The Bobbsey Twins Megapack

by Laura Lee Hope

  THE BOBBSEY TWINS ON THE DEEP BLUE SEA

  CHAPTER I

  On the Raft

  “Flossie! Flossie! Look at me! I’m having a steamboat ride! Oh, look!”

  “I am looking, Freddie Bobbsey!”

  “No, you’re not! You’re playing with your doll! Look at me splash, Flossie!”

  A little boy with blue eyes and light, curling hair was standing on a raft in the middle of a shallow pond of water left in a green meadow after a heavy rain. In his hand he held a long pole with which he was beating the water, making a shower of drops that sparkled in the sun.

  On the shore of the pond, not far away, and sitting under an apple tree, was a little girl with the same sort of light hair and blue eyes as those which made the little boy such a pretty picture. Both children were fat and chubby, and you would have needed but one look to tell that they were twins.

  “Now I’m going to sail away across the ocean!” cried Freddie Bobbsey, the little boy on the raft, which he and his sister Flossie had made that morning by piling a lot of old boards and fence rails together. “Don’t you want to sail across the ocean, Flossie?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll fall off!” answered Flossie, who was holding her doll off at arm’s length to see how pretty her new blue dress looked. “I might fall in the water and get my feet wet.”

  “Take off your shoes and stockings like I did, Flossie,” said the little boy.

  “Is it very deep?” Flossie wanted to know, as she laid aside her doll. After all she could play with her doll any day, but it was not always that she could have a ride on a raft with Freddie.

  “No,” answered the little blue-eyed boy. “It isn’t deep at all. That is, I don’t guess it is, but I didn’t fall in yet.”

  “I don’t want to fall in,” said Flossie.

  “Well, I won’t let you,” promised her brother, though how he was going to manage that he did not say. “I’ll come back and get you on the steamboat,” he went on, “and then I’ll give you a ride all across the ocean,” and he began pushing the raft, which he pretended was a steamboat, back toward the shore where his sister sat.

  Flossie was now taking off her shoes and stockings, which Freddie had done before he got on the raft; and it was a good thing, too, for the water splashed up over it as far as his ankles, and his shoes would surely have been wet had he kept them on.

  “Whoa, there! Stop!” cried Flossie, as she came down to the edge of the pond, after having placed her doll, in its new blue dress, safely in the shade under a big burdock plant. “Whoa, there, steamboat! Whoa!”

  “You mustn’t say ‘whoa’ to a boat!” objected Freddie, as he pushed the raft close to the bank, so his sister could get on. “You only say ‘whoa’ to a horse or a pony.”

  “Can’t you say it to a goat?” demanded Flossie.

  “Yes, maybe you could say it to a goat,” Freddie agreed, after thinking about it for a little while. “But you can’t say it to a boat.”

  “Well, I wanted you to stop, so you wouldn’t bump into the shore,” said the little girl. “That’s why I said ‘whoa.’”

  “But you mustn’t say it to a boat, and this raft is the same as a boat,” insisted Freddie.

  “What must I say, then, when I want it to stop?”

  Freddie thought about this for a moment or two while he paddled his bare foot in the water. Then he said:

  “Well, you could say ‘Halt!’ maybe.”

  “Pooh! ‘Halt’ is what you say to soldiers,” declared Flossie. “We said that when we had a snow fort, and played have a snowball fight in the winter. ‘Halt’ is only for soldiers.”

  “Oh, well, come on and have a ride,” went on Freddie. “I forget what you say when you want a boat to stop.”

  “Oh, I know!” cried Flossie, clapping her hands.

  “What?”

  “You just blow a whistle. You don’t say anything. You just go ‘Toot! Toot!’ and the boat stops.”

  “All right,” agreed Freddie, glad that this part was settled. “When you want this boat to stop, you just whistle.”

  “I will,” said Flossie. Then she stepped on the edge of the raft nearest the shore. The boards and rails tilted to one side. “Oh! Oh!” screamed the little girl. “It’s sinking!”

  “No it isn’t,” Freddie said. “It always does that when you first get on. Come on out in the middle and it will be all right.”

  “But it feels so—so funny on my toes!” said Flossie, with a little shiver. “It’s tickly like.”

