TITTY, LIKE DICK, had been thinking more of the birds than of the capture of the egg-collector. Her heart, like his, had missed a beat at hearing those two shots on the loch that had turned the McGinty and his Gaels into allies instead of gaolers. She had pursued the egg-collector like a young fury but without hope, for she thought that all was over, the eggs stolen and the birds dead. Then had come Dick’s news that the birds had escaped and that if only they could give them back the eggs there was yet a chance that the story of the Divers might have a happy ending. The others were looking for the eggs to take them from the egg-collector. Titty, like Dick, was looking for them in the wild desperate hope that it might not yet be too late to give them back to the birds.
It was Titty who had said, ‘Dick’ll want the boat as well as the eggs,’ so that, while all the others were searching for the box, John and Nancy, after rescuing the boat, had pulled it up and were emptying the water out of it. She herself moved fast from one patch of heather to another. The egg-collector or his man must have hidden the box in the heather, not among the stones where it would easily be seen. For less than a minute the two of them had been out of sight as they ran up from the shore. They must have known that their only chance was to hide the box and come back for it later. It could not be far away. Feverishly her hands groped among the tough stems of the heather. The trouble was that she did not know exactly what she was looking for. Dick, searching a dozen yards away, had said it was a box but he did not know what kind of a box or how big. Nor did John and Nancy, though they had seen that the egg-collector had had something in his hands. Titty groped on and on. This was worse than hunting for Captain Flint’s cabin trunk hidden under the stones of Cormorant Island. That, after all, had had in it only a book and a typewriter, things that were not in a hurry. This was a matter of life and death. Quick! Oh, quick! Life and Death! She thought of the Divers grieving for their rifled nest. She thought of the young Divers who might never peck through the shells into the world outside. What was that box like? Big? It could not be very small. And then, thrusting deep into a tuft of heather, she doubled her fingers against something hard. There was blood on the backs of her hands where she had scraped them against the heather stems. There was more blood now as her knuckles hit on a buckle.
‘Dick!’ she called.
Dick was beside her in a moment, the others close behind him. He had lifted the box from under the heather and was trying to help her to undo the strap. She heard Dorothea saying, ‘Titty found it.’ She heard Dick saying, ‘The buckle’s stuck.’ She heard Nancy’s, ‘Let me get at it.’
Nancy’s fingers, not trembling like Titty’s and Dick’s had unfastened the strap. Titty’s head bumped on Dick’s as they bent to look in. There were the eggs, the two big oval eggs of the Great Northern Diver, dark olive, blotched with darker brown, each in a nest of cotton wool in a compartment at the bottom of the box.
‘Blown?’ asked Dick breathlessly.
‘They’re still warm!’ said Titty. ‘I can feel them warm even without touching them.’
‘The boat!’ exclaimed Dick. ‘There’s still a chance. Quick! Quick! Cover up the eggs.’
The McGinty and Captain Flint were standing over them and looking down into the box. Roger was there too, Peggy, Susan, Dorothea, the young McGinty. Flitting through Dick’s mind came the thought that anyhow the thing was proved now. The whole crew of the Sea Bear and the two McGintys had with their own eyes seen the first eggs of the Great Northern Diver ever known to be laid in the British Isles. But it hardly seemed to matter. What mattered now was to get them back to the nest. He went hurrying down to the shore.
Titty heard above her head the grave deep voice of the McGinty. ‘Queer that a grown man should be ready to swindle a boy for a couple of eggs.’
‘It isn’t just the eggs,’ said Captain Flint. ‘What he’s after is a place in history.
‘I’ll see that he gets one,’ said the McGinty, ‘if we hear any more of him. Preserve the birds! He was for preserving them dead. And the eggs too. And taking them from my loch without so much as a “By your leave.”’
‘Boat’s ready,’ shouted John.
‘I’ll row,’ said Nancy.
‘No! No!’ said Dick, thinking of Nancy pulling as in a boat-race, straight for the island. That would be the last straw, even if the birds had not already been too frightened to return.
‘Dick ought to do it himself,’ said Dorothea.
‘All right, Professor,’ said Nancy. ‘Your eggs.’
‘I’m bringing the eggs,’ said Titty.
‘Yes,’ said Dick. He walked straight into the water, stepped into the boat and sat down.
A moment later they were both afloat. Dick was rowing as quietly as he could. Titty was sitting in the stern nursing the egg-box. The crew of the Sea Bear still on shore, the McGintys, father and son, Captain Flint, the raging egg-collector and his man, watched by the dogs and ghillies, all had ceased to exist for them. Nothing mattered now but the birds. Had they flown away for ever? If they had come back, would they be frightened away again by yet another human visit to the island? And that visit had to be made. Would the birds, in spite of everything, come back to their nest or would they not? Everything hung on that one question. If the eggs were put back in vain, there would be only miserable failure to remember. It would be a pity that the Sea Bear had come into the cove instead of being scrubbed in harbour. It would be a pity Dick had ever found the birds, a pity that, after he had found them, he had not sailed away without trying to prove what birds they were.
‘The island’s over there,’ said Titty.
‘I know,’ said Dick, but did not row straight for it. For a moment or two he said nothing more. Then he thought he ought to explain. ‘The nest’s at this end,’ he said earnestly. ‘So we’d better come at the island from the other.’
