Chapter XXIV A Lucky Move
The wind began droning like a monster pipe-organ through the wood. The thunder of the surf sent its solemn cadence to their ears from the seaward side of Storm Island. Night was shutting down threateningly and pregnant with the possibility of coming disaster.
They were comfortable enough under the break of the hill. If worse came to worse, they could clip aboard the Spoondrift and take shelter in her cabin. She was not likely to pitch much here in the cove, with the wind in its present quarter.
Red took Peewee in his arms, despite that infant’s strenuous objections, and sang to him:
“Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top!
When the wind blows the cradle will rock.”
“I’ll bounce a rock off your top story—that’s the sort of a rock I’ll give you!” threatened Hicks. “What do you think you’re doing, nursing a first-form kid?”
The evening promised to be tempestuous, both in the tent and out. The atmospheric pressure has something to do with the brittleness of human temper at such times. Midkiff and Cloudman got into a wrangle that Kingdon had to settle with some abruptness, and Hicks had a chip on his shoulder most of the time. After a while, getting tired of it, Rex called sharply:
“Stop the fussing. I have something serious to say. This tent isn’t right. I haven’t been satisfied with its position since it was raised. It isn’t properly sheltered from the wind, and we’re going to have some wind to-night, my husky lads. Come on, let’s move it before it gets any darker.”
“Move it!”
“It should be at least twenty yards over here to the east,” insisted Rex. “No time like the present. Give a hand.” He began to pull up stakes.
“You’re crazy, Rex,” Midkiff said.
“Let the tent alone!” cried Cloudman.
“Ain’t to-morrow another day?” queried Peewee shrilly, almost in tears. “I don’t want to work any more to-night.”
“This tent is going to be moved to-night,” asserted the leader of the party.
“You’re foolish, Rex,” Midkiff again said.
“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Peewee. “I don’t see——”
“You don’t have to,” Kingdon said with sharpness. “Come, now! Think I’m going to do this all alone? Want to get it set up again before the rain comes.”
“I won’t do it!” Phillips protested. “It’s foolishness. You’re using the steel fist without any reason.”
Midkiff yielded. “Rex is within his rights. He’s captain. If he says it’s moving day, why move we must. But to-morrow we’ll see about this.”
“You’ll have to show us why and what-for to-morrow, then,” said Cloudman morosely. “I can obey orders as well as the next one. But these are tyrannical. I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. This will need a lot of explaining to satisfy me.”
It was a grouchy bunch that tackled the job. Before starting for the summer camp Rex had been unanimously chosen captain, and they had agreed to obey every order given by him. This, of course, was quite necessary aboard the Spoondrift. Discipline had become somewhat lax ashore, but Kingdon still had the right to command, if he wished to enforce it.
It was necessary to get out the lanterns before they were through, and ere the job was finished it had begun to rain.
Some of their “dunnage” got damp, and when Hicks got into his nightshirt the bottom of it was sopping wet. He almost frothed at the mouth beneath the chaffing of the others.
The rainfall began and continued without the roll of thunder or the flash of lightning. It was a tempest, nevertheless. Harder and harder the rain drummed on the canvas roof. The torrential downpour would have drowned conversation had the boys attempted it.
Their five cots were arranged just as they had been before, but somehow they did not now seem so comfortable. Peewee growled about his nightshirt, and Cloudman snickered. In the dark the little fellow tried to smash his tormentor with his own hard, hay-stuffed pillow. When he got hold of it again the pillow was wet.
“The water’s leaking in under the tent, King!” snarled Peewee. “You got us in a nice mess!”
“In the morning you shall take a pick and shovel, honey, and dig a nice trench all around.”
“I’ll see you hanged first!” bawled the rebel.
“Go to sleep and forget it,” advised Red.
They all got to sleep finally. But it was not yet morning when they were awakened again by Peewee, who seemed to be having a nightmare.
“That blamed infant!” Midkiff was saying with shocking emphasis. “I never did see such a pestiferous insect.”
Hicks was squealing: “Stop it! Stop! ’Tain’t time to get up. That’s only the first bell. Slop any more of that water on me, and I won’t leave you enough to wash your face in!”
