18

The White Spots

IT WAS LATE indeed and the sun was pouring down on the tents before they woke again. It was already too late to be worth while starting before breakfast. John raced down to Tyson’s for the morning milk because he could do it quicker than anybody else. Breakfast was pitched in at high speed. Squashy Hat might be stirring now at any minute, and when John, Nancy and the professor hurried out across the Topps a scouting party was told off to watch Atkinson’s farm and to give warning the moment the enemy was on the move.

‘But what’s it for?’ said Nancy.

They were looking at a great patch of white paint on the face of a rock a long way up the steep slopes of Grey Screes. There seemed to be no reason for it at all. Here was nothing but craggy hillside, hard to climb, with no signs of old workings of any kind. Up here, they were high above the Topps. The country they had left spread below them like a map. They could even see glimpses of the distant lake, and the further hills, and High Greenland where, in the Christmas holidays, Dick had rescued a cragfast sheep. But they had not climbed so high only to look at views. John scratched the white paint with his finger-nail.

‘It’s just ordinary paint,’ he said.

‘Come on,’ said Nancy. ‘Let’s go on and have a look at another.’

They climbed, sometimes on hands and knees on the rocks, sometimes skirting round a bit of crag too steep to climb. They came, breathless, to the second of the white patches. Standing beside it, they could see another higher still.

‘Well, it beats me,’ said Nancy.

‘Found anything, Professor?’ said John. Dick was digging at something with a knife and looking very worried.

‘He’s been hammering at this stuff,’ he said, ‘but I can’t think why.’

A little above the big round splash of paint there was a wide crack in the rock full of what looked like rust and ashes, brown, reddish and black. Here, and nowhere else, were marks of a hammer. Bits of the stuff were lying loose. It looked as if someone had been trying to clean out the crack.

‘What is it?’ said John.

‘Iron, I should think,’ said Dick, ‘with that rusty stuff, but I don’t know.’ He had pulled the mineralogy book from his knapsack, but found no help in it.

John and Nancy attacked the stuff with their hammers.

‘It’s just dirt,’ said Nancy.

‘It can’t be that,’ said John. ‘Let’s go up to the top one.’

They climbed again, and came to the first and highest of the white patches. And here, too, there seemed to be no reason for it, unless it was that near this patch also was what looked like an old crack in the rock, six or seven inches across, full of this same reddish dirt.

‘He’s been doing a good deal of hammering at this one,’ said John.

‘Trying to sink a well,’ laughed Nancy, poking the handle of her hammer into a deep hole in the dirt. There were chips of grey rock round it as if someone had been using hammer and chisel. Small scraps of reddish dirt were scattered about.

‘Let’s go down again to the bottom one and see if there’s any of the same stuff there,’ said John.

‘Right,’ said Nancy. ‘That’ll settle it. But, I say, Professor, are you sure about the stuff?’

‘Not really,’ said Dick, ‘but it looks like rust. And, anyhow, it isn’t gold.’

They raced downhill, leaping, running, sliding, pulling up short and going carefully sideways down the steepest bits until they came to the lowest of the white paint splashes.

‘Here it is,’ said John. ‘Just the same as up above.’

They were looking at another crack in the rock full of red dirt exactly like the stuff they had been looking at. Here, too, were marks of Squashy Hat’s hammer and chisel. Dick picked up bits of the stuff one after another.

‘I don’t believe they’re worth anything at all,’ he said.

‘Hullo, here’s his paint pot,’ said Nancy.

They all three had a good look at the paint pot, as if that could answer questions. But it answered none. It was an ordinary tin of paint with a wire handle for carrying, and a press-in lid. It was labelled ‘Household Paint. White. For indoor or outdoor use.’

‘I wonder if it’s the same crack going all the way up the hill,’ said Dick. ‘Each bit points about the same way, and there’s a lot of grass and loose stones. Perhaps if we could clear it away we’d find it was all one crack.’

Dick, in that moment, had come very near the truth, but none of them knew it, and Dick himself presently threw the idea away. He was still looking at bits of the reddish stuff that had been chipped from the crack. ‘He can’t really be interested in that rubbish,’ he said.

‘Got it,’ said Nancy. ‘Galoots we are. Gummocks. Mutton-headed gummocks. Of course he isn’t. He’s only pretending. He’s guessed that Slater Bob has told us something he hasn’t told him. He comes up here just to have an excuse for watching us. From here he can see everything in High Topps. That’s it. You know, he didn’t start coming up here till after we’d begun prospecting.’

She stopped suddenly, looking at John’s face which had turned the colour of an over-ripe tomato.

‘What’s the matter?’

She turned to see what he was staring at.

Fifty yards away on the hillside Squashy Hat himself was standing, with his back towards them, looking away into the distance as if he did not know they were there.

Nancy’s mouth fell open. She still had the stranger’s can of white paint in her hands. She put it hurriedly down in the place where she had found it.

