Georgina of the Rainbows

"No," he answered firmly, "I can't finish it now, but I'll tell you what I'll do. This afternoon I'll row up to this end of the beach in my dory and take you two children out to the weirs to see the net hauled in. There's apt to be a big catch of squid worth going to see, and I'll finish the story on the way. Will that suit you?"

Richard stood up, as eager and excited as Captain Kidd always was when anybody said "Rats!" But the next instant the light died out of his eyes and he plumped himself gloomily down on the step, as if life were no longer worth living.

"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed. "I forgot. I can't go anywhere. Dad's painting my portrait, and I have to stick around so's he can work on it any old time he feels like it. That's why he brought me on this visit with him, so's he can finish it up here."

"Maybe you can beg off, just for to-day," suggested Mr. Darcy.

"No, it's very important," he explained gravely. "It's the best one Daddy's done yet, and the last thing before we left home Aunt Letty said, 'Whatever you do, boys, don't let anything interfere with getting that picture done in time to hang in the exhibition,' and we both promised."

There was gloomy silence for a moment, broken by the old man's cheerful voice.

"Well, don't you worry till you see what we can do. I want to see your father anyhow about this bill-case business, so I'll come around this afternoon, and if he doesn't let you off to-day maybe he will to-morrow. Just trust your Uncle Darcy for getting where he starts out to go. Skip along home, Georgina, and tell your mother I want to borrow you for the afternoon."

An excited little pink whirlwind with a jumping rope going over and over its head, went flying up the street toward the end of the beach. A smiling old man with age looking out of his faded blue eyes but with the spirit of boyhood undimmed in his heart, walked slowly down towards the town. And on the bottom step of the Green Stairs, his arm around Captain Kidd, the boy sat watching them, looking from one to the other as long as they were in sight. The heart of him was pounding deliciously to the music of such phrases as, "Fathoms deep, lonely beach, spade and pickaxe, skull and cross-bones, bags of golden doubloons and chests of ducats and pearls!"

CHAPTER V

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF PIRATES

THE weirs, to which they took their way that afternoon in the Towncrier's dory, The Betsey, was "the biggest fish-trap in any waters thereabouts," the old man told them. And it happened that the net held an unusually large catch that day. Barrels and barrels of flapping squid and mackerel were emptied into the big motor boat anchored alongside of it.

At a word from Uncle Darcy, an obliging fisherman in oilskins held out his hand to help the children scramble over the side of The Betsey to a seat on top of the cabin where they could have a better view. All the crew were Portuguese. The man who helped them climb over was Joe Fayal, father of Manuel and Joseph and Rosa. He stood like a young brown Neptune, his white teeth flashing when he laughed, a pitchfork in his hands with which to spear the goosefish as they turned up in the net, and throw them back into the sea. If nothing else had happened that sight alone was enough to mark it as a memorable afternoon.

Nothing else did happen, really, except that on the way out, Uncle Darcy finished the story begun on the Green Stairs and on the way back told them another. But what Richard remembered ever after as seeming to have happened, was that The Betsey suddenly turned into a Brigantine. Perched up on one of the masts, an unseen spectator, he watched a mutiny flare up among the sailors, and saw that "strutting, swaggering villain, John Quelch, throw the captain overboard and take command himself." He saw them hoist a flag they called "Old Roger," "having in the middle of it an Anatomy (skeleton) with an hour-glass in one hand and a dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from it."

He heard the roar that went up from all those bearded throats – (wonderful how Uncle Darcy's thin, quavering voice could sound that whole chorus) —

"Of all the lives, I ever say,
A Pirate's be for I.
Hap what hap may, he's allus gay
An' drinks an' bungs his eye.
For his work he's never loth,
An' a-pleasurin' he'll go
Tho' certain sure to be popt off.
Yo ho, with the rum below."

And then they made after the Portuguese vessels, nine of them, and took them all (What a bloody fight it was!), and sailed away with a dazzling store of treasure, "enough to make an honest sailorman rub his eyes and stagger in his tracks."

Richard had not been brought up on stories as Georgina had. He had had few of this kind, and none so breathlessly realistic. It carried him out of himself so completely that as they rowed slowly back to town he did not see a single house in it, although every western window-pane flashed back the out-going sun like a golden mirror. His serious, brown eyes were following the adventures of these bold sea-robbers, "marooned three times and wounded nine and blowed up in the air."

