Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

Peggy Blackett came along the path from the harbour, with a huge white bundle on her shoulder, followed by Titty and Roger with blankets and a bundle of fishing rods.

“Hullo, Sammy,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“It was all a mistake, miss,” said the policeman.

“Run away, Sammy, and don’t make those mistakes again,” said Nancy.

The big policeman went down to his boat again and pushed off.

“Miss Ruth and Miss Peggy,” he begged, “don’t you say anything to mother.”

“All right, Sammy, not if you are good.”

He rowed quickly away.

“What did he want?” said Titty.

“Why was he frightened?” said Roger.

“Did you know him?” said Susan.

“Of course we did,” said Captain Nancy. “His mother used to be mother’s nurse, and she was our nurse too when we were very young. He’s our policeman. He isn’t afraid of anybody except his mother . . . and us, of course. I say, you know what’s happened?”

“What?”

“You know that message the old Billies gave you to give to us, about telling Uncle Jim to put a padlock on his houseboat? Well, they were right.”

“Uncle Jim’s houseboat has been burgled,” said Peggy.

“I knew something had happened when I saw all those boats there this morning,” said John.

“The other pirates attacked Captain Flint’s ship while he was away,” said Captain Nancy. “He had gone, you know, when you said he had. We were wrong. Those lights we saw in the houseboat when we were sailing down here in the dark weren’t his. They belonged to the burglars, to the other pirates. At that very moment they were about their fell work.”

“Someone else saw those lights too,” said Peggy. “The motorman who knew that Uncle Jim was away. So in the morning he went to see and found the cabin door swinging open and the whole place upside down. He came over to tell mother and mother sent a telegram to Uncle Jim. He got here last night, and went to his houseboat, but everything was in such an awful mess that he came back with his parrot to our house to sleep.”

“He was raging mad,” said Nancy. “And the parrot was too cross to talk.”

“Sometimes he was mad and sometimes just glumpy,” said Peggy. “He said he wouldn’t have minded if they’d taken everything he had except what they did take. They’ve taken his old cabin trunk, with his typewriter in it and the book he’s been writing all summer, the book he’s been writing so that he couldn’t be one of us like he used to be. He said he supposed they took it because it was heavy. He didn’t know what else they’d taken. But they’d emptied all the lockers out on the floor and pulled everything in the boat to pieces. Worse than a spring cleaning, he said it was. Sometimes he was just miserable and saying nothing at all, and then other times he would start raging away about the lake being covered with boys, and about you. . . .”

“He always thinks it’s us,” said John.

“I was just going to tell him that it couldn’t have been you that night,” said Nancy, “because you were up the Amazon River when we saw the light in his ship, but Peggy nudged me just in time and I remembered that we were in bed that night, so I shut up. I began to think it was a good thing we’d already got leave to camp with you. Any minute someone might have told us not to, they were all in such a stew. So we slipped off and stowed our things in Amazon last night and hid her up the river. And then this morning we lay low until Uncle Jim had rowed away back to the houseboat. When we did start there wasn’t much wind, or we’d have been here before. We had to row through the islands, and then we waited for a bit watching all the boats taking people to Houseboat Bay to see the burglary.”

“You got back in time yesterday morning?” said Susan.

“It was a near squeak, but we did,” said Nancy.

“We just had time to get into bed with our clothes on when they came banging at the door,” said Peggy.

“I say,” said John. “Were they burgling the very night of our war?”

“Of course they were,” said Nancy. “I told you. We saw their light in the houseboat. If we’d only known we could have captured the lot of them and made Uncle Jim our grateful slave for ever.”

“Then perhaps Titty really did hear something that night,” said John.

“Perhaps the pirates I heard were the very ones who had sacked Captain Flint’s ship,” said Titty.

“Did you hear any?” said Nancy.

“They were in a rowing boat,” said Titty, “when I was anchored in Amazon.”

“They probably were the burglars,” said Nancy. “We saw their light and then you heard them. What beats me is why Uncle Jim should have got it into his head that you had anything to do with it.”

“Of course we didn’t,” said Captain John.

“Gaskets and bowlines,” said Captain Nancy, “you needn’t tell me that. What puzzles me is why he should think you did.”

Captain John was very uncomfortable.

“He didn’t believe me when I told him I hadn’t touched his houseboat, that time I went to tell him what the charcoal-burners had said.”

“But why wouldn’t he believe you?”

“Well,” said Captain John. “Look here, Captain Nancy, it really doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does,” said Captain Nancy. “Old Sammy would never have come nosing round here if he hadn’t heard something from Uncle Jim.”

“It was that day we first saw you,” said Captain John. “When we thought he’d fired at you. He saw us when we sailed up the lake to see where you went, and he thought it was us who put that firework on his cabin roof.”

Captain Nancy turned very red, even through her sunburn.

“I’ll put that matter right at once,” she said. “Was he very beastly?”

“He did call me a liar,” said John. “But it doesn’t matter now, really.”

“It does,” said Captain Nancy. “Peggy!”

“Sir.”

“Empty the rest of our stores out of Amazon, take the mast and sail out of her and bring her round to the landing-place. Mister Mate, Captain John, have you got a pencil and a bit of paper in the camp? And I’ll want a scrap of charcoal out of your fire.”

Captain John went into his tent and brought out the exercise-book and the pencil. Captain Nancy lay on the ground and wrote for some minutes, sucking her pencil between each word and pressing very hard. Twice she broke the point of her pencil and had to sharpen it again.

“I suck it to make it good and black,” she explained, noticing that Susan watched her with surprise.

Titty and Roger stared at her open-mouthed.

When she had done she got up and took a bit of charred wood from the fire. She tore out the sheet on which she had been writing and smeared the back of it with burnt wood. Then she folded it up and put it in the pocket of her shirt.

“Boat ready, sir!” called Peggy from the landing-place.

“I’ll be back soon,” said Captain Nancy.

“But what are you going to do?” asked John as Nancy pushed off.

“Tip him the Black Spot,” said Nancy and rowed, rather splashingly, away.

Table of Contents

The houseboat man, Captain Flint, sometimes known as Uncle Jim, was alone with his green parrot in the cabin of his ship grimly trying to put things straight after his visitors. First there had been the burglars, and then this morning there had been all the people who wanted to see what damage had been done, besides Sammy and the other policeman and the sergeant from Rio, who had sent Sammy to the foot of the lake and the other policeman up to the other end to make inquiries. The burglars had turned everything upside down. Every one of the neat lockers and cupboards had its door swinging open and its contents raked out. The assegais and tomahawks and shark’s-tooth necklaces and boomerangs and green and scarlet painted gourds, that were relics of Captain Flint’s travels and had hung in honoured places on the cabin walls, had been torn down. It was like trying to tidy up after a whirlwind. Captain Flint trod on a little ebony elephant from Colombo. He picked it up, thinking of glue, but it had lost its tusks, its trunk and two of its legs, and he threw it desperately through the open cabin window.