‘He was looking this way when I first saw him,’ whispered John, who was feeling almost as if he had been caught in somebody else’s garden.

‘I’m sure it’s only iron,’ said Dick, who had been scraping away at a bit with his pocket knife.

‘Shut up!’ hissed Nancy. ‘Look!’

‘Let’s ask him what the stuff is,’ said Dick.

‘We can’t,’ said Nancy. ‘We’ve got to get out. Come on. Don’t look his way.’

Dick looked at John, but John, too, was all for getting out, as quickly as possible, without actually running away. After all, not one of them knew Squashy Hat. And even if he was a rival, and trying to find the gold that they were after, it was not very pleasant to be caught examining his can of paint and looking at the places where he had been busy with his hammer. Mother was the friendliest and most understanding of all natives, but this was not a thing of which she could be expected to approve.

Silently, and not exactly hurrying, but not dawdling either, they went down Grey Screes and across High Topps to the camp.

They did not once look back at the Screes. Squashy Hat may have been looking at them or he may not, but both John and Nancy felt his eyes on their backs. Dick, thinking of the red dirt, had other troubles. He cheered up, however, on the way.

AS IF HE DID NOT KNOW THEY WERE THERE

‘Perhaps he didn’t know what it was himself,’ he said at last.

‘He was only using it for an excuse to be up there spying on us,’ said Nancy. ‘The white spots are all part of his villainy. What he wants is to keep an eye on us, and to be ready to jump our claim the moment we find the gold. We were quite right to go and look. Even Susan would say so. But I don’t know what our scouts were doing not to warn us he was coming.’

Half-way across the Topps they met Roger, Peggy, Titty and Dorothea hurrying to meet them.

‘Did he say anything?’ asked Dorothea.

‘What happened?’ asked Titty.

‘You’re a fine lot of scouts,’ said Nancy bitterly. ‘Letting us get caught like that. Why didn’t you signal?’

‘We did,’ said Peggy.

‘Like windmills,’ said Roger, ‘for hours and hours, but it wasn’t any good because you never looked at us.’

‘I suppose we can’t have done,’ said Nancy, rather sheepishly for her.

Back in the camp, where Susan had made scrambled eggs for them on a huge scale, breaking sixteen eggs one after another into the frying-pan, a council was held. Whatever happened everybody was to keep clear of Squashy Hat. Susan was very firm on that, and John and Nancy, after the morning’s experience, seemed almost as native as Susan.

‘But he didn’t really say anything,’ said Dorothea.

‘It was just as bad as if he had,’ said John.

‘Perhaps worse,’ said Susan.

‘Perhaps we ought to stop prospecting except when he isn’t there.’

‘If we do,’ said Nancy, ‘he’ll know we’ve found out that his scratchings and blobs of white paint are just to hide that he’s watching to find out where Slater Bob told us to look.’

‘Nancy’s right,’ said Captain John. ‘We’ve got to go on just as if we hadn’t found him out.’

‘We haven’t really,’ said Dick.

Sophocles was sent off soon after dinner. The message sent with him said nothing about Squashy Hat.

‘NEW CAMP COULDN’T BE BETTER. AND YOU JUST TRY OUR COOKING, SUSAN’S I MEAN.’

The skull with which the message was signed was grinning so cheerfully that nobody could have guessed how near things had come to being very awkward.

That afternoon a long line of prospectors combed the Topps as if there was no Squashy Hat busy on the hillside above them. And Squashy Hat, for his part, went on with his work as if there were no prospectors looking up every now and then to see what he was doing. He even added yet another white spot to the others, a little way below the third. He left Grey Screes and went home while the prospectors were still on the Topps. It seemed almost as if he did not care what they might be doing.

There was no need now to get down to Tyson’s farm for supper, and the combing went on till dusk. Peggy was sent off first to run down for more milk. Susan followed her to get the fire going and to cook the supper. The others went on till they could hardly see.

After supper Nancy and John marked the map that they had made, putting black dots to show the old workings they had found, and rough shading over the strips of country that had been combed. The shaded part seemed very small when they remembered how many days had gone.

‘You know we did more the first day than we’ve ever done since,’ said Nancy.

‘Well, we’ve had to have somebody keeping an eye on him,’ said John.

‘And then there was the well to dig and shifting camp,’ said Nancy.

‘How many more days have we got?’ said Titty.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Nancy. ‘Anyway we jolly well will get up early tomorrow, and we’ll search about two hundred square miles.’

‘Combing?’ said Roger. ‘I don’t believe it’s any good. Marching along in a row we’ll never find it. It may be in the part we won’t get at till it’s time to go. If it’s there at all.’

‘We jolly well know it’s there,’ said Nancy. ‘We’re bound to find it if we go on. If we start just dashing about all over the place we may miss it altogether.’