14

Desperation

NOT A WORD was said to Titty about dowsing, but next morning, tents were still being tidied when she noticed that Nancy had disappeared.

‘Where’s Captain Nancy?’ she asked.

‘Gone on,’ said Peggy, and at that moment they all heard a very loud but very bad copy of an owl call from high in the wood where Nancy was already climbing.

‘I’m ready,’ said Titty, ‘except for the provisions.’

‘So’m I,’ said Dick.

‘Nancy’s forgotten her hammer,’ said Peggy. ‘And she’s gone without waiting for her grub.’

‘I’ll take it,’ said Titty.

‘Better start, anybody who’s ready,’ said Susan. ‘We’ll catch you up. Go ahead, Titty. Then you won’t have to hurry later on. Roger, your toothbrush is quite dry. …’

‘Well, I was just going to use it,’ said Roger.

‘I must just finish my diary,’ said Dorothea.

‘Come on, Dick,’ said Titty.

‘Leave your flasks,’ said Susan. ‘We can’t fill them till Mrs Tyson’s ready with the tea.’

Dick and Titty hurried off into the wood.

They climbed fast at first, hoping to catch up Nancy. They called to her once or twice but got no answer. Even in the shade of the trees it was very hot and they were both out of breath before they had got half-way up the winding path to the Topps. They had passed the place where the path crossed the dry bed of the beck when Titty stopped short.

‘Let’s just rest half a second,’ she said. ‘It’s no good thinking we can catch her.’

‘We’ll have a look at the pool,’ said Dick.

They turned aside through the trees to the shrinking puddle that in other years had been a deep little pool in the stream that had come leaping down, waterfall after waterfall, from High Topps to the valley below. It was small and stagnant, but on a hot day even to look at a puddle is better than nothing and the ferns that hung over it were cool and green.

‘It’s gone down a bit even since we came,’ said Titty. ‘Somebody’s been drinking at it. Natives, perhaps. …’

‘Animals,’ said Dick. ‘Very small ones. Look at the tracks.’

He flung himself down and peered through his spectacles at faint muddy prints on the white stones. Some small animal had wet its feet and brought them damp and muddy from the pool, leaving its footprints on the stones. The mud had dried at once. A breath of wind would have swept the little dusty marks away for ever.

‘What is it?’ said Titty. ‘No Timothies here.’

‘Can’t be a stoat or a weasel,’ said Dick. ‘Toes too near together. I’ve got a book with lots of tracks in it, and the stoat’s toes spread out wide. Not like these. I wish I could see where he went. But the ground’s so dry there are no tracks to be seen. …’

‘Not even Captain Nancy’s,’ said Titty, and with that they left the little pool and hurried on up the track after the leader of the expedition.

‘Yes there is,’ said Dick suddenly, stopping short.

‘Is what?’ asked Titty.

‘Spoor,’ said Dick. ‘You can see someone’s been this way. Cutting sticks.’ He pointed at some new cut twigs lying on the ground.

‘She may have been laying a patteran,’ said Titty. ‘You know, to show which way she went. But the sticks aren’t crossing.’

‘Here’s some more,’ said Dick. ‘She’s just been chopping as she went along.’

‘Let’s trail her,’ said Titty, ‘for practice.’

They climbed on with their eyes on the path.

‘Hullo! Here she’s dropped a whole stick.’

Dick picked up a twig about a foot long. Titty found another not unlike it, the end of it showing the marks of a knife.

They went on.

‘Now she’s hacking away at another,’ said Titty. Scraps of thin bark and bits of twig and chopped-off leaves littered the path.

‘Making arrows?’ said Dick. ‘She did once, didn’t she?’

‘That was last year,’ said Titty. ‘For sending messages. This year we’re all together. She can’t be thinking of shooting at Squashy.’

‘Listen,’ said Dick.

They were near the top of the wood. Another bend of the winding path would bring them to the place where the old charcoal-burners’ track turned off into the bushes.’

