Peter Duck

by Arthur Ransome

  “Let me have a go with the pick,” said Nancy at last. “We can’t count on finding the thing at once. We’re almost bound to be sleeping here again tonight. What about cutting a ridge-pole to make a bigger tent of it. It’ll take us at least a couple of days to dig even half the bit you’ve marked out.”

  “There’s something in that,” said Captain Flint, and he went so far as to get the saw and to start the cutting down of a tall young palm to make a ridge-pole. But he soon called John to carry on with that job, while he went back and had another hard go with the pick. Susan and Peggy had joined the diggers after washing up the breakfast mugs. They were using the wooden spades, and just as Captain Flint came back to the diggings Peggy had the bad luck to break a spade through putting too much beef into digging with it. She went on working, shovelling the sand out of a hole as well as she could with the broken end of the spade.

  Captain Flint watched for a while without stopping the steady swinging of his pick. Then he stopped.

  HARD AT WORK

  “This is no good,” he said. “What we need is stronger spades. The two I made aren’t worth digging with. It wasn’t your fault, Peggy. I don’t wonder it broke.”

  Just then the tall young palm came crashing down, and John, the woodcutter, came to ask what next. Captain Flint went to look at it, to see how much ought to be cut off the top of it. Near the edge of the forest, close to the palm that had been cut down, lay a much larger fallen tree. Captain Flint took the saw from Roger and set furiously to work sawing a flattish piece out of it. The others watched, wondering.

  “We simply must have a decent-sized spade,” he said, and in the end he had made one, all in one piece, very rough, but a good deal stronger than the one which Peggy had broken. But he had worn the saw very blunt, and kept wishing all the time that Peter Duck was there to help.

  “This wood’s as hard as iron,” he said, “and I never thought of bringing a file for sharpening the saw.”

  “What about finishing up the tent-pole,” said Nancy, “while the saw’s still got some cut in it?”

  “All right,” said Captain Flint. “This job’s going to be a longer one than I thought. Of course we may strike the bag any minute, but we may just as likely be digging for a week first.”

  So he finished cutting the ridge-pole, and carried it down to Duckhaven. Everybody stopped digging and came to help, while the new pole was set up between the rocks and the oars, and the oars were shifted farther from the rocks, so that they had a much bigger tent than the one they had rigged up in a hurry in the evening. John was very pleased to let Swallow have her mast again.

  It was just when Captain Flint had done his part of the tent-making, and was setting to work once more at the diggings, that Nancy let out the secret of the discovery made the day before.

  “What about a drink of water after all that?” she said, glancing along the beach to the north and waving a hand.

  “We must go slow on the water,” said Captain Flint. “I don’t want to waste time sailing round to fill the breaker, and it’s far too big a job to bring it overland full of water. I can hang on all right till dinner-time.”

  Titty slipped out from dodging along the edge of the trees. Roger was close behind. They both had tin mugs in their hands.

  “I say,” said Captain Flint, “I know it’s jolly thirsty work, but does Mate Susan know you’ve been at the water already?”

  “Just try it,” said Nancy. “Is it fit to drink?”

  Captain Flint took Roger’s mug and smelt it.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. “There can’t be. The barrel was only filled yesterday.”

  “This didn’t come out of the barrel,” said Titty.

  “Where did you get it from?”

  “It comes out of a rock,” said Nancy, “but it isn’t exactly a stream. It just disappears again.”

  “Well, it’s fresh water, anyhow,” said Captain Flint. “Good, too.” He finished off the mug. “Let’s have a look at the place. This looks like saving us a lot of trouble. I was really getting bothered about that water-barrel, with the lot of us coming thirsty to meals, and all this digging to do.”

  Nancy’s spring was hardly three hundred yards from Duckhaven, but it was little wonder that Peter Duck had not found it, even if it had been there sixty years before. A spur of high land ran down towards the sea. It was covered with trees, and it was not until you were in among the trees that you could see that there was a backbone of black rock under the foliage. Nancy, Titty, and Roger had noticed a great commotion of birds above these trees when they had walked this way along the shore after looking at the crabs in the old wreck. Now usually when the parrots and other birds were disturbed by anything, they rose up and flew away. But here as many birds seemed to be coming as going, and the explorers had pushed into the forest to see why. Guided by the birds they found, deep in ferns, a very small pool, at which the parrots were drinking. There was no stream from it. The water seemed to soak away into the sand. But they could see that a trickle of water was coming into it all the time out of a crack in the black rock high above it. It was easy to climb along the rock to the place where this trickle came out, and Nancy had caught some in the palm of her hand and tasted it, though she had not allowed her men to do the same, until Captain Flint had tried the water and said that it was all right.

  “It’s as good water as we’ve got on the other side,” said Captain Flint. “Well done, Nancy, and you two. We shan’t die of thirst, anyhow, but you’ll have to be careful to take it from up here, where it comes out, and not from the pool. There’ll be other things besides parrots drinking at that pool. Look there, now!”

  The others were climbing on the rock beside him, but now they peered down through the ferns into the tiny pool, about six feet below them. A green snake, mottled with black, was lying beside the pool with its head in the water. It lifted its head, then slipped into the pool, bathed there for a moment, swimming round, and then slipped quickly up out of the water and disappeared.