  “That’s the way it was with me at first,” Freddie answered. “But I like it now.”

  Flossie wiggled her little pink toes in the water that washed up over the top of the raft, and then she said:

  “Well, I—I guess I like it too, now. But it felt sort of—sort of—squiggily at first.”

  “Squiggily” was a word Flossie and Freddie sometimes used when they didn’t know else to say.

  The little girl moved over to the middle of the raft and Freddie began to push it out from shore. The rain-water pond was quite a large one, and was deep in places, but the children did not know this. When they were both in the center of the raft the water came only a little way over their feet. Indeed there were so many boards, planks and rails in the make-believe steamboat that it would easily have held more than the two smaller Bobbsey twins. For there was a double set of twins, as I shall very soon tell you.

  “Isn’t this nice?” asked Freddie, as he pushed the pretend boat farther out toward the middle of the pond.

  “Awful nice—I like it,” said Flossie. “I’m glad I helped you make this raft.”

  “It’s a steamboat,” said Freddie. “It isn’t a raft.”

  “Well, steamboat, then,” agreed Flossie. Then she suddenly went:

  “Toot! Toot!”

  “Here! what you blowin’ the whistle now for?” asked Freddie. “We don’t want to stop here, right in the middle of the ocean.”

  “I—I was only just trying my whistle to see if it would toot,” explained the little girl. “I don’t want to stop now.”

  Flossie walked around the middle of the raft, making the water splash with her bare feet, and Freddie kept on pushing it farther and farther from shore. Yet Flossie was not afraid. Perhaps she felt that Freddie would take care of her.

  The little Bobbsey twins were having lots of fun, pretending they were on a steamboat, when they heard some one shouting to them from the shore.

  “Hi there! Come and get us!” someone was calling to them.

  “Who is it?” asked Freddie.

  “It’s Bert; and Nan is with him,” answered Flossie, as she saw a larger boy and girl standing on the bank, near the tree under which she had left her doll. “I guess they want a ride. Is the raft big enough for them too, Freddie?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” he answered. “You stop the steamboat, Flossie—and stop calling it a raft—and I’ll go back and get them. We’ll pretend they’re passengers. Stop the boat!”

  “How can I stop the boat?” the little girl demanded.

  “Toot the whistle! Toot the whistle!” answered her brother. “Don’t you ’member, Flossie Bobbsey?”

  “Oh,” said Flossie. Then she went on:

  “Toot! Toot!”

  “Toot! Toot!” answered Freddie. He began pushing the other way on the pole and the raft started back toward the shore they had left.

  “What are you doing?” asked Bert Bobbsey, as the mass of boards and rails came closer to him. “What are you two playing?”

  “Steamboat,” Freddie answered. “If you want us to stop for you, why, you’ve got to toot.”

  “Toot what?” asked Bert.

  “Toot your whistle,” Freddie replied. “This is a regular steamboat. Toot if you want me to stop.”

  He kept on pushing with the pole until Bert, with a laugh, made the tooting sound as Flossie had done. Then Freddie let the raft stop near his older brother and sister.

  “Oh, Bert!” exclaim
ed Nan Bobbsey, “are you going to get on?”

  “Sure I am,” he answered, as he began taking off his shoes and stockings. “It’s big enough for the four of us. Where’d you get it, Freddie?”

  “It was partly made—I guess some of the boys from town must have started it. Flossie and I put more boards and rails on it, and we’re having a ride.”

  “I should say you were!” laughed Nan.

  “Come on,” said Bert to his older sister, as he tossed his shoes over to where Flossie’s and Freddie’s were set on a flat stone. “I’ll help you push, Freddie.”

  Nan, who, like Bert, had dark hair and brown eyes, began to take off her shoes and stockings, and soon all four of them were on the raft—or steamboat, as Freddie called it.

  Now you have met the two sets of the Bobbsey twins—two pairs of them as it were. Flossie and Freddie, the light-haired and blue-eyed ones, were the younger set, and Bert and Nan, whose hair was a dark brown, matching their eyes, were the older.

  “This is a dandy raft—I mean steamboat,” said Bert, quickly changing the word as he saw Freddie looking at him. “It holds the four of us easy.”

