CHAPTER IX
THE CALLING OF THE ISLAND
The on-shore wind, blowing the cloud of fog before it, was a better friend to the German fugitive than it was to his pursuers. The search was a long and blind one, and all of the boats that scattered to find him came back with only failure to report. Some of them had seen a big white yacht go by them in the mist, but as such vessels were so common along the coast at that season, little notice had been taken of her. One boat, indeed, had come close enough to ask whether she had seen any such craft as the catboat they were seeking, and had been directed to bear off to the southward, as the yacht had sighted just such a boat near Andrew’s Point. When the little catboat was finally found, however, floating idly with the tide, far to the north of Andrew’s Point and just where the yacht might easily have passed her, suspicions began to arise as to how the German had escaped. Inquiry was made all along the coast, but without bringing any news to light. The millionaire purchaser of an estate on Appledore Island seemed to have vanished completely.
Almost the first words that Captain Saulsby spoke were to ask what had become of that “son-of-a-gun of a friend of the Kaiser’s.” When he learned that in spite of all possible efforts the man had got clean away, he announced at first that he was too disgusted to try to get well; but altered his decision a little later.
“If the whole United States Navy can’t catch a man like that,” he said weakly to Billy, “I guess it’s Ned Saulsby’s duty to keep in the world a little longer, and try to be a match for the rascal.”
The doctor said that the old sailor’s recovery was miraculously quick; the Captain himself, that it was “slower than a wet week.”
“That woman,” he would say, indicating the long-suffering nurse, “that woman that’s all rustles and starch and has no real heart, she keeps me down, when the only thing I need to get well is to walk out along the garden path and feel the good, warm sunshine on my back.”
A day came, however, when “that woman’s” reign was over and she and the old captain bade each other good-bye. They had become fast friends even in spite of their frequent clashes of opinion, so the parting, which took place in Billy’s presence, was a most affectionate one.
“I may have spoken roughly to you, my dear,” Captain Saulsby said, apologetically, “but I was sure, even at the time, that you were forgiving me right along. And there’s no one that can deny that you spoke roughly to me many a time, and good cause you had to do it, too. I’m that spoiled that, now I’m to be my own master again, I really don’t know how to hand myself my chicken broth.”
“I’m truly sorry to leave you, Captain,” the girl answered; “you are quite the worst patient I ever tried to manage, but I think you have done me the most credit.”
She went away down the path, Captain Saulsby looking after her with a very grave face. Then he turned and hobbled into the house to kindle a fire in his little stove.
“It’s too bad she’s gone,” he said solemnly to Billy, “but—the way I’ve longed for fried onions!” He heaved a mighty sigh of relief and put a frying pan on the stove to heat. The whole of the cottage became filled presently with an odor that caused Captain Saulsby to sniff delightedly, but that would have made the nurse throw open every door and window.
When the delectable repast was over he came and sat down in the doorway and filled a pipe whose perfume rivalled that of even the onions.
“I’ll have to smoke night and day for a while,” he said, “to catch up on myself. Whew-ew, but that is good!”
Jacky Shute had laboured manfully in the garden during Captain Saulsby’s illness. Even his small remnant of a conscience smote him when he was tempted to neglect the weeds, and the Captain’s comment, “ship-shape as can be, Jacky; I didn’t know you had it in you,” made his small countenance beam with pride.
The delicate, crinkled poppies were blooming abundantly throughout the garden. It was the season when they were in their full glory, when all else in Captain Saulsby’s little place, the vegetables, the currant bushes, and the fruit trees, must be quite cast into the shade. The old sailor ventured forth on a short tour of inspection, and actually managed to reach the bench down by the hedge where he and Billy had sat upon the day they became acquainted.
“It doesn’t look so bad,” he remarked complacently as he viewed his small domain. “Of course, raising flowers and garden truck is a mighty little business after you have once followed the sea, but an old sailor likes to have things as they should be, whether he’s at sea or ashore. No,” he looked over the place again with a pleased smile, “no, it doesn’t look so bad.”
