Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

The green parrot, perched on the edge of the cabin table, was trying to bite off the head of a little jade image of Buddha that Captain Flint had bought in Hong-Kong.

“Go ahead, Polly,” said Captain Flint, “smash it up.”

“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot, and holding the little idol in one claw twisted at it with its strong curved beak.

“Why on earth they couldn’t have taken some of these things if they wanted them, beats me,” said Captain Flint, who from living alone so much was accustomed to talk a good deal to himself and to the parrot. “And then they go and take the one thing that could be of no possible use to them but mattered a great deal to me. Never lock anything up, Polly, and you’ll never lose it. Whoever the thief was, he took that box simply because it was heavy and he couldn’t open it. If it was that boy he must be a strong one. But perhaps he had others to help him. Well, when he does open it he’ll be sorry he didn’t take something else. Mixed Moss, by ‘A Rolling Stone,’ won’t mean much to him, Polly, though it meant a lot of hard work to me.”

“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot, as the head of the idol dropped on the floor.

Captain Flint bent to pick up the fallen head, and a broken emu’s egg cracked under his feet.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” said Captain Flint, “won’t put Humpty Dumpty together again and won’t make me sit down to write Mixed Moss a second time.”

The green parrot gave a loud, angry shriek when Captain Flint picked up the little jade head.

“Oh well, take it, then,” said Captain Flint. The parrot waddled towards him along the table, and, gripping the edge of the table with one claw, took the head from him with the other.

“It’s just a summer wasted,” said Captain Flint. “And all my diaries gone too.”

“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot.

“There is one thing about it,” said Captain Flint, picking up an armful of clothes and shoving them into one of the cupboards, “those nieces of mine had nothing to do with it. They do play the game, and they’d never have wrecked my cabin for me. But that boy. I didn’t like his lying to me about his firework on my cabin roof. Boys are capable of anything, Polly, even good ones. I was a bad one myself, so they say, but at least I didn’t tell lies.”

At that moment a small folded piece of paper flew through the cabin window and dropped on the table. The parrot shuffled towards it and picked it up. It seemed to be better material for beak work than the remains of the little jade image. Captain Flint looked out.

“Hullo, Nancy,” he said. “Come to gloat?”

“I won’t speak to you,” said Nancy. “I’ve tipped you the Black Spot. Read it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I won’t speak to you till you’ve said you’re sorry. Read the Black Spot and you’ll see why.”

Captain Flint was just in time to save the paper from the parrot. It was already in two pieces. Captain Flint untwisted them and put them together. On one side was a large round smudge made with the charred wood. On the other was a letter.

“To Captain Flint (alias Uncle Jim),

John never touched the houseboat. When you told him he was a liar, he wasn’t. You were. He had come at risk of his life to warn you that savage natives were planning an attack on your houseboat. The Billies had given him a message for you. You wouldn’t listen. Instead you called him a liar. Talk about being ungrateful. Now you’ve been burgled. I’m glad. Very glad. If you want to know who singed your beard (see Philip of Spain) by exploding a mine on your cabin roof, it was the undersigned. You deserved it. This is the Black Spot. You are deposed from being an uncle or anything decent.

Nancy Blackett (Amazon pirate).”

“Hi! Nancy!” shouted Captain Flint out of the cabin window.

But Captain Nancy, anxious to show the Swallows that she was holding no parley with the enemy, was already rowing out of the bay.

“By Jove!” said Captain Flint, “so it was those young harum-scarums all the time. What a brute that boy must have thought me. And I was a brute too. And now I’ve gone and told the police that I thought he might have something to do with this mess. Into your private cabin with you, Polly. There’s too much about to leave you in charge here.”

He put the parrot, squawking wildly, into its cage, ran up on deck, jumped down into his rowing boat, cast off the painter and set off after Captain Nancy, rowing as hard as he could. Whatever happened, he must see that boy at once and put things right.

Table of Contents

For some moments after Nancy had rowed away Peggy and the Swallows stared after her in silence. No one knew exactly what she was going to do.

“Perhaps I ought not to have told her about it,” John said at last.

“Rubbish,” said Susan. “She’d have been bound to hear about it sooner or later. Let’s get the Amazons’ tent up before she comes back.”

“Let’s,” said Peggy. “We’ve got all the things here. Nancy brought the poles.”

“Oughtn’t we to take Swallow and go and help her?” said Titty.

“Better not,” said Peggy. “If she’d wanted help she wouldn’t have gone alone.”

She unrolled her big white bundle. It was a tent but not made like the tents of the Swallows.

“Where are those poles?” she said. “They’re all in two pieces. You fit them together and get four all the same length. Then you push them into the hems at the corners of the tent. They’re a horribly tight fit. The first two are easy enough, but after that it’s awful, because it’s so difficult to keep the hem straight for the pole to go in. I say, if your able-seaman and the boy will hang on to the other end and keep it stretched out, it’ll be easier.”

Everybody helped. The poles were put together, like fishing rods, and pushed into the hems. At the top of the hems there were little bags for the ends of the poles, like fingers on a glove, and the ends of the poles, in their little bags, stuck out above the tent about six inches or so.

“They’re just like ears,” said Roger, “donkey’s ears.”

Then, when the poles were all in, Peggy gathered up the tent in a long bundle, or rather tried to. John took hold of one end of the bundle and she took hold of the other.

“This way,” she said. “It’s lucky you didn’t pitch your tents on our place, or we really should have had to fight you for it. We couldn’t put it up properly without these two stumps.”

On the opposite side of the camp to the tents of the Swallows there were two stumps of trees that had been cut down. Between them, now that they looked, the Swallows saw the remains of a worn square patch. Peggy dug about with her fingers in the grass and found a hole at each corner of the square.

“The tent poles fit into those holes,” she said. “Then these ropes go from the top of the tent to the old tree stumps and round them, and we tighten them up with these bits of wood.”

The bits of wood had two holes in them, one at each end. The rope ran through one hole, then round the tree stump, then through the other hole, ending in a knot so that it would not pull out again. To tighten the rope, all you had to do was to pull the bit of wood up the rope, and then the other end, by pulling it sideways, stopped it from slipping when you let go.

“It’s a lot easier with five to work at it,” said Peggy, when the tent stood in its place, and the ropes from the donkey’s ears at each end were properly tautened. “It takes us ages by ourselves. What did you do with that bundle of iron pegs that was with the blankets?”