  Indeed the mass of boards, planks and rails from the fence did not sink very deep in the water even with all the Bobbsey twins on it. Of course, if they had worn shoes and stockings they would have been wet, for now the water came up over the ankles of all of them. But it was a warm summer day, and going barefoot especially while wading in the pond, was fun.

  Bert and Freddie pushed the raft about with long poles, and Flossie and Nan stood together in the middle watching the boys and making believe they were passengers taking a voyage across the ocean.

  Back and forth across the pond went the raft-steamboat when, all of a sudden, it stopped with a jerk in the middle of the stretch of water.

  “Oh!” cried Flossie, catching hold of Nan to keep herself from falling. “Oh, what’s the matter?”

  “Are we sinking?” asked Nan.

  “No, we’re only stuck in the mud,” Bert answered. “You just stay there, Flossie and Nan, and you, too, Freddie, and I’ll jump off and push the boat out of the mud. It’s just stuck, that’s all.”

  “Oh, don’t jump in—it’s deep!” cried Nan.

  But she was too late. Bert, quickly rolling his trousers up as far as they would go, had leaped off the raft, making a big splash of water.

  CHAPTER II

  To the Rescue

  “Bert! Bert! You’ll be drowned!” cried Flossie, as she clung to Nan in the middle of the raft. “Come back, you’ll be drowned!”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” Bert answered, for he felt himself quite a big boy beside Freddie.

  “Are you sure, Bert, it isn’t too deep?” asked Nan.

  “Look! It doesn’t come up to my knees, hardly,” Bert said, as he waded around to the side of the raft, having jumped off one end to give it a push to get it loose from the bank of mud on which it had run aground. And, really, the water was not very deep where Bert had leaped in.

  Some water had splashed on his short trousers, but he did not mind that, as they were the old ones his mother made him put on in which to play.

  “Maybe we can get loose without your pushing us,” said Freddie, as he moved about on the raft, tilting it a little, first this way and then the other. Once before that day, when on the “boat” alone, it had become stuck on a hidden bank of mud, and the little twin had managed to get it loose himself.

  “No, I guess it’s stuck fast,” Bert said, as he pushed on the mass of boards without being able to send them adrift. “I’ll have to shove good and hard, and maybe you’ll have to get in here and help me, Freddie.”

  “Oh, yes, I can do that!” the little fellow said. “I’ll come and help you now, Bert.”

  “No, you mustn’t,” ordered Nan, who felt that she had to be a little mother to the smaller twins. “Don’t go!”

  “Why not?” Freddie wanted to know.

  “Because it’s too deep for you,” answered Nan. “The water is only up to Bert’s knees, but it will be over yours, and you’ll get your clothes all wet. You stay here!”

  “But I want to help Bert push the steamboat loose!”

  “I guess I can do it alone,” Bert said. “Wait until I get around to the front end. I’ll push it off backward.”

  He waded around the raft, which it really was, though the Bobbsey twins pretended it was a steamboat, and then, reaching the front, or what would be the bow if the raft had really been a boat, Bert got ready to push.

  “Push, Bert!” yelled Freddie.

  But a strange thing happened.

  Suddenly an odd look came over Bert’s face. He made a quick grab for the side of the raft and then he sank down so that the water came over his knees, wetting his trousers.

  “Oh, Bert! what’s the matter?” cried Nan.

  “I—I’m sinking in the mud!” gasped Bert. “Oh, I can’t get my feet loose! I’m stuck! Maybe I’m in a quicksand and I’ll never get loose! Holler for somebody! Holler loud!”

  And the other three Bobbsey twins “hollered,” as loudly as they could.

  “Mother! Mother!” cried Nan.

  “Come and get Bert!” added Freddie.

  “Oh, Dinah! Dinah!” screamed Flossie, for the fat, good-natured colored cook had so often rescued Flossie that the little girl thought she would be the very best person, now, to come to Bert’s aid.

  “Oh, I’m sinking away down deep!” cried the brown-eyed boy, as he tried to lift first one foot and then the other. But they were both stuck in the mud under the water, and Bert, afraid of sinking so deep that he would never get out, clung to the side of the raft with all his might.