When all of a sudden the brigantine changed back into The Betsey, and he had to climb out at the boat-landing, he had somewhat of the dazed feeling of that honest sailor-man. He had heard enough to make him "rub his eyes and stagger in his tracks."

Uncle Darcy, having put them ashore, rowed off with the parting injunction to skip along home. Georgina did skip, so light of foot and quick of movement that she was in the lead all the way to the Green Stairs. There she paused and waited for Richard to join her. As he came up he spoke for the first time since leaving the weirs.

"Wish I knew the boys in this town. Wish I knew which one would be the best to get to go digging with me."

Georgina did not need to ask, "digging for what?" She, too, had been thinking of buried treasure.

"I'll go with you," she volunteered sweetly.

He turned on her an inquiring look, as if he were taking her measure, then glanced away indifferently.

"You couldn't. You're a girl."

It was a matter-of-fact statement with no suspicion of a taunt in it, but it stung Georgina's pride. Her eyes blazed defiantly and she tossed back her curls with a proud little uplift of the chin. It must be acknowledged that her nose, too, took on the trifle of a tilt. Her challenge was unspoken but so evident that he answered it.

"Well, you know you couldn't creep out into the night and go along a lonely shore into dark caves and everything."

"Pity I couldn't!" she answered with withering scorn. "I could go anywhere you could, anybody descended from heroes like I am. I don't want to be braggity, but I'd have you to know they put up that big monument over there for one of them, and another was a Minute-man. With all that, for you to think I'd be afraid! Tut!"

Not Tippy herself had ever spoken that word with finer scorn. With a flirt of her short skirts Georgina turned and started disdainfully up the street.

"Wait," called Richard. He liked the sudden flare-up of her manner. There was something convincing about it. Besides, he didn't want her to go off in that independent way as if she meant never to come back. It was she who had brought the Towncrier, that matchless Teller of Tales, across his path.

"I didn't say you wasn't brave," he called after her.

She hesitated, then stopped, turning half-way around.

"I just said you was a girl. Most of them are 'fraid cats, but if you ain't I don't know as I'd mind taking you along. That is," he added cautiously, "if I could be dead sure that you're game."

At that Georgina turned all the way around and came back a few steps.

"You can try me," she answered, anxious to prove herself worthy to be taken on such a quest, and as eager as he to begin it.

"You think of the thing you're most afraid of yourself, and tell me to do it, and then just watch me."

Richard declined to admit any fear of anything. Georgina named several terrors at which he stoutly shook his head, but presently with uncanny insight she touched upon his weakest point.

"Would you be afraid of coffins and spooks or to go to a graveyard in the dead of the night the way Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did?"

Not having read Tom Sawyer, Richard evaded the question by asking, "How did they do?"

"Oh, don't you know? They had the dead cat and they saw old Injun Joe come with the lantern and kill the man that was with Muff Potter."

By the time Georgina had given the bare outline of the story in her dramatic way, Richard was quite sure that no power under heaven could entice him into a graveyard at midnight, though nothing could have induced him to admit this to Georgina. As far back as he could remember he had had an unreasoning dread of coffins. Even now, big as he was, big enough to wear "'leven-year-old suits," nothing could tempt him into a furniture shop for fear of seeing a coffin.

One of his earliest recollections was of his nurse taking him into a little shop, at some village where they were spending the summer, and his cold terror when he found himself directly beside a long brown one, smelling of varnish, and with silver handles. His nurse's tales had much to do with creating this repulsion, also her threat of shutting him up in a coffin if he wasn't a good boy. When she found that she could exact obedience by keeping that dread hanging over him, she used the threat daily.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said finally. "I'll let you go digging with me if you're game enough to go to the graveyard and walk clear across it all by yourself and" – dropping his voice to a hollow whisper – "touch – ten – tombstones!"

Now, if Richard hadn't dropped his voice in that scary way when he said, "and touch ten tombstones," it would have been no test at all of Georgina's courage. Strange, how just his way of saying those four words suddenly made the act such a fearsome one.

"Do it right now," he suggested.

"But it isn't night yet," she answered, "let alone being mid-night."

"No, but it's clouding up, and the sun's down. By the time we'd get to a graveyard it would be dark enough for me to tell if you're game."

Up to this time Georgina had never gone anywhere without permission. But this was something one couldn't explain very well at home. It seemed better to do it first and explain afterward.