re playing in our boat,” Jim said defensively.

  “We’re pirates,” said Phoebe, hugging her doll to her chest.

  The face chuckled nastily. “Pirates you are! Pirates, and no mistake! For it ain’t your boat! It’s mine!”

  The children were stunned. Immediately Jim realized their error, but Phoebe protested: “This rowboat is so ours!”

  “It is, is it? Ho, ho! We’ll see about that!”

  Emerging from the bushes, the ugly fellow took a step forward which brought him alongside the boat. He had a pair of oars tucked under one arm. In the other hand he brandished a fishing rod.

  “Git out o’ there!” The voice was stealthy, dangerous. “Git out, I’m tellin’ yer, you thievin’ brats!”

  Jim yanked the flagpole from the iron ring, thrust it at Phoebe, and snatched up the oars. Scrambling out of the boat, the children fled.

  They pelted through the grove and up the hill, Phoebe close on Jim’s heels. “But it’s our boat!” she wailed. “He has no right to drive us out when it’s ours!”

  “Oh, Phoebe! It probably is his boat…”

  Phoebe burst into tears of disappointment. “It’s got to be ours! It can’t belong to him!”

  Jim offered no comfort. As they neared the house, he admonished her sternly: “If you’ve got to cry, stop snuffling and blubbering or Nurse will hear you and come popping out. We’ve got to change our clothes before she catches us. I’m leaving the oars here in the rhododendrons so she won’t see us putting them in the shed.”

  Though Annie couldn’t pursue them across country, she was a hard person to elude indoors, and especially alert at mealtimes. Now the dinner hour was approaching and she was watching for the youngsters from an upper window. When they scuttled out from behind the shrubbery, she was horrified by their appearance.

  Jim was pale, Phoebe was sobbing, and both were bandaged and seemed to be covered with blood. Panting from fright and fat, Annie hurried downstairs and pounced upon them as they entered the door.

  “My chicks!” she screamed, trapping them in her arms. “Whatever have you done to your precious limbs? Don’t fret, Jim, and don’t you weep, my poppet! Nurse will mend yer, Nurse will fix you up!”

  With trembling fingers, she swiftly unwound a bandage on Phoebe’s arm, and when the last coil fell off, she stared, she tightened her lips, her face grew red and her sympathy turned to wrath. She refused to listen to any explanations.

  “And what sort of deviltry will yer be dreamin’ up next? Decoratin’ yerselves like bleedin’ corpses to give me such a turn! If me eyes do not deceive me, you went and took me lovely linen bandaging that I keep for them with honest injuries!”

  Catching sight of the Jolly Roger on the floor, Annie broke out anew:

  “And there’s a fine embroidered damask towel murdered to make this wicked-looking banner! And yer sainted father’s cane stuck full o’ nails!” With that, she hustled the children off to bed “without any supper,” which was the family formula for punishment — a punishment that gave her a lot of trouble.

  As usual, a couple of hours later, Annie began to worry for fear such a long fast might stunt the children’s growth; so she coaxed Cook to heat up the dinner again, and staggered up the stairs twice in succession, carrying them each a loaded tray.

  Delicious food is often a consolation in times of stress, but this evening it failed to banish the children’s depression. The beautiful little pink and green rowboat was not, as they had thought, a gift from Heaven in answer to their fervent hopes and prayers. With strange injustice on the part of the Deity, it had been bestowed on that mean character, the man with the purple nose.

  “May I please have Blue Belle, Nurse?” Phoebe asked plaintively, when Annie returned to take away the trays.

  The old woman’s mood had softened. She handed Phoebe the doll, kissed the child good night and opened the door connecting the children’s rooms…“To keep the little divils from gettin’ lonesome,” she muttered. Wishing them both sweet dreams, she stacked the empty dishes on one tray, slapped the trays together and departed.

  It was late twilight. The sky was overcast. The nesting birds stopped twittering. Off in the forest, whippoorwills were halling each other lugubriously. Phoebe was somewhat comforted at having Blue Belle beside her on the pillow. The doll was no longer the seasick cabin boy; she didn’t need the muffler anymore. As Phoebe pulled it off, a thought struck her: The boat belonged to the man with the purple nose, so everything in it was his. Sooner or later, he would be sure to miss the muffler, and he would know that the “thievin’ brats” were to blame.