  “Oh, you’re making us sink. You’re making us sink!” screamed Nan. Indeed, the raft was tipping to one side and the other children had all they could do to keep from sliding into the pond.

  “Oh, somebody come and help me!” called Bert.

  And then a welcome voice answered:

  “I’m coming! I’m coming!”

  So, while some one is coming to the rescue, I will take just a few moments to tell my new readers something about the children who are to have adventures in this story.

  Those of you who have read the other books of the series will remember that in the first volume, called “The Bobbsey Twins,” I told you of Flossie and Freddie, and Bert and Nan Bobbsey, who lived with their father and mother in the eastern city of Lakeport, near Lake Metoka. Mr. Richard Bobbsey owned a large lumberyard, where the children were wont often to play. As I have mentioned, Flossie and Freddie, with their light hair and blue eyes, were one set of twins—the younger—while Nan and Bert, who were just the opposite, being dark, were the older twins.

  The children had many good times, about some of which I have told you in the first book. Dinah Johnson, the fat, jolly cook, always saw to it that the twins had plenty to eat, and her husband, Sam, who worked about the place, made many a toy for the children, or mended those they broke. Almost as a part of the family, as it were, I might mention Snap, the trick dog, and Snoop, the cat. The children were very fond of these pets.

  After having had much fun, as related in my first book, the Bobbsey twins went to the country, where Uncle Daniel Bobbsey had a big farm at Meadow Brook. Later, as you will find in the third volume, they went to visit Uncle William Minturn at the seashore.

  Of course, along with their good times, the children had to go to school, and you will find one of the books telling what they did there, and the fun they had. From school the Bobbsey twins went to Snow Lodge, and then they spent some time on a houseboat and later again went to Meadow Brook for a jolly stay in the woods and fields near the farm.

  “And now suppose we stay at home for a while,” Mr. Bobbsey had said, after coming back from Meadow Brook.

  At first the twins thought they wouldn’t like this very much, but they did, and they had as much fun and almost as many adventures as before. After that they spent some time in a great city
and then they got ready for some wonderful adventures on Blueberry Island.

  Those adventures you will find told about in the book just before this one you are now reading. The twins spent the summer on the island, and many things happened to them, to their goat and dog, and to an odd boy. Freddie lost some of his “go-around” bugs, and there is something in the book about a cave,—but I know you would rather read it for yourself than have me tell you here.

  Now to get back to the children on the raft, or rather, to Flossie, Freddie and Nan, who are on that, while Bert is in the water, and stuck in the mud.

  “Oh, come quick! Come quick!” he cried. “I can’t get loose!”

  “I’m coming!” answered the voice, and it was that of Mrs. Bobbsey. She had been in the kitchen, telling Dinah what to get for dinner, when she heard the children shouting from down in the meadow, where the big pond of rain water was.

  “I hope none of them has fallen in!” said Mrs. Bobbsey as she ran out of the door, after hearing Bert’s shout.

  “Good land ob massy! I hopes so mahse’f!” gasped fat Dinah, and she, too, started for the pond. But, as she was very fat, she could not run as fast as could Mrs. Bobbsey. “I ’clare to goodness I hopes none ob ’em has falled in de watah!” murmured Dinah. “Dat’s whut I hopes!”

  Mrs. Bobbsey reached the edge of the pond. She saw three of the twins on the raft. For the moment she could not see Bert.

  “Where is Bert?” she cried.

  “Here I am, Mother!” he answered.

  Then Mrs. Bobbsey saw him standing in the water, which was now well over his knees. He was holding to the edge of the raft.

  “Oh, Bert Bobbsey!” his mother called. “What are you doing there? Come right out this instant! Why, you are all wet! Oh, my dear!”

  “I can’t come out, Mother,” said Bert, who was not so frightened, now that he saw help at hand.

  “You can’t come out? Why not?”

  “’Cause I’m stuck in the mud—or maybe it’s quicksand. I’m sinking in the quicksand. Or I would sink if I didn’t keep hold of the raft. I dassn’t let go!”

  “Oh, my!” cried Mrs. Bobbsey. “What shall I do?”

  “Can’t you pull him out?” asked Nan. “We tried, but we can’t.”