‘I can hear her,’ said Titty.

‘Shall I shout?’ said Dick.

‘Not when we’re trailing her,’ said Titty. ‘We ought to creep on feet like cats’.’

They heard cheerful shouting far away below them in the wood.

‘The others are coming,’ whispered Dick.

‘She’s at Might Have Been,’ said Titty. ‘Probably up the look-out tree.’

They crept away through the bushes till they came to the tall ash. But no sentinel was up there above their heads. They came to the edge of the old pitstead. There was no one there. And then, suddenly, they caught a glimpse of her under the trees between the pitstead and the Great Wall. They dodged silently nearer, round the edge of the clearing. Nancy, with bent head, seemed to be walking to and fro, looking at the ground.

‘I know what she’s doing,’ said Dick suddenly. ‘She’s …’ But he did not finish his sentence. ‘Is anything the matter?’ he asked, seeing Titty’s face.

They could both see Nancy now.

She was walking slowly about with a forked hazel stick in her hands. First one way and then another she walked, bending low, holding the point of the fork before her over the short tufts of green rushes.

‘But it didn’t work with her,’ said Dick. ‘Only with you. … If it did work. Did it, or was it just because …?’

‘Don’t talk about it,’ said Titty desperately.

And just then they saw Nancy, giving up all hope of dowsing, suddenly jerk herself upright and toss the forked hazel away into the bushes. She put her hands to her mouth and gave an owl call far too cheerful to be really like an owl’s. A moment later she had disappeared, and they could hear her scrambling up the Great Wall. The owl call came again.

Dick tried to answer.

‘Hullo!’ Nancy’s voice came through the trees. ‘Where are you? Come along.’

Other owl calls, good and bad, sounded in the wood.

‘They’re all coming,’ said Dick, as he started forward.

‘Don’t say anything about what she was doing,’ said Titty urgently.

‘All right,’ said Dick, and they ran through the trees, along the edge of the bramble thicket, and up the gully in the rock to find Nancy, shading her eyes with her hands, looking out over the Topps.

‘Well,’ said Nancy. ‘He isn’t there yet. Awful climb from the bottom, isn’t it?’

They threw themselves down on the top of the rock, already hot from the sun, and a moment later Dick had forgotten dowsing, mining, and everything else in watching a small, brown lizard dodging in and out along a crack in the stone.

Titty could not forget. She was still remembering what she had seen, when the rest of the Mining Company came out from the trees below the rock. John, Susan, Peggy, Dorothea. …

‘Come along, Roger,’ called Susan.

Roger, lagging behind the others, came into sight carrying the pigeon-basket, and Titty felt worse than ever.

‘Sorry, Rogie,’ she cried out. ‘It was my turn to bring the pigeon. I forgot all about it. I say, did you bring the right one? Sophocles is the one for today.’

‘He weighs two tons more than Homer,’ said Roger.

‘Let’s have him now,’ said Titty, and she ran down the gully and took the pigeon-basket. ‘Oh, Rogie, I am most awfully sorry.’

‘It’s quite all right,’ said Roger.

But, for Titty that day, everything was all wrong. She could not get the dowsing out of her mind. What if they failed? What if the time came to leave and they had found nothing, and instead of going off knowing that at least they had done the best that could be done, they would have to go knowing that if only she, Titty, had been a little different, the expedition might not have been chained to the Tysons’ pump? She could hardly bear to look at the others. Nobody was worrying her about it, and even that made things seem worse. She wished that nobody had ever thought of trying an experiment with a hazel twig.

The experiment had somehow changed things for everybody. It was all right to sleep in a solemn row of tents under the orchard wall, and to be in time for meals in the farm, so long as this was the very best that could be done. But now, it was almost as if someone had half opened a door and shut it in their faces.

‘Is Squashy in sight?’ she heard John ask.

‘No,’ said Nancy. ‘But he may be behind a ridge or something.’