One of the summer visitors came along the path to ask for some of the packets of poppyseed that Captain Saulsby, although he made a business of selling them, always parted with most grudingly. This woman he looked over long and severely, and asked her many searching questions before he finally drew a package of seeds from his pocket and graciously allowed her to buy it.
“She looks to me like one of those women who would try to grow poppies in a pot,” he said to Billy after she had gone. “I didn’t really quite trust her, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt. She came from up Boston way: that was what saved her. I hope she will really take care of them.”
“I’ve noticed you won’t sell seeds to everybody,” Billy said. “Don’t you like to think that your flowers will be growing everywhere?”
“They won’t grow unless people treat them right,” he answered. “There’s some women, those young giggly things with embroidery parasols, that think my flowers are ‘so attractive’ and that they can grow them to pin to the front of their ruffled white dresses. Much good poppies will do any one who tries to wear them! They droop and die in ten minutes and the sweet young things say ‘Oh, dear!’ and throw them away. And there are others who say my place here is ‘so original and quaint’ and they must have a corner in their gardens just like it, so they take the seeds away to plant them somewhere in the Middle West where the ground bakes as hard as iron and the hot air dries up the buds before they can open. No, poppies have to have cool earth to dig their toes into, and cool salt air to breathe; it’s sea breezes that put the colour into them, and a good wet fog is their meat and drink. Poor things, I hate to think of them off somewhere drooping and withering for a whiff of fresh salt wind.”
“Captain Saulsby,” said Billy gravely, “I do believe you care a lot for those flowers of yours. You are always saying you don’t, but I think I won’t believe you again. I can see by the very way you look at them that you love them.”
“No, can you?” exclaimed the old sailor in genuine surprise. “Why—why—maybe I do now, I never thought of it.” He looked about the garden as though suddenly seeing it in a new light. “I hated the whole place bitterly enough when I first knew I must stop here all the rest of my life, and my only wish was that the time might not be long. But I’ve worked and tended and watched over it for five years and—well, you are right. I have learned to love it and never knew. That’s a queer thing, now, isn’t it?”
“How glad you must be that it wasn’t sold,” Billy went on, “that all that trouble and worry is over for good.”
“I’m not so sure of its being for good,” the old captain returned reflectively; “the fellow got clear away, and as long as he’s still free to make trouble, there will be mischief brewing. And there’s plenty more like him where he came from, too. No, there is still danger for Appledore Island, I am sure of that.”
“Do you think that German clock-maker could have helped him to get away?” Billy asked. “I have wondered a good deal if they didn’t have something to do with each other.”
“There’s Germans and Germans,” the old man answered. “I put a lot of faith in Johann Happs, but the trouble of it is you can’t always tell. I think a time is coming, though, coming pretty soon, when things will show plainly which kind of German is which. But I may be wrong.”
Their talk was interrupted here by a visitor, not a summer tourist this time, but a person of a very different kind. It was Harvey Jarreth, fresh and smiling and sure of himself again, in spite of his unpleasant experience with the naval authorities and his weekend visit to Appledore’s jail. There had been no evidence to bring against him as to his transactions with the prosperous stranger, so that he had been set free after giving many promises that he would be more careful in future. His reputation for shrewdness had suffered greatly for a little time; but as the weeks passed and people began to forget the disturbance that they had never quite understood, Harvey Jarreth began to come into his own again.
He was jauntily dressed as ever today, in the light grey clothes that made his sandy complexion still sandier, and that by their extreme of fashion showed just how many years they lagged behind the present mode. His straw hat was a little frayed and battered at the edges, but he wore it at just such a cheerful angle as when Billy had first seen him.
“Well, Captain,” he began genially, “that was a queer business about that city friend of mine, wasn’t it? And the joke of it is that it looks just now as though you had been right about him. That’s pretty funny. Ha, ha!”
