CHAPTER III

PRATTLE

The one street of the village contained only two shops. One of these, the forepart of a simple cottage, was post office and general store, whose window displayed groceries, sweetstuffs, stockings, reels of cotton, and other articles of a miscellaneous stock. A few yards beyond it stood a larger, newer, and uglier building, the lower storey of which was a double-fronted shop, exhibiting on the one side a heterogeneous heap of old iron, on the other a few agricultural implements, a ramshackle bicycle, a mangle, tin tea-pots, a can of petrol, a concertina, and various oddments. Above the door, in crude letters painted yellow, ran the description: "Samuel Blevins, General Dealer."

"We must try the post office," said Warrender. "But I don't expect we'll find anything up to much. Still, there'll be some local views."

They entered the little shop, filling the space in front of the counter, and began to examine picture-postcards. The shopkeeper, a middle-aged woman in a widow's cap, was in the act of handing packets of baking-powder to a customer--a small man who turned quickly about as the boys went in, showing a plump, brown face decorated with a tiny, black moustache and dark, vivacious eyes.

"And how be your missus?" the woman was saying.

"She is ver' vell," said the man, swinging round again. "Zat is, not bad--not bad. She have a cold--yes, shust a leetle cold."

"I be main glad 'tis nothing worse," said the shopkeeper, drily. "Rogers did say only this morning as he hadn't seed or heard anything of her for a week or more--and her his own sister, too, and not that breadth between 'em. She might as well be in foreign parts. 'Twas never thoughted when she married you, Mr. Rod; my meaning is, Rogers believed her'd always be in and out, being so near; whereas the truth is he sees no more of her than if she lived at t'other end of the kingdom."

"And now ze isinglass," said the man, with the obvious intention of turning the conversation. "Vat! No isinglass? Zis is terrible country. Vell, zat is all, madame. You put every'ing in ze book?"

"Trust me for that, Mr. Rod. Remember me to Mary, and I hope she'll soon be rid of her cold."

The man gathered up his purchases, and left the shop, darting a glance at each of the boys as he passed them.

They bought a few postcards and some postage stamps, and issued forth into the street. Blevins, the general dealer, standing at his shop-door with his hands under his coat-tails, gave them a hard look.

"These country folk are as inquisitive as moths," remarked Armstrong.

"Take us for strolling minstrels, I dare say," rejoined Pratt. "Lucky I didn't bring my banjo."

"Our blazers make us a trifle conspicuous," said Warrender. "I say, as we've plenty of time before dark, and I don't want to run into that crowd at the inn again, suppose we stroll on."

They passed the general dealer's, soon left the last of the cottages behind them, and rambled along the grassy bank of the road, which wound across a wide and barren heath land. About half a mile from the village they came to narrower cross-roads, leading apparently to the few scattered farmsteads of the neighbourhood. A few yards beyond this they saw, rounding a bend, a girl on a bicycle coasting down a slight hill towards them.

"The fair maid in white!" said Pratt. "I think my banjo ought to have been a guitar, or a lute, whatever that is."

A loud report startled them all. The bicycle wobbled, stopped, and the girl sprang lightly from her saddle, and bent down to examine the front tyre. She rose just before the boys reached her, gave them a fleeting glance, and started to wheel the machine down the road.

After a brief hesitation Warrender turned towards her, lifting his cap.

"Can I be of any assistance?" he asked.

"Oh, please don't trouble," replied the girl. "It's a frightfully bad puncture, and I haven't very far to go."

"Some distance across the ferry?"

"Well, yes; but this will take a long time, and I really couldn't think of----"

"It's no trouble--if you have an outfit."

"Yes, I have, but----"

"He's a dab at mending tyres, I assure you," Pratt broke in. "Also at all sorts of tinkering old jobs. Our engine broke down the other day--that's our motor-boat, down at the ferry, you know--I dare say you saw it when you passed an hour ago--or was it two? It seems a jolly long time. Do let him try his hand; he'll be heartbroken if you don't. Besides, wheeling a bicycle is no joke; I know from experience; and for a lady--why, there's a smudge on your dress already. Really----"

Like many loquacious persons, Pratt was apt to let his tongue run away with him. The girl had shown more and more amusement with every sentence that bubbled from his glib lips, and here she broke into a frank laugh, and surrendered the bicycle to Warrender, who laid it down on the grass bordering the road, opened the tool pouch and set to work.

