The Happy Adventurers by Lydia Miller Middleton (best thriller novels of all time TXT) 📖

“It’s only our private language,” said Prudence; “she says that if you talk that way we’ll talk our way, and then you won’t understand us. That wouldn’t do any good. I think we’d better have a Circle. Give me your hand, Mollie, and you take Hugh’s. And Hugh Dick’s, and Dick Grizzel’s, and Grizzel Young Outram’s, and Young Outram my other hand. Now all stand quite still and shut your eyes; listen to the waves, and try and think of three nice things about the people next you.”

The six children stood in a circle, silent and still, as Prudence had ordered, their eyes tightly closed. They felt the hot beams of the sun pouring over them, and the cool salt wind blew on their faces and through their hair; their toes curled and wriggled in the warm, wet sand, and in their ears was the plash-plash of the little waves beating backwards and forwards on the beach. It was very pleasant. It seemed quite easy to think of those three nice things. And presently each child felt a warm and friendly glow steal up its left arm, through its heart, down its right arm—and so on to its neighbour. When this pleasing and cheerful sensation had gone round the Circle three times, Prudence said: “Now, open your eyes and let go.”

They stood there smiling at each other, and feeling almost ready to burst with goodness and loving kindness towards all the world.

“Now we’ll understand each other,” said Prue. “Words don’t matter much if you understand people. Now what shall we do?”

“Don’t let’s stand about any more,” said Mollie; “the time does go so quickly, and there are lovely things to do. What would you like to do, Young Outram?”

“Call me Jerry all the time,” he answered first. “I want to forget about school while I can—there are a good many of us at school,” he explained to Prudence, “and we are called Old Outram, and Outram Two, and Young Outram; and there are three Outram Kids at the prep, and another kid at home.”

“All boys!” exclaimed Prudence.

Jerry nodded. There had been nine Outram boys before the war! “Let’s go out on the raft again—please,” he added, with a wink at Grizzel, who smiled back. “You come too; we could easily push you along.”

“We’ll have to change into our bathing things first,” said Prudence; “the raft looks a little wet. We won’t be long.”

The girls ran up into the sandhills to change, but before Prue disappeared she returned to the boys with a basket made of rushes in her hand, which she had begged from Bridget.

“Here are some buns and grapes,” she said a little shyly, “I thought you might be feeling hungry, and it is a long time yet till tea-time.”

Jerry decided on the spot that if he ever did go in for the peculiar entertainment of falling in love, he would choose a shy girl with brown curls who did not talk slang and went about distributing buns to hungry boys. “Her for mine,” he expressed it to himself.

The girls were soon back, all in navy-blue bathing-suits, knickers below, and a belted tunic reaching to their knees above—too much clothed for Mollie’s taste; she liked to be skimpy when she went swimming. But no one grumbles after they have been in a Circle—at least, not for the next twenty-four hours—so Mollie endured her substantial garments philosophically and soon forgot all about them.

The girls waded out to the raft, which the boys had launched. They climbed on board and were soon in fairly deep water. Mollie and Prudence slipped off and left lazy Grizzel alone on deck, sitting cross-legged like a little tailor, one arm flung round the mast. The raft rocked gently up and down on the calm sea, while the children swam, ducked, and played about in the clear, sun-warmed water like a school of young porpoises. As Grizzel sat idly watching the rest, her eyes fell upon an object which floated at a little distance from the raft. It was a bottle—a common beer-bottle—its cork rammed well in and sealed with red wax.

“What’s that?” she called to Hugh, pointing to the bottle as it danced about, twirling round and round, tossing from side to side in the wide ripples sent out by the children and the drifting raft.

They all made for it. “It’s a message from the deep,” cried Jerry; “probably from a ship-wrecked sailor.”

Hugh, being the nearest, caught it by its red neck, and the whole party collected on and about the raft to see what would happen next. But Hugh refused to break the bottle until they went ashore again.

“The sea might get in and spoil the paper, and the broken glass would get on deck and cut us; we’ll pull her in now and read the message on the beach,” he decided.

They got under way and, practice making perfect, were soon high and dry on the beach, and the Nancy Lee dragged up and comfortably moored. The children seated themselves in a ring, and Hugh cautiously knocked off the neck of the bottle with a stone. He drew out a paper, which had been carefully rolled round a thin bamboo stick and tied with a red ribbon. There was no date on the paper, nor was there any sign to show where the bottle had been thrown in, but written in large, clear round-hand was the following message:

IF THE FINDER OF THIS BOTTLE WILL SEARCH THE CAVE UNDER THE DUKE’S NOSE HE WILL FIND SOMETHING TO HIS ADVANTAGE.

“Hidden treasure,” said three boys all at once. “Where is The Duke’s Nose?” asked Dick.

