Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

Amazon had passed Swallow outside the river, and, with the following wind, was adding foot after foot to her lead. She was being steered by Roger and Titty in turn. They were trying who could leave the straightest wake, now that the real captain and mate had changed places with their borrowed crew and were lying down on each side of the centre-board case, pretending that it was their watch below and that they were asleep in their cabins.

“Wake us up when we come to Rio Bay,” said Nancy.

“What for?” asked Roger.

“You should never say ‘What for?’ to the captain,” said Titty.

“All right. I mean, aye, aye, sir. But if you hadn’t gone and said that I wouldn’t have made that waggle in our wake.”

“Count it my waggle,” said Titty. “That’s two, with the one I made myself. And you’ve made three, two in your last turn and one in this.”

“No quarrelling on deck,” said Captain Nancy in a growling voice from down on the bottom-boards, “or there’ll be keel-hauling and hanging from the yardarm.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Titty.

“Why didn’t you say ‘No, no, sir’?” asked Roger. “You meant ‘No.’ ”

“You think of your steering,” said Titty, “or you’ll make another waggle. You have. That’s two waggles in this turn. Let me have a try for a bit.”

“All right,” said Roger, “and I’ll talk.”

“You’re both wrong, really,” said Mate Peggy, lying on her back and looking up at the sky from the bottom of the boat. “You ought never to talk to the man at the wheel, and you’ve both been doing it.”

“But there isn’t a wheel,” said Roger.

The two little ships took the Rio passage, and John pointed out to mother the island with the landing-stage, where they had tied up and slept after beating to and fro in the dark a year ago.

“The night you were very nearly duffers?”

“Yes,” said John.

Then they were slipping across Rio Bay, outside the yacht moorings and close by the reeds where the natives anchor and fish.

“That’s the yard where they mended Swallow,” said John, and called out to Nancy in the other boat. Nancy was sitting up now and being the pilot, taking Amazon through the bay. Titty was steering. Both ships turned across towards the boatyards and sailed along close to that shore with its wooden jetties, and slipways and sheds full of boats being built.

John sniffed the air.

“Yes, you can smell it. Tarred rope. Just sniff for a minute, mother.”

And mother sniffed and remembered that same smell drifting from the open doors of the little shops along the water front, and from the sailing ships in Australian harbours long ago.

A man who was looking at the new paintwork on a motor boat saw them passing, and called out to John, “Is she all right?”

“That’s the boatbuilder,” said John, and shouted back, “Better than ever. Thank you very much.”

“You made a good job of the mast between you,” the boat-builder shouted back. “I had a good look at it, when we brought her down yesterday.”

They sailed on round the promontory and into Holly Howe Bay. Both vessels tied up to the jetty for a minute or two while mother and Bridget went ashore to go home to the farm for the night, and the able-seaman and the boy left the Amazon and rejoined their own ship.

“Good-bye, mother. Good-bye, Mrs. Walker. Good-bye, Bridgie.”

Bridget, waving good-bye, nearly made a pier-head jump at the last moment without meaning it, if mother had not caught her in time.

“Come and see us on the island to-morrow night,” called Susan.

“Glook, glook,” said the best of all natives.

The little ships pushed off from the jetty and sailed out of the bay, close together, under the Peak of Darien.

Titty looked up at the Peak, remembering how last year they had watched the island day after day from the top of it, waiting for the telegram from daddy to say they might put to sea. She remembered how, day after day, they had watched the boats of natives fishing or rowing about, and how, when any boat went too near the island, they had been afraid that someone else was going to land there before they could. And then she remembered the finding of the fireplace when they landed there, and the coming of the Amazons who had made it. She remembered how first they had seen Peggy and Nancy, once their enemies and now their closest allies, and she looked happily across the water to the Amazon slipping quietly along beside the Swallow. And then, as they sailed on and left the Peak astern and could see into Houseboat Bay, she remembered their first sight of the retired pirate and the parrot.

“We’ll sail in to tell Uncle Jim how you won the race,” called Nancy, and the two ships changed course and headed directly for the houseboat.

“He isn’t there,” said Peggy a moment later. “There’s no flag up.”

“And there’s no rowing boat,” said Nancy.

The Swallow and the Amazon sailed close under the stern of the houseboat and Nancy and Peggy shouted “Houseboat ahoy!” but there was no answer.

“He had the launch with him this morning,” said John.

“Of course he had,” said Nancy. “That’s it. I was forgetting he’d have to go back to Beckfoot in her. He must have missed us going through the islands. Oh, well, never mind. We’ll tell him to-morrow.”

They sailed out of Houseboat Bay and now set a course a little west of south to take them straight to Horseshoe Cove.

“We don’t want to waste any time,” said Susan. “Let’s all get to bed early. It’ll take us all day to-morrow to get everything shifted across.”

They were well out in the middle of the lake, and more than half-way from Houseboat Bay to Cormorant Island, when Roger, who was being a look-out man, though, with his crutch, Mate Susan wouldn’t let him go before the mast, suddenly shouted, “Smoke, smoke! There’s smoke on Wild Cat Island.”

Peggy, in the Amazon, had seen it at the same moment, a thin cloud of blue smoke, drifting away from the trees. They would have seen it before if it had not been that the wind was northerly and was blowing the smoke away from them to the south of the island.

“Too late, too late!” wailed Titty. “Someone’s got it after all.”

“We ought to have taken it to-day instead of racing,” said John.

“We couldn’t,” said Susan. “We’d promised to go to Beckfoot.”

“There’s very little smoke,” said John. “Someone may just have boiled a kettle there and left his fire smouldering. Natives often do.”

Nancy Blackett took command.

“Don’t alter course more than a little at a time,” she said quietly across the water. “Don’t let them think we’ve seen it. We’ll sail on just as we are, working over a bit that way when we can. Keep a sharp look-out, everybody. There may be nobody there. We’ll make sure. It’s no good taking risks. There may be a whole crowd of them.”

“We can’t let them have it,” said Titty.

“We won’t,” said Nancy. “We’ll keep together, working over that way, as if we were sailing for pleasure. Don’t let them see that we’re taking any notice.”

“How would it be for one of us to go across towards Shark Bay and down the inner channel? You can see right into the camp from there.”

“It would give us away at once,” said Nancy. “They’d see that we’d come to look at them. No. We’ll keep together and work over that way, pretending we aren’t really altering course. Look here. There’s a steamer coming. We’ll change course the moment the steamer’s between us and the island.”

So it was done. The long passenger steamer churned up the lake, and while it was passing completely hid the Swallow and the Amazon from anyone who might be watching on the island. They changed course and headed east of south, and when the steamer had passed, there they were, sailing together as before. No one who had not been looking at them very carefully could have been sure that they had not been heading in that direction before the steamer had shut them out of sight.