Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

The little staff straightened itself at the top of the mast, and the flag, a three-cornered one, blew out in the wind.

Titty drew a long breath that nearly choked her.

“It is . . .” she said.

The flag blowing out in the wind at the masthead of the little boat was black and on it in white were a skull and two crossed bones.

The four on the island stared at each other.

Captain John was the first to speak.

“Roger stops here,” he said. “The mate watches the landing-place. Titty watches the western shore. I watch the harbour. No one will show themselves. It’s quite likely they haven’t seen us. Wait till they’re well away on that tack and then we’ll get to our places. They could see us if we moved now.”

The Amazon, sailing fast on the port tack, was soon half across the lake.

“Now,” said John; and the three of them, leaving Roger, slipped down from the look-out place into the camp. Susan hid herself behind some bushes close to the landing-place. Titty crawled through the undergrowth till she could see out over the steep rock that ran along the western side of the island. John hurried through the trees until he came to the harbour. There he found a place from which he could look out without being seen. He unstepped the mast of the Swallow in case it could be seen over the rocks, and then hid himself and waited.

Titty saw more of what happened than any of the others, and she really saw very little. The Amazon went about once more, and sailed round the southern end of the island. Titty watched her until the trees at that end of the island hid her. John saw her only for a moment as she passed across the opening in the rocks outside the harbour. Then he could not see her any more. Then he heard voices not far away but dared not move for fear of showing himself. Presently he heard the voices further away, near the landing-place. He hurried back through the trees to help Susan. But Susan had seen them as they passed, for a moment only, through the trees. They had not stopped at all. Sailing fast, with the wind with them, they had run through between the island and the mainland, and were already north of the island, sailing straight on towards Houseboat Bay and Darien. Susan and John hurried together to the look-out point, where Roger, his legs kicking with excitement, was lying in the heather watching the Amazon growing smaller and smaller.

“They hauled down the flag almost as soon as they were clear of the island,” he said.

“Then they must have hoisted it only because they saw us,” said John.

Titty joined them.

“If they were pirates,” she said, “why did the pirate on the houseboat fire at them?”

“Perhaps he didn’t,” said Susan. “Watch if they run into Houseboat Bay again.”

“They haven’t got a cannon,” said Roger, “and he has, a beauty. I know it was the pirate on the houseboat who fired.”

The Amazon did not run into Houseboat Bay. The little boat, with her white sail well out, held on her course, leaving a long line of wake astern of her, as straight as if it had been laid off with a ruler.

“They know how to steer,” said Captain John. One of Swallow’s weak points was that she was inclined to yaw about with a following wind. It was none too easy to leave a wake like that. And, as John could not admit that there might be easier boats to steer than Swallow, he had to give all the credit for that straight line to the sailors of the Amazon.

They watched the little white sail grow smaller until at last it disappeared beyond the Peak of Darien.

“She must be going to Rio,” said Susan.

“We’d better follow and see where they come from,” said Captain John. “They can’t get back here without our seeing them. Now we can’t see them, and they can’t see us. So even if they do see us afterwards, they won’t know we have come from the island.”

“Unless they have seen us already,” said Susan.

“They didn’t see Swallow, anyhow,” said John. “I took her mast down. Let’s have a pemmican day. Then we needn’t wait to cook dinner. Don’t let’s waste a minute. A loaf of bread and a tin of pemmican and some apples, and we’ll get four bottles of ginger beer, grog, I mean, in Rio. Then we needn’t bother about anything but tea when we get back. Come on, Roger. We’ll bring Swallow round to the landing-place. Will you be ready with the stores, Mister Mate?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Mate Susan.

John and Roger ran to the harbour, cast off Swallow’s moorings, and scrambled in. John stepped the mast, paddled her out through the narrows, and then began rowing as soon as there was room to use the oars. You can’t do much sculling over the stern against a south-west wind. He rowed round to the landing-place. Susan and Titty were waiting there with a tin of pemmican, a tin-opener, a knife, a loaf of bread, a hunk of butter wrapped up in a bit of paper, and four large apples. A moment later the brown sail was hoisted and set, and Swallow, with her whole crew aboard, was slipping out from behind the island.

All four were in the stern of the boat to give her her best chance with a following wind. John steered, and the other three sat in the bottom of the boat. The little Swallow foamed through the water. John did his best to keep her nose steadily on the outermost point of Darien, but, glancing back, he knew that he was not steering so well as the girl at the tiller of the Amazon. Still, he did his best, and the noise of the water boiling under Swallow’s forefoot showed that Swallow was doing her best too. The tops of the trees on the shores of the lake seemed to race across the purple slopes of the hills.

Houseboat Bay opened up. There was the houseboat and on the foredeck of her stood the fat man.

“He’s very angry about something,” said Titty.

He seemed to be shaking his fist at them, but they could not be sure, and presently they had passed the further point and could not see him.

Darien grew clearer and larger every moment.

“They’ll have lost the wind the other side of Darien,” said John, “and they won’t get much until they get beyond the islands off Rio. They’ve a long start of us, but we may get a sight of them and see where they go.”

The Swallow rounded the point of Darien. All her crew looked towards Holly Howe. Outside the farm-house they could see two figures and a perambulator—mother, nurse, and Vicky. They seemed to belong to a different, distant life. There they were, placid in the sunshine. Vicky was probably asleep. And here, foaming through the water, ran the Swallow, carrying Vicky’s brothers and sisters who, not an hour before, not half an hour before, had seen with their own eyes the black flag with the skull and cross-bones upon it run to the masthead by a strange vessel which, so they thought, had actually been fired at by the retired pirate with the green parrot from the houseboat in Houseboat Bay.

For a moment or two no one said anything.

Then Susan said: “It’s no use trying to tell mother about the pirates, not until it’s all over, anyhow. But we must put it in the log and tell her afterwards.”

“We’ll tell her when she isn’t a native any more,” said Titty. “It’s not the sort of thing you tell to natives.”

The Swallow ran on. There were now more houses on the eastern shore of the lake. The further they went, the more houses there were. There were islands. One big one had houses on it. A long sandy spit ran out with boathouses on its further side. The houses, no longer scattered among trees, clustered on the side of the hill above the little town of Rio, inhabited entirely by natives who had no idea that this was its name. The Swallow ran on in sheltered water beyond the outer islands and the spit of land. Now they could see Rio Bay and the steamer pier. They were slipping slowly through a fleet of yachts at their moorings. Motor boats were moving about with cargoes of visitors. Captain John sent the Boy Roger forward, to the boy’s delight, as a look-out man, and himself was kept very busy avoiding the rowing boats and canoes. Rio on this summer day was a busy place. A steamship hooted, left the pier, and steamed slowly out of the Bay. Not one of all the passengers who looked down from the deck on the little brown-sailed Swallow knew that the four in her were living on a desert island, and that they were interested, not in the big steamer, or the yachts, or the motor boats, but only in another little vessel as small as their own. For the crew of the Swallow there was no other vessel on the water, except, of course, this mass of clumsy native craft which really did not count. Their eyes were only for the pirate vessel they were pursuing.