“Never heard of it,” answered Hugh, looking hard at Jerry, whose nose was distinctly aquiline and promised to be more so in the future. “You aren’t a duke by any chance, I suppose?” he asked.

“No, old sport, I’m not,” Jerry answered, with a grin, “and if I were, the only treasure you would find in the cave under my nose would be some jolly sharp teeth, and they wouldn’t be at all to your advantage either.”

“It’s probably among those rocks over there,” Mollie suggested; “I expect if we went there and walked round we would see something that looked like a duke’s nose.”

“But there aren’t any big enough to have a cave under them,” said Prudence; “they are all quite little rocks.”

“It will be a bit of the cliff, most likely,” said Dick, “in fact it is almost bound to be if there is a cave.”

The others agreed that this was probable. “What do you think the hidden treasure will be?” asked Grizzel. “A sack of diamonds and rubies?”

“I hope not,” said Jerry, “for, if it is anything of that sort, we will have to give it up. If we were caught trying to sell diamonds we’d be copped at once, and the bobbies would think the bottle story was all made up. I expect we’d all be put in jail, and it would be jolly awkward for Dick and me when we got back to school. I think I see the Old Man’s face when we explained that we couldn’t come because we were in an Australian prison in the year 1879 for stealing diamonds. I don’t think!”

“Schoolmasters and mistresses are extraordinarily stupid sometimes,” said Mollie reflectively. “They are so hard to convince, even about quite simple things, if they don’t want to be convinced. But I shouldn’t care for diamonds myself. I’d like a swanky tennis-racket.”

“I’d like a revolver, latest pattern,” said Jerry.

“I should like a first-class camera,” said Hugh.

“I’d like a pure-bred bull-dog,” said Dick.

“I’d like a nice little model sewing-machine,” said Prue.

“I’d like six pairs of stilts,” said Grizzel, “and then we could all walk home on them.”

Everyone looked a little ashamed; Grizzel was the only one who had thought of the five others. A murmur went round that of course they had meant six of everything. Then Mollie began to laugh: “How funny we will look if we each get all the things,” she giggled. “We will walk home on the stilts, with a revolver and a sewing-machine tied on to each stilt, and a tennis-racket and a camera on our backs, and six bull-dogs trotting after us.”

This flight of fancy made everyone laugh consumedly: “We must go home now, anyway,” Prudence said, as she dried a tear, “because it is getting on for tea-time and we have got to get dressed. Perhaps there will be time to go to the rocks after tea and just look for a nose, and if we find it we’ll take some spades in the morning and dig.”

The Campbell’s seaside cottage stood behind the sandhills. It had been built by a retired sea-captain, who had planned it to look as like a ship inside as a house could be made to look. The walls were panelled in wood, painted bird’s-egg blue, and decorated with pictures of ships. The windows were round like portholes; the table stood across one end of the room and was screwed to the floor, as were also the benches on either side. In the children’s rooms were bunks, in rows one above the other, and the washing-stands were fixtures. It was altogether very charming and romantic.

Tea was of the kind called high, and the hungry children disposed of cold ham, an extraordinary number of boiled eggs, several loaves of smoking hot new bread, and at least a pound of butter and two or three pounds of jam.

“May we go for a walk to the rocks?” asked Prudence, when tea was over. “We will go very quietly along the beach and not get wet, and be home before dark.”

Papa said he would walk that way a little later on and meet them; so Mamma gave permission, and soon a party of six were wandering by the shore towards the rocks, carrying their boots and stockings slung round their necks. It did not take them long to cover the two miles which lay between their beach and the rocks. Mollie found it hard to pass by all the lovely shells with which the beach was strewn, but the rest were impatient. The sun was dropping down the sky and they had not too much time for their search.

It did not promise to be a very successful search, for nowhere was there anything even remotely like a duke’s nose to be seen—nor indeed any sort of nose. The rocks were low and for the most part jagged, with pools of water in the hollows between them for unwary or careless people to slip into. Many of them were covered with periwinkles, which Grizzel could not resist gathering. She filled her boots with them.

“Papa likes them,” she said, when Prudence and Mollie remonstrated with her for lingering; “he says they taste like a sea-breeze, and if we aren’t going to take back a duke’s nose I may as well take a periwinkle’s nose; it will be better than nothing.”

The cliffs were high and precipitous, but they were no particular shape, being, as Hugh said, merely the edge of Australia. The children scrambled along till they reached the turn of the coast-line, beyond which were more rocks and cliffs, much the same as those about them.

“Perhaps it isn’t here at all,” Prudence said, as they seated themselves in a row on the edge of a big boulder; “the message didn’t say it was. It might be anywhere. Perhaps that bottle came hundreds of miles, and the Duke’s Nose is at the South Pole.”

“More likely Kangaroo Island or Yorke’s Peninsula,” Hugh said. “We might sail the raft across—it’s only about fifty miles to the Peninsula.”

“How’d you get