"He may be nervous, and fumble a bit, you know," said Pratt, "if we look at him. I used to be like that myself, when I was young. Don't you think we'd better walk on? Perhaps you'd like to be shown over our boat?"

"I think I'd prefer to wait for my bicycle," said the girl, demurely.

"Warrender's quite to be trusted," rejoined Pratt. "He isn't just an ordinary tramp or tinker. We've none of us chosen our professions yet. We _have_ been called 'The Three Musketeers' in some quarters."

"At school, I suppose," the girl put in.

"Because we're always together, you know," Pratt continued. "We came up the river to-day--on a holiday cruise--all the joys of nautical adventure without any of the discomforts. Of course, there are disappointments; bound to be. We thought of camping on the banks--one of the banks, I mean--but, as Armstrong said, it might be the Congo, it's so frightfully overgrown, and as we didn't bring axes or dynamite, or any of the old things that explorers use, we had to reconcile ourselves to the shattering of our dreams.... Whew! That was a near thing!"

At the cross-roads just below, a motor-car, carrying two men, had emerged suddenly from the right, and run into a country cart which had been lumbering along the high road from the direction of the village. The chauffeur had clapped his brakes on in time to avoid a serious collision, but two spokes of the cart's near wheel had been smashed, and the wing of the car crumpled. Springing out of the car, the chauffeur, a dark-skinned little man, rushed up to the carter, who had been trudging on the off-side at the horse's head, and began to berate him excitedly, with much play of hands.

"Vy you not have care?" he shouted, so rapidly that the monosyllables seemed to form one word. "You take up all ze road; you sink all ze road belong to you; you not look round ze corner; no, you blind fool, you crash bang into my car, viss I not know how many pounds of damage."

"Bain't my fault," said the carter, stoutly. "Can _you_ see round the corner? Then why didn't you blow your horn?"

The chauffeur retorted with a torrent of abuse, in which broken English and expletives in some foreign tongue seemed equally mingled, the carter keeping up a monotonous chant of "Bain't my fault, I tell 'ee."

The former appealed to his passenger, a tall man of fair complexion and straw-coloured moustache and beard. A lull in the altercation between the other two enabled him to declare that the carter was in the wrong, and his clear measured words rang with a distinctly foreign intonation in the ears of the four spectators above. The squabble revived, and was ended only when the passenger got out of the car, laid a soothing hand on the chauffeur, and persuaded the carter to give his name, which he wrote down in a pocket-book. A few seconds later the car snorted away into the cross-road on the left-hand side.

Warrender had looked up from his task only for a moment, but the other three had watched the whole scene in silent amusement.

"Can you tell us," said Pratt to the girl, "whether the Tower of Babel is anywhere in this neighbourhood? We've seen four foreigners since we landed at the ferry an hour or two ago, and, if accent is any guide, they all hail from different parts."

"It is funny, isn't it?" said the girl. "And the explanation is funny, too. They are all servants of a strange old gentleman who lives in a big house near the river. Some people say he is mad, but I think he's only very bad-tempered."

"Very likely the old buffer we saw. But go on, please."

"His English servants went to him one day in a body and asked him to raise their wages. It was quite reasonable, don't you think, with all the labourers and people earning twice as much as they did before the war? But they say he stormed at them, using the most dreadful language, dismissed them all, and vowed he would never have an English servant again. Frightfully, silly of him, but my father says that there's no telling what extremes a hot-tempered lunatic like Mr. Pratt will----"

"Who?" ejaculated Pratt.

"That's his name--Mr. Ambrose Pratt. Perhaps you have heard of him? He was a great traveller--quite famous, I believe."

"My aunt! I mean--I'm rather taken by surprise, you know; but--well, the fact is," stammered Pratt, "he's--he's my uncle."

"Mr. Pratt is! Oh, I'm so sorry!"

"So am I!"

"For calling him such names, I mean."

"Nothing to what I've called him, I assure you. He gave me an awful licking once. Not that that matters, of course; we men don't think anything of a licking; no--what I meant was I'm sorry an uncle of mine is bringing the ancient and honourable name of Pratt into disrepute. Why, he must be a regular laughing-stock. Fancy having a menagerie of foreigners!"