Even Nancy’s voice had lost its cheerful ring. Her owl call had sounded cheerful enough, but owl calls are not like talking. The most cheerful person can make a melancholy owl call, and the most melancholy person can tuwhit tuwhooooooo as if everything was as right as it possibly could be.

Scouts were sent down to Atkinson’s, but somehow even scouting was not what it had been. Prospecting went on rather half-heartedly. Near the middle of the day Squashy Hat was seen high up on Grey Screes, but nobody had seen him going there, and he might have been there all morning. Nancy’s signal calling in the scouts was not understood by Dorothea, and in the end John went back over the Topps to explain, and had to go down into Atkinson’s wood to find Peggy, who had found a good watching post by the garden wall and was still thinking that Squashy Hat was in the house.

‘He must have set out long before we posted our scouts,’ said Nancy, and Titty knew that everybody was thinking that if only they had been able to camp in the old charcoal-burners’ pitstead close to the edge of the Topps such a thing need never have happened.

Sophocles carried a dull message. … ‘ALL WELL. LOVE.’ … Nancy had not even the heart to put a skull and crossbones on it.

Only once did anything stir the melancholy of the day, and that was when the day was nearly over.

‘He’s painted another white spot,’ said Roger suddenly, just as the prospectors were starting home.

There it was, a great splash of white on the grey rock, a little way below the first.

‘Well, we can’t do anything about it tonight,’ said Susan.

‘Or in the morning,’ said Nancy, ‘not if he’s going to be there before we get up.’

‘It’s awful not being able to cook,’ said Susan. ‘We can’t even start until Mrs Tyson lets us have breakfast.’

They marched home almost in silence.

‘I KNOW WHAT SHE’S DOING’

Tonight nobody wanted to turn aside to have another look at the old pitstead. Titty, as she passed it, looked the other way. She was still seeing Captain Nancy walking desperately up and down with the forked stick and at last throwing it into the bushes. She knew that Nancy had been hoping that, after all, the divining rod would work with her as it had seemed to work with Titty. … If indeed it had worked. Titty had begun to feel doubtful about it herself, though, when she thought of it, she could almost feel the ends of the twig twisting in her hands. What if the whole expedition was going to peter out and come to nothing because of their having to camp in a place that could hardly be called a camp … at least not a camp like Swallowdale or Wild Cat? Why even the Beckfoot garden was better. What if Captain Flint were to come home? … ‘Well, and what have you been up to?’ he would say, and they would have to answer, ‘Nothing.’ … No nugget of gold. … Nothing. … And then he would hear how a perfect stranger had nipped in before them. … Titty could hardly bear the thought. And there was Might Have Been, the perfect camping place, with the cleared platform for the pitching of their tents, and the Great Wall handy to look out over the Topps, and the look-out tree even handier to let a sentinel keep an eye on Atkinson’s. If only the beck had not run dry. Suppose Dick was right about those tufts of dark green rushes. Suppose the water were there all the time needing only to be found. Suppose the hazel twig would work with her and she could find it if she chose to try. Suppose the expedition had its own water diviner, and the water diviner, just at the very moment of real need, was refusing to help them.

Titty walked a little faster.

For the first time the prospectors were back at Tyson’s in time for supper.

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Tyson. ‘Better for everybody. Keep it up if you can, Miss Nancy. You’ve had a good day, I reckon, and home early to end up well.’

There was talk of other holidays during the meal, of sailing, of battles on sea and land, of stories made up by lantern-light in the cabin of an old wherry in Norfolk, of fishing for trout that other summer when the becks had been full of water. But no one had the heart to talk of mining. Nobody could have guessed that this was the evening meal of a company of gold seekers.

‘What’s the matter, Titty?’ asked Susan privately, noticing that all through supper Titty had not said a word.

‘I’m quite all right,’ said Titty.

After supper she slipped out.

‘Where’s Titty?’ said someone a little later.

‘Giving fresh water to the pigeons, probably,’ said someone else.

But Titty, her lips firmly together, was once more climbing the steep track up Tyson’s wood.