“Somebody please hit him on the head with the hatchet,” urged Phillips.
“Ouch!” bawled the now thoroughly awakened Peewee. “I’m all afloat.”
“What d’ye mean—afloat?” demanded Kingdon, sitting up.
“Water’s dripping ri-right into my ear,” wailed Hicks.
“Ahoy! She’s sprung a leak! Man the lifeboats!” came from Red Phillips. “All hands to the pumps.”
Then they heard something which at first they thought was the rain increasing. It seemed to be rushing down the hill upon them in a regular flood. Then, with a rumble and roar that seemed to rock the earth itself, an avalanche fell upon the plateau.
Kingdon sprang up, seized the lantern that was burning low, turned up the wick, and got outside as quickly as possible. Midkiff was at his heels. In bare feet, they slopped through the two-inch flood that ran all around the tent. The rain was pouring steadily down. Through the darkness and the downpour they saw, just about where the tent had formerly stood, a bulky object around which the rain smoked.
“Mercy, Rex! What is it?” Midkiff gasped.
“The bowlder,” Kingdon said in a muffled, almost choky voice.
“Bowlder?”
“It overhung the camp. I—I was afraid of it. That’s why I had the tent shifted.”
“Good boy!” Midkiff patted his shoulder. “Your hunch saved us.”
Both recovered themselves as the others rushed out of the tent. No boy cares to reveal, even to his closest friend, the deeper feelings of his nature, and Rex and Midkiff said nothing more about appreciating the wisdom that had saved them all from disaster.
“Look at that rock!” gasped little Hicks, staring and shivering. “Rex, you kept us from being smashed by making us move.”
“It—it was lucky, Rex, that you made us do that,” admitted Cloudman.
“You’re a wonder!” Red exploded. “If we’d been there we’d been driven three feet under ground. They’d never had to bother to bury us.”
Midkiff pointed to the east. “It’s almost daybreak. No more sleep.”
“I should say not!” Cloudman agreed.
“The rain washed the rock free and sent it down the hill,” decided Phillips. “I can understand that, all right. But why did it fall just now? Of course, there’s nothing fishy about it, Rex?”
“I couldn’t say. A fish might have done it, but he’d had a stiff climb up to where that rock was.”
“After that I’m sorry that you moved! There’s nobody would have done such a thing, anyway.”
“Even that scaley Injun wasn’t on the island,” Applejack added.
“I don’t believe our beloved Horace, or any of his bunch, would have strolled out in such a rain,” Red went on carelessly.
“Hush!” chided Kingdon. “Evil to him who evil thinks.”
“It’s knocked all the think out of me,” said Cloudman, grinning in a sickly way.
All five felt a seriousness that they feared to display. Boys are prone to consider any show of deeper feeling unmanly.
They started to dress, and found that the most of their garments were more or less wet. As for putting on shoes and socks, that was foolish. The driest place they could find was the cabin of the catboat, and as it was almost high water they easily got aboard. When the oilstove was lighted, Cloudman started to fry soft clams and bacon for breakfast.
“Talk about paradise!” sighed Red, stretching and crowding Peewee into a space about as wide as a knife-edge. “This is it.”
“It distinctly is not it,” denied Hicks. “A sardine in a can feels lonesome, ’side of me. Move over, and let a fellow breathe.”
Kingdon had not come aboard to stop. Getting into his oilskins, he climbed the hill above the camp alone. He was in a pretty serious mood. The bowlder had sheared the sod off the hillside for its entire course. The water was running in a brown flood down the path of the avalanche.
Where the bowlder had been set was a hole all of two feet deep, and full of water. The drainage from above, pouring down the hill, seemed to have excavated the earth from all around the station of the bowlder. It might be that the huge rock was merely washed out of its bed by the rain and started in its plunge down the hill.
Kingdon looked farther up the hill. Through the still falling drizzle he mounted the slope a few yards and found the sapling that he had before noted. It had been brought out of the woods and apparently had been put to criminal use. The smaller stone, still in position as a fulcrum, pointed to one answer to the problem. The leverage of that green stick might easily have started the bowlder to rolling. The rain had merely helped cover the fact.
In Rex Kingdon’s mind a thought took form: “An enemy hath done this!”