"But didn't you know? Aren't you staying with him, then?"

"Rather not. We're not on speaking terms."

"I remember--you said you were thinking of camping out."

"Yes; and our dream was shattered. We've had to take beds at the inn. It's terrible to lose your illusions, isn't it? We all thought nobly of our fellow-men till this afternoon, and now our hearts are seared, and we'll be frightful cynics till the end of the chapter. I don't suppose you know him, but there's a bullet-headed brute of a fellow in a red choker and a velveteen coat who sits on a tree-stump down the river----"

"Oh, yes," said the girl. "That's Rush. Every one knows him. I believe he has been in prison for poaching."

"Well, it seems to be his business in life now to delude unhappy mariners; a regular siren luring them to their doom. We asked him to direct us to a camping-place. At first he protested there was no suitable spot, but his malignant spirit prompted him to tell us of a glade where the sward was like velvet, under a charming canopy of umbrageous foliage. We had just got our tent up, and I was boiling the kettle for tea, when there broke upon our solitude a man and a dog--detestable, unnatural creatures both; the dog hadn't a bark in him--it was all transferred to the man. The old buffer barked and bellowed and bullied and brow-beat and bundled us off."

A ripple of laughter from the girl's lips brought Pratt up short. He looked at her reproachfully.

"Do forgive me," she said, "but do you know, I'm sure that--old buffer--was my father!"

Even the ebullient Pratt was rendered speechless; as Armstrong afterwards put it, in boxing parlance, "he was fairly fibbed in the wind."

"Father is a little hasty, but quite a dear, really," the girl continued. "He has been frightfully annoyed by trespassers--that man Rush, for one, and some of Mr. Pratt's servants. But don't you think perhaps we had better say no more about our relations?"

"Certainly," said Armstrong, with a solemn air of conviction. It was the first word he had spoken, and the girl gave him a quick, amused glance.

"Umpire gives us both out!" remarked Pratt, his equanimity quite restored. "We are now back in the _status quo_, Miss Crawshay, with this difference: that we know each other's name. The Bard of Avon wouldn't have asked 'What's in a name?' if he had been here five minutes ago. If you had known my name, and I had known that you were the daughter of----"

"That's forbidden ground, Mr. Pratt."

"Well, is there any ground that isn't forbidden?" Pratt rejoined. "For our camp, I mean?"

"Why not try No Man's Island?"

"Siren Rush told us it's a mere wilderness, 'long heath, brown furze,' and so on."

"Oh! That's quite wrong; he must know better than that. There's an excellent camping place on the narrower channel. We often picnicked there before my father quarrelled with Mr. P----"

Smiling, she caught herself up.

"Call 'em X and Y," suggested Pratt. "It is a sort of simultaneous equation, isn't it? But the island can't belong to Y unless Y is generally recognised in the neighbourhood as no man at all."

"Nobody knows whose it is. The owner died years ago; his cottage there is falling to ruin; they say it belongs now to a distant relative in the colonies."

"Then there's no one to chevy us away, as soon as we've got things shipshape?"

"Unless you're afraid of ghosts. There are all sorts of queer tales; the country folk shake their heads when the island is mentioned; not one of them will have the courage to set foot on it."

"A haunted island! How jolly! I've always wanted to meet a spook. That's an additional attraction, I assure you. Perhaps I can soothe the perturbed spirits with my banjo. I admit it has the opposite effect on Armstrong, but----"

The girl turned suddenly away towards Warrender, who had finished his job and was pumping up the tyre.

"You frightful ass!" muttered Armstrong in a savage undertone, heard by Pratt alone. "You've done nothing but drivel for the last half-hour."

"All right, old mule," retorted Pratt, grinning.

"Yes, it will carry you home," Warrender was saying, "but I'm afraid you'll have to get a new tyre."

"Thanks so much. It is really awfully good of you," replied the girl.

"I'm sorry I've been such a time."

"I've been very well entertained. It hasn't seemed long at all. Thank you again. Good-bye."

She mounted the bicycle, beamed an impartial smile upon the three, and sped away down the road.