  “Safe enough if you always get your water from up here,” said Captain Flint, “but look where you’re going, and make a noise.”

  After that they went back to the digging. Looking at Nancy’s spring had been a bit of a holiday for everybody. They dug on now until it was time for dinner. It was very hot. The new wooden spade, though it looked as if it had been made by prehistoric man, was a good deal better than the one that Peggy had broken, but the two tin spades from Cowes were the only spades that were the slightest good at digging ground that had not first been loosened with the pick. So, after dinner, Captain Flint kept hard at it with the pick until the evening, and the others kept at it, too, working along, taking turns with the good spades and doing as well as they could with the others. But not one of the diggers found anything. Some of them began to doubt if there was really anything to dig for.

  “It may be just like the crabs,” said Peggy. “They seemed big to Mr Duck when he was a little boy, but you said yourself they probably grew a bit when he was telling the story. These crabs are nothing” (she picked one up that was sidling after a fallen bit of biscuit, and threw it away) “and the treasure may be just the same.”

  This was at the evening meal, when the trade wind had dropped and dusk was falling, and digging was over for the day. Captain Flint rolled over to look at his younger niece, and found that Susan was looking at him as if she, too, felt that he could have nothing to say to that.

  “Of course it may not be much,” he said unhappily.

  “It’s jolly good fun looking for it,” said John.

  “But what if it never was there at all?” said Peggy.

  “Or taken away long ago.”

  “Shiver my timbers!” said Nancy. “What’s all this? Here we are in a fine camp. Anybody can see that Black Jake did his digging in the wrong place. We’ve only been digging for one day and part of that was tent-making.”

  “We’re going to dig until we find it,” said T
itty.

  “What do you think, Roger?” asked Captain Flint.

  “I’m going to dig with Titty,” said Roger. “And so is Gibber.”

  “Then we’re bound to find it,” said Captain Flint. “Look here, you two mates,” he added, “we haven’t really given it half a show. The stuff’s here all right. None of the digging’s wasted. Every bit dug is so much that we needn’t dig again. It’s like mowing a field with a hare in it. The hare may jump up any minute, but, if he doesn’t, in the end there’ll be just a tiny patch of long grass and the hare’ll be sitting tight in the middle of it. Anyway, as soon as half of us want to give up, we’ll go back to the schooner.”

  When supper was over he nearly ruined the blade of his pocket-knife, trying to smooth the rough handle of the new spade. Then he lit his pipe and went off for a stroll in the dusk while the fireflies were dancing in the shadow under the trees and the diggers were settling down in their sleeping-bags in the improved and larger tent.

  “He’ll be most awfully sick if he doesn’t find it,” said Nancy, sitting up in her bag in the dark. “Not just because he wants it, but because he won’t like coming back without it after bringing us all this way.”

  “But if it isn’t here,” said Peggy.

  “If it isn’t, it isn’t. But it isn’t only Uncle Jim who thinks it is.”

  “And what if it’s nothing when we find it?”

  “What a galoot you are,” said Nancy. “Whatever it is, it’ll be something to have found. To put in the British Museum, perhaps, or some place like that. ‘Presented by the Captain and Crew of the Wild Cat Expedition to Crab Island.’ Like Roger’s pirate knife … We’ve simply got to help him to find it. He’s failed again and again. Finding just one thing like that would make him really happy.”

  “We’ve got a week’s food here,” said Susan. “We’ll dig until it’s done, anyway.”

  “We may just as well do that,” said Peggy. “Nancy’s probably right.”

  “We may find it tomorrow at the very first dig,” said Titty.

  “Nobody’s let me have a go with the pick,” said Roger. “It’s my turn to start with it in the morning.”

  Captain Flint came back from his prowl along the beach, still a little worried by the talk at supper. He killed a lot of invading crabs to get peace for the night while they were being eaten up by their cannibal friends. Then he lay down to sleep across the doorway of a tent which, though he did not know it, was once more crammed with determination and good will.

  *

  Next day the digging went on.

  Roger had first whack with the pick in the morning, but its point did not plunge deep into a bag of gold as he had thought it might, but only into sand, and not as far as it should have done if it was to be of any use. He had another whack or two, and then was glad to hand over the pick to Captain Flint and to take to the broken spade that suited him very well.

  The digging today was more regular and business-like. Yesterday everybody had kept on having good ideas and deciding that the right place must be under this tree or that, going straight there, and having a dig to see or even getting Captain Flint to come along and to see what happened when he used the pick. Today, by general agreement, people dug along lines carefully marked beforehand.

  “It stands to reason,” Captain Flint said, “that when those two scoundrels buried their bag under a young coconut tree, they had some way of their own for knowing that tree again.”

  “They probably blazed it,” said Titty, looking up at the tall trunks of the palms.

  “Sorry, Able-seaman, but that’s just what I think they wouldn’t do. A blazed tree all by itself would start anybody thinking. No. They probably chose some tree that didn’t need blazing. All they wanted was a tree they would be able to find in a year’s time, or two years’ time, or whenever it was they meant to come back.”