“It will go right on being just as big a joke,” returned the Captain sourly. “You had better go home and practice laughing at it until you can manage something better than that cackling you’re doing now. It takes a lot of learning for a man to know how to laugh at himself.”
Jarreth’s thin face flushed and he shifted his feet uneasily.
“The joke is going to be on you, yet, Ned Saulsby,” he said, “for you’ll find you’re going to part with your land and not get much of a price for it in the end. You had your chance to sell out fair, and didn’t; now you’ll see that there are other ways. That friend of mine was as straight as a string. It would take a smarter man than he was to fool Harvey Tarreth.”
“He was so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew,” returned the Captain with spirit. “And he has fooled you once, and will likely fool you again. The first time he got you into jail: look out it isn’t the penitentiary you go to after his next visit. He helped to get you out of one just as generously as he will help you out of the other.”
“He felt real bad about my being in jail,” Jarreth maintained heatedly, his temper evidently becoming more and more ruffled.
“You’ve heard from him then?” inquired Captain Saulsby quickly. “And why didn’t you tell that to the people who are still looking for him?”
“It’s not my way to get a friend into trouble,” was the answer. “Yes, I heard from him and he sent me a box of cigars. Have one?”
He reached into his breast pocket, but Captain Saulsby stopped him with a gesture. Cigars were a rare luxury with him, but not to be acquired in any such way as this.
“No, thank you,” he said drily. “I’ve always heard that Germans smoke the worst cigars in the world.”
Harvey Jarreth thrust the proffered gift back into his pocket.
“All right,” he answered briskly. “I’m not the fellow to force things on people that don’t want them. As for Germans, how about that clock-maker that you’re so thick with? And it will be you that will be making me a present before long, Ned Saulsby, making me a present of this land; for the price you’ll get for it will bring it down to about that. You’ve been a careless man about your taxes, Ned, and nothing short of criminal about the way you’ve looked after your title-deeds.” He looked about the garden with an appraising eye, as though it were already his own. “You won’t be planting poppies next year,” he said, “unless you care to plant them on another man’s ground. Well, good morning.”
He walked off strutting jauntily, swinging his cane.
'“He’s got more need to lean on that stick than to flirt it around like that,” muttered Captain Saulsby. “Ah—h!”
The last swing had cut off the heads of a half-dozen tall white poppies, whereupon Jarreth turned about with an impudent grin to see if the old man dared protest.
“Don’t take any notice of him,” growled the Captain; “that is what will hurt him worst of anything.”
So Billy, by great effort, managed to keep quiet, and the disagreeable visitor walked away without the satisfaction of a word of comment.
“Do you really think he can get your land, Captain Saulsby?” Billy asked anxiously, as soon as Jarreth was safely out of hearing.
“I don’t quite know,” the sailor admitted slowly; “you see the place has belonged to my people so long I never thought about having much proof of the ownership. Harvey is right when he says I’ve been careless about taxes and things. He held a mortgage on the land once, and though it was paid off in my father’s time I’m blessed if I know if there is anything to show for the payment at my end. There’s sure to be plenty of documents of all kinds at his. He is terribly anxious, for some reason, to get those hard, lean fingers of his on the property.”
He puffed at his pipe for quite a little while in silence, then spoke again.
“That’s a dangerous kind of man, Billy Wentworth, the most risky kind a community can have. A man who thinks he’s smart and isn’t—that’s about as bad a combination as can be made. Jarreth has a reputation to live up to, for being shrewd and quick and able to get the best of people; he nearly lost that reputation and he will stop at nothing to get it back. He doesn’t mean any harm, he hardly means to be really dishonest; but he’s so bound to prove himself smart that he will let anybody who is more of a rascal than he is, make a fool of him. I’m not easy in my mind when I think of him and of that ‘friend’ of his that he’s so bound to prove is straight. No, I don’t like it.”
And when Billy went home to supper he left the Captain still sitting on the bench, evidently turning his anxious thoughts to the same matter, if one could judge by the way he smoked his pipe in short, troubled puffs.