  Suppose he came in the middle of the night and climbed in the window looking for his muffler!

  With a shudder, Phoebe sat up and stared at the window…a pallid oblong, framed by the murky room.

  The man needn’t wait till the middle of the night. It was a dark evening, growing darker. At this moment, he might be creeping up the hill, slipping like a shadow through the shrubbery!

  Phoebe could see him climbing the stout wisteria vine covering this end of the house. She heard the rustle of leaves, the heavy breathing, the creaking of the twisted ropelike stems. He would crawl upward, stealthy as a panther! Little by little, his hideous blackberry eyes and purple nose would rise above the windowsill…slowly, slowly the rest of him would follow…a spidery ink blot spreading across the sky! Then he would hoist himself into the room hissing “You thievin’ brat” in that dreadful hoarse whisper!

  The vision was so real it became unbearable.

  “Jim,” Phoebe whined, then more loudly: “Jim!”

  Her brother, who had been dropping off to sleep, heard her and staggered in, rubbing his eyes. When she told him about the muffler he was cross.

  “It all comes of your bringing Blue Belle along! Now we’ll have to take the muffler back, and I hate to go anywhere near that awful fellow. If we don’t give it back right away, he’ll be coming to the house saying we stole it, and Nurse will have a fit.”

  But with Jim in the room, Phoebe’s courage revived and she took a more hopeful view. “Maybe the man won’t notice that the muffler is gone.”

  “And maybe he will!” Jim retorted with scorn.

  “He didn’t notice I’d wrapped it around Blue Belle. Maybe he doesn’t want it anyway.”

  “I bet he does though.” Jim picked up the muffler and fingered it. “It’s wonderfully soft, like that shawl Father brought Mother from India. Nobody cares to lose a thing like this. Here’s a label with a name on it stitched to one corner. Let’s see who he is.”

  There were a tinderbox and a candlestick on Phoebe’s bedside table. Jim lit the candle, and together the children inspected the scrap of tape bearing a tiny inscription handwritten in ink: “Reverend John Hawley,” they read.

  “That’s our clergyman!” Phoebe exclaimed in wonder. “The muffler is his and not the horrid man’s! Goody! Tomorrow we’ll take it to Dr. Hawley. We’ll tell him how we found it and he’ll be pleased, and then they will give us some cake.”

  “Wait a minute, Phoebe! Stop chattering and let me think. Listen!...Where exactly was this thing?”

  “The muffler? Under the seat in the stern. It opens.”

  “I know. But whereabouts under the seat? Did you see it when you looked in? Was it in plain view?”

  “Oh, no! There was a fishing reel and some rope. I stuck my head down inside to look around and I saw something blue tucked off in one corner, so I pulled it out. Why?”

  “This is why,” Jim answered slowly. “I think the man may not have known it was there. You know what I think? I think that’s Dr. Hawley’s boat...the one he was saying had disappeared mysteriously...and I bet the man with the purple nose stole it!”

  Phoebe’s eyes grew round. Convinced of the truth, she reflected with awe on the altered situation. Her face cleared. “When we take Dr. Hawley his muffler, we�
��ll tell him where his rowboat is, so he can come and get it.”

  Such an arrangement was too tame for Jim. “That’s no fun!” he cried. “Let’s surprise him. We’ll take the rowboat back to him ourselves!”

  “We can’t! The man with the purple nose won’t let us!”

  “Let us! Of course he won’t! We’ll get it sometime when he isn’t looking.”

  “But, Jim! How can we tell when he isn’t looking?”

  “We’ll reconnoiter,” said her brother airily.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, hiding and peeking...watching for a chance…crawling on our stomachs through the long grass.”

  This picture didn’t appeal to Phoebe as much as it did to Jim. “He hides and peeks himself. Don’t you remember how he popped out of the bushes?”

  “Yes, I know. But he can’t be watching the boat every second of the time. He’s got to eat and sleep. It would be fine if we could swipe the boat later on tonight.”