‘But every minute counts,’ Titty all but whispered.
‘If we frighten them again it’ll be longer before they come back.’
He rowed steadily on while Titty sat there with the egg-box, more and more afraid that they were too late and that the birds were already far away. Driven from their nest, shot at, missed, pursued again, the Great Northern Divers might have left the loch altogether and flown, despairing, on and on, northward to the Arctic. Well, if they had gone, there could be no hope of saving the eggs. They could not be kept warm for very long. Sooner or later the life that was hidden in them would fade away. How long, already, had they been taken from the nest? Things had happened very quickly. The taking of the eggs had been long after the shots, for Dick had seen it done. Then, when Dick’s shout had saved the birds, the thief and his man had rowed for the shore and been caught. The search for the box had been a short one. Perhaps the eggs had been in the box not half an hour altogether. But where were the Divers? She saw that Dick kept glancing across the loch in the hope of seeing them. She too, kept looking out over the water but nowhere could she see those strange, great birds.
Suddenly Dick stopped rowing.
‘There’s one of them,’ he whispered. ‘Only its head showing.’
Titty stared in the direction in which he was looking, but could see nothing.
‘Heuch! Heuch! Heuch!’
‘That’s the other one,’ said Dick. ‘They’re coming back. We’ve still got a chance.’
‘Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!’
This time it was not the guttural screech of alarm but a weird yelping call.
Far up the loch in the gleaming water between herself and the evening sun, Titty saw a long line of splashes as the bird came down on the water.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Dick, more to himself than to Titty. ‘I can’t help it if they do see us. They’re coming back. We’ve got to go straight to the island.’
Rowing again, as quietly as he could, he turned the boat and made straight for the end of the island furthest from the flat bit of shore where the Divers had their nest.
‘Perhaps better if they do see us now,’ he said presently. ‘Better than if they go back to the nest before we’ve put the eggs there.’
‘We simply must get there first,’ said Titty.
At last she saw the head and neck of one of the birds, swimming as if to meet the one that had just flown down to the loch.
‘We’re all right,’ she whispered. ‘It’s going the other way.’
Dick said nothing. He wanted to bring the boat in close by the reeds where he had hidden it that morning and again, in his hurry, he was finding it hard to steer. There was a gentle swish as the bows pushed into the reeds. A moment later the keel touched ground, and Dick stepped out into the water, pulled the boat up a foot or two, and held out his hands for the box.
‘I’d better not come,’ said Titty.
‘No,’ said Dick. ‘It’s a pity even one of us has to go there. They must be watching us now.’
She handed over the box and waited.
Dick seemed hardly to have gone before he was back.
‘Just where they were,’ he whispered, as he pushed the boat off and stepped in. ‘Lucky I’d seen how they lay . . . side by side, but not touching. That beast hadn’t upset things either. He said he wanted to take the whole nest, but he didn’t have time and he left it when he thought he had another chance of shooting them. He’d have had to dig up a bit of the shore. The nest looks just like it did. If only the birds come back to it before the eggs get cold.’
‘That one in the water dived and came up much nearer. It’s dived again. At least I can’t see it.’
‘We must get away,’ said Dick.
They were nearly half-way across to the shore, when they heard that yelping cry again.
‘Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!’
One of the birds was once more in the air. It came flying overhead so that they saw its pale underneath and its great folded feet. Round it swung high above them.
‘If only it tells the other one we’ve really gone,’ said Titty.
Dick went on rowing until a long splashing furrow in the water fifty or sixty yards away showed where the bird came down.
‘Now,’ said Dick.
‘Are they both there?’ said Titty.
Dick pulled in the oars and let the boat drift while he tugged Captain Flint’s binoculars from their case.
‘That one’s swimming quite high,’ he said. ‘Its back’s showing . . . Can’t be so frightened . . . I can’t see the other . . . Yes, I can . . . Still only head and neck . . . But they’re nearer the island . . . One’s gone under . . . Up again . . . Oh, don’t let the boat rock . . . They’re both swimming properly . . . I say, one’s going straight for the shore where the nest is . . . It must have seen the eggs by now . . . It . . .’ There was a long, breathless pause . . . ‘It’s coming out . . . Using its wings like flippers . . . like a seal . . . It’s on the nest . . . Here, you look . . . What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Titty impatiently, scrumpling her handkerchief into a ball. It really was dreadful, the way her eyes would weep when there was nothing whatever to weep about . . . quite the contrary.
‘Look,’ said Dick. ‘Put your elbows on your knees to keep the glasses steady.’
Titty took the glasses and looked. For a moment the island swung from side to side, but, as the boat steadied, she saw it, the flat bit of shore, the rocks where heather had sprouted in the night, and yes, in front of those rocks, a yard or so from the water’s edge, a huge black and white speckled bird, with a dark neck on which were two striped patches, the Great Northern Diver, sitting on its nest. Its mate was swimming to and fro in the water just beyond the island.
‘Come on,’ said Titty. ‘Let’s go and tell the others.’
‘Gosh! Oh Gosh!’ said Dick, almost as if he were Roger, and, blinking joyfully through his spectacles, pulled for the shore.