  “But all the young coconut trees are as like as belaying-pins,” said Roger. “Peter Duck said so. I heard him.”

  “That’s just the point,” said Captain Flint. “They’d have to choose a tree that they would recognise by something else … These rocks, for example. A tree in the middle of the forest would be no good to them. Too many others all round it. They’d choose one right on the edge. And there’s another thing, too. So would Peter Duck. Remember, he’d chosen the very same tree, and bolted up it out of the way of the crabs. He wouldn’t bolt farther than he needed. Everything shows that he chose a tree near where he was thrown up, and that they chose a tree they could tell again, on the edge of the forest. It might be the first tree north or south of where the rocks come down on the shore. It might be the second or the third one way or the other. But one thing is clear, and Peter Duck says the same … It must have been a tree very close to where we are standing.”

  “Sitting,” said Roger.

  “Shut up, Roger,” said Titty. “You may be sitting on the hoard at this very minute.”

  Roger got up in a hurry. Captain Flint went on talking.

  “The big tree I took for a mark coming in, is exactly above Duckhaven, where Mr Duck was washed up. That’s why I started there. We’ll go on digging both ways, beginning at that tree. We can’t miss it if we do the thing thoroughly.”

  He set up two sticks in the sand in front of the trees and scraped a rough furrow between them. “That marks out our claim. We shall find the stuff all right, if we dig under all the trees along that line.”

  “It’s a longish line,” said Susan.

  “Makes it all the surer that we shan’t miss the thing. It’s not as if we were Black Jake and digging in the wrong place to start with. We know we’re starting right, and that’s the main thing.”

  By evening of that day, all the ground between that scraped furrow and the trees at the edge of the forest looked like a bit of ploughed field. Stones dug up out of it had been laid aside and built by Roger into a row of little cairns. The digging went up to and behind the nearest trees. Nothing had been found, but before dark Captain Flint, working till the sweat poured off him, had cleared the whole of the ground round the trees that grew immediately behind these outer ones, to make ready for the next day’s digging.

  “You see,” he said, while they were sitting round the camp fire, having their supper, and battling with the crabs who were as bothersome as horseflies, “it never struck me this morning. The wind’s mostly easterly, and the shallows are on this side of the island. It may well be that in these sixty years the sea’s gone back a little, or piled up the sand, and the earth and the forest may be gaining on the shore. Perhaps all those trees at the very edge of the forest weren’t there sixty years ago, and we’ll find the stuff a little further back, where the edge of the forest used to be.”

  “Well, we’ve got lots of time,” said Nancy.

  Captain Flint looked hurriedly out over the darkening sea.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  THREATENING WEATHER

  DURING THE MORNING of the third day of the digging hopes were falling low. The cairns of stones along the edge of the ground already dug stood there as memorials of one disappointment after another. The clink of iron pick on buried stone had long ceased to bring everybody on the run expecting to see the treasure brought to light. Everybody had by now too often seen a lump of black stone tenderly dug out of the ground by hands that were nervous with fear lest they should damage something valuable.

  At middle-day dinner, John had been all but ready to give up. Even Captain Flint had begun to feel that perhaps, after all, there was nothing to be found. But a change of another kind had come over the feelings of the mates. Susan, by now, was settling down at Duckhaven, and, for the moment, wanted no more house-moving. The discovery of Nancy’s spring had made the camp much easier to run than she had thought it would be. Captain Flint had said it was good drinking water, and this, after all that time in the schooner, carefully rationing the water, made Susan want to stay where she was. Peggy agreed with Susan. The two housekeepers had made up their minds t
o camp at Duckhaven till the food ran out. That, in itself, was enough to put heart into the doubters. Just before dinner, Roger had been asking Titty whether it wasn’t nearly time to start back to the schooner, and John had been thinking that it would be good to be at sea once more, but when they saw that Susan took it for granted that they would be digging on for at least another four days, John somehow forgot his doubts, and Roger said: “Of course, we could stay a whole year if we ate some of the crabs.” Captain Flint, naturally, was ashamed to give up while everybody else seemed ready to dig on, and after dinner all the diggers set to work again, almost as keenly as if this was the first day. They worked steadily on through the afternoon in the shade of the outer trees until something happened that, for a time, brought digging to an end.

  “What’s the matter with Gibber?” said Roger suddenly, and Nancy, who was digging close by, looked up to see the monkey shivering as if he had had a sudden fright.

  “What’s gone with you, Gibber?” said Nancy. Only a few minutes before she had seen him busily scratching away with a bit of stick, pretending he was digging, like his master.

  The monkey whimpered. Its lips drew back from its chattering teeth. It clung to Roger and tried to hide its head in Roger’s shirt. It shivered so violently that Roger himself shook.

  “Uncle Jim! Uncle Jim!” called Nancy. “Gibber’s going to have a fever.”

  “Not he,” said Captain Flint, who had thrown down his pick and come on the run at hearing Nancy’s call. He took the wrist of the monkey as if he were a doctor feeling a patient’s pulse. “He’s had a fright. That’s what it is. Seen a snake, perhaps. What was he doing?”