  Phoebe quailed at the thought.

  “But I don’t believe I’d be able to find my way downstream in the dark,” Jim continued.

  “Oh, no!” Phoebe eagerly agreed.

  “So we’ll have to put off going till early tomorrow,” Jim concluded, and Phoebe sighed with relief.

  Next morning the birds had barely begun to chirp when Jim tiptoed into Phoebe’s room and shook her shoulder gently. “Wake up,” he whispered, as she roused herself. “If we go now, maybe we can manage to row away while the man is still asleep.”

  “We don’t know where he lives or when he gets up,” Phoebe grumbled. “And Nurse will be furious if we go without breakfast.”

  “She needn’t know. It’s not yet five o’clock. We can get to Buttervale and back again before Cook rings the breakfast bell at eight. We’ll pretend we’re explorers escaping from cannibals.”

  “It won’t be pretending,” Phoebe said gloomily. “I think the man with the purple nose is an ogre, and ogres eat people, the same as cannibals.”

  “When things are dangerous they’re much more fun,” Jim declared with gusto. “And Phoebe, don’t you dare bring your doll this time,” he added as he hurried back to his room.

  Previously, Phoebe had been happy to join in any adventure that Jim suggested. Even now, although she felt frightened, she was unwilling to be left behind. She dressed and stuffed the muffler in her pocket. In a short time, the children had picked up the oars and were on their way to the stream.

  At the water’s edge, they dropped the oars in some ferns, proceeding on their hands and knees through the reeds that bordered the bank, till they reached the clump of willows. Squinting through the slits between the reeds, they saw to their dismay that the boat was gone.

  “Oh, dear! Whatever has he done with it?” Phoebe moaned, as they both got to their feet and looked about them.

  On either side, the woods sloped down to the water. Fringed with reeds and wild flowers, overhung with willow trees and elderberry bushes, the deep stream meandered out of sight.

  “After we found the boat, I guess he decided he’d better hide it somewhere else,” Jim surmised. “If we go farther upstream, maybe we’ll find it.” They moved ahead cautiously. Sure enough, around the next bend, they caught sight of the boat, a short distance away.

  It wasn’t tied up. It was out in midstream, and the man with the purple nose was sitting in it with his back to them. The oars were at rest, the fishing rod lay at his side and he was busy cleaning the fish he had caught. As the children watched from behind the screen of reeds, he rinsed the fish in the stream, took up the oars and swiveled the boat around. The children ducked out of sight and held their breath, while a few oar strokes brought the boat to shore.

  Not daring to raise their heads, Phoebe and Jim huddled together, listening intently. They heard the man clamber out of the boat. The bottom of the boat made a scraping sound as he drew it into the shallows; a bough rustled as he knotted the painter; the oars clattered as he picked them up; there was a squelch of mud, a twig snapped; finally the lumbering clump of footsteps dwindled away in the swish of long grass, followed by the gentle hum of summer, the simmering of insects, the murmur of leaves, the honk of a frog, the brief call of a bird.

  The children stood up again. Not far off, the pink and green rowboat was wedged in a sandy hollow underneath the bank. There was no sign of the man.

  “Which way do you think he went?” Phoebe asked.

  “I wish I knew,” said Jim.

  “Shall we take the boat now?”

  “Before we do, I’d like to know how far away he’s gone.”

  Jim scanned the overlapping treetops that rose to meet the sky, and at that moment a tiny thread of smoke began to curl upward from the heart of the dense foliage.

  “Do you see that?” he asked excitedly. “That’s where he is, up there in Father’s wood! He’s a poacher! He’s cooking his fish in the log cabin that the woodcutter goes to live in every fall. Here’s our chance!”

  The children hurried back to the clump of ferns where they had left the oars, returned with them and jumped into the boat. Phoebe loosened the painter, Jim prodded the boat from shore, slipped the oars into place and headed downstream. But working in haste, they made considerable noise. Before they had gone five yards, the underbrush crackled and their enemy hove into view.

  Running along the bank in hot pursuit, he glared and bared his teeth and shook his fist. “Git out o’ that boat, you water rats!” he snarled.