The days went by, the poppies drooped their heads and scattered their petals in the winds, the early apples turned yellow on Captain Saulsby’s trees, and the blackberries ripened along the wall. The time of Billy’s visit had come to an end; the morning of his departure arrived, and he came down, dressed in his travelling clothes, to say good-bye to his dear, good friend.
He walked in past the gap in the stone wall and between the bent, old willow trees, went slowly up the path and down through the garden, not at all eager for this last parting. He did not quite know why he was so uncomfortable and depressed; he thought perhaps it might be that his stiff collar felt so uneasy against his sunburned neck and so made him miserable, more or less, all over. He was going West again; surely he was glad about that. He assured himself over and over again, that, yes, he was very glad.
Captain Saulsby was sitting smoking in the sun down by the hedge. They talked for a little while of various things, Billy somehow feeling reluctant to say that this visit must be the last.
“Got your shore hat, I see,” the Captain observed finally. “That means the end of the season for sure and that you’re leaving us. How early next spring will you be coming back?”
Billy was a little surprised, and for the second time that day. Early in the morning he had walked through the woods to say good-bye to Sally Shute. She too had asked when he would come back, taking it cheerfully for granted that he would never fail to return soon.
“I’m not coming back next year,” he said now; “we’re going out to the Rockies to camp, my father and mother and I, and the year after—well, I hardly know where we’ll be then. We don’t often go to the same place twice. No, maybe I won’t ever be coming back.”
Captain Saulsby knocked the ashes out of his pipe and smiled slowly.
“You’ll be coming back,” he said; “there’s nobody can keep away always. You’ll think that the prairies, and the big mountains, and all the wonderful things in the West can satisfy you, but a time will come, perhaps all in a minute, when you’ll remember the shining blue of the water out there, and the sound of the surf on the beach, and the smell of wet sea-weed when the tide goes down. A boy who’s been on the sea, and in it and near it and of it as you have been this summer, Billy Wentworth, can never get away from it again.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Billy; “of course I’ve liked it and all that but—”
“You can’t know yet,” his friend replied. “There was my garden here; for five years I thought I hated it, and now, since you drew my notice, I find I’ve learned to love it. And you’ll find you love all this—” he swept his arm in a wide gesture to include the rocky shore, the high, green hill of Appledore and the wide stretch of sunny sea—“yes, that you love it too well to stop away. Well, good-bye; I hope you’ll have a good passage, but I fear it’s going to be a rough one.”
It was true that, although the sun was shining, there were banks of clouds in the west and signs of coming stormy weather.
“Do you hear the island singing?” Captain Saulsby said. “That means wind for sure.”
It was a strange thing about the rocks of Appledore that, when rising winds blew across them in a certain way, there was a queer, hollow, humming sound that the fisherman said was “Appledore Island calling.” Billy had heard it before; it made him vaguely unhappy and homesick now.
“It won’t take the boat long to get me ashore,” he said. “I’m going by train from Rockford, not all the way by sea to Boston. Well, good-bye, Captain Saulsby; I—I—I can’t—good-bye.”
He had meant to thank the old sailor for his many kindnesses, words that seemed simple enough to speak; but in the end he said nothing, merely turned away and walked down through the willow trees, never looking back. He bade farewell to his aunt on the pier, embarked upon the waiting steamer and headed away toward the shore, toward the West, toward all the things he knew. Yet he stood on deck and looked back as long as he could see toward Appledore Island, until Captain Saulsby’s red-roofed cottage had vanished, until points and headlands disappeared and the green hills sank and became smaller and smaller on the horizon.
The winds rose, the boat rolled a trifle, but still did not disturb his steady watching. He thought of the friends he had made there, of the adventures he had been through, of the dangers that still hung about the place.
“Will I ever see it again?” he wondered, over and over. This was still the burden of his thoughts when the boat rounded the point into Rockford harbour and Appledore Island vanished from his sight. Yet he still seemed to hear it calling, even after his straining eyes could see it no longer.