  The little boat was light and easy to handle. The gentle current bore them along smoothly and Jim rowed hard. They seemed to be moving fast. But fast as they went, the man kept up with them, dodging around the bushes and reappearing, cursing, scowling like a Chinese demon and threatening to wring their necks.

  Phoebe hunched in the stern, stiff with fright. Jim rowed as rapidly as possible and yet, to the children’s terror, they couldn’t get rid of their nightmarish companion.

  As the woods and meadows of Heatherfield dropped behind them, the stream changed. From a silky, gliding waterway, it became wider, shallower and more turbulent. Broad ledges of rock divided it. Among them the torrent gushed and wriggled downhill. Jim had to dodge the rocks, select the deep channels and avoid running aground. Dipping and whirling to right and left in the rapids, he managed to steer the rowboat out of danger to meet an even more alarming test.

  The stream had suddenly narrowed to a bottleneck between two boulders, through which the water surged. If the man got there first, he could reach down from above and grab the side of the boat as it passed below.

  The fellow was still abreast of them, puffing, perspiring and swearing under his breath. He too had seen his opportunity and quickened his pace.

  Jim put forth all his strength and the suction of water helped to carry them into the narrow passage, when a roar came from overhead and a hairy hand descended toward the boat. The children cowered, the hand clutched empty air, as the boat whipped by and the current shot them out into a deep round pool.

  This was the swimming hole used by the youngsters of Buttervale. Jim knew that it lay near the mouth of the stream, so the river was not far off.

  The boy, exhausted, rested on his oars while the boat drifted toward the pool’s outlet. But the man had turned and was coming after them, stalking them around the rim of the swimming hole, aiming to catch them where the stream ran out. Jim seized the oars, the man broke into a run, but, losing his footing on the slimy bank, he fell in the water, headfirst.

  The man touched bottom and came to the surface gurgling. Where he stood, the water was up to his neck. His red and purple head appeared to be floating, like some grotesque, exotic water lily.

  Phoebe giggled nervously. Jim guffawed. The man choked, coughed and spluttered.

  “I’ll get you yet,” he croaked. “You rascally thieves!”

  “Thief yourself!” Jim shouted. “You stole this boat! It belongs to the Reverend John Hawley of Buttervale and we’re taking it back t
o him.”

  A look of fear now mingled with the rage on the disembodied face. As speedily as water and mud permitted, the man with the purple nose waded out, scrambled up the bank and slopped away, to the children’s joy, in the opposite direction.

  The Hawleys were about to sit down to breakfast in the arbor back of the house overlooking the river, when Phoebe and Jim, each carrying an oar, came up the path from the landing.

  Though somewhat astonished at such an early visit, the clergyman and his wife welcomed them warmly.

  “I see you have come by boat, as I suggested,” said Dr. Hawley.

  “Yes, sir, and here are your oars,” Jim replied. The children laid them on the lawn at his feet.

  “I didn’t expect you to return them so soon...and surely you need them to row your boat back home!”

  “No, sir. I guess we’ll be walking home through the wood. The boat isn’t ours after all. We think it’s yours. Will you please come down and see?”

  Mystified, the Hawleys accompanied the children to the dock where the boat was tied, and were overjoyed to see that it was theirs.

  “How thankful I am that we have it back again I” cried Mrs. Hawley. “We thought it was gone for good.”

  “But I never described it; how did you know it was ours?” asked Dr. Hawley.

  Phoebe drew the muffler from her pocket and waved it in the air triumphantly. “This was under the seat and it has your name on it,” she said as she handed it to the clergyman.

  “Wonders never cease!” exclaimed his wife. “I’m glad that’s found...I gave it to him for Christmas.”

  “I suspect that you children have a story to tell which my wife and I would very much like to hear,” said Dr. Hawley.

  “And with such an early start,” his wife put in, “I fancy you came away without your breakfast. Please stay and have it with us.”

  The children accepted the invitation with alacrity. They suddenly realized that they were hungry and they were delighted to discuss their adventures. At the table under the arbor, Phoebe and Jim recounted the events of yesterday and told of their perilous trip from Heatherfield, while their host and hostess listened